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Soundtrack to Pynchon’s “Against the Day”: Glass’s Plutonian Ode with Allen Ginsberg

by Bud Parr on January 06, 2007

“What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the sun? ”
- Allen Ginsberg “Plutonian Ode”

I had originally posted this at my own site, but thought I’d throw it in here. Seeing as there wasn’t much discussion on the last few posts, I thought if I threw out something even more absurd than my last idea of apocalypse and Knights of the Roundtable, someone might come out and call me crazy. Anyway, here goes:

I recommend as a Soundtrack to Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 6 “Plutonian Ode” with Allen Ginsberg. You’re thinking this is absurd - I know - to say a modern symphony connoting nuclear disaster can capture, musically, themes from a book that begins and ends before plutonium was discovered, but I say to you it’s striking how well the music fits with the book.

First, the word itself is a great play: “Plutonium” is of course a radioactive element discovered (named) in 1942 for the planet Pluto because plutonium follows neptuniam in the periodic table of elements just as the (erstwhile) planet Pluto orbits beyond Neptune in the solar system. “Plutonian,” the name of Ginsberg’s ode, refers to Pluto, God of the world of the dead, deep within the earth, infernal, dismal. Get it? The two are intertwined in the Ode and most certainly in real life - Plutonian comes up in Against the Day on page 154 in context of the “DOLEFUL” metropolis (NYC?) where “Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes...”

Besides the mood evoked by the title - and I haven’t finished the book yet - I do feel as though much of the scientific discussion in Against the Day premeditates the Atomic age and the hold it has on our lives.

The music itself has a grandeur - you may know Philip Glass scores a lot of films - that befits an epic like Pynchon’s and its grandeur, it seems, is self-mocking in such a way to belie the seriousness of its underlying themes.

I’m not, by the way, suggesting that you sit down with the music while you read the book - you’d get nowhere with either. The symphony - particularly the version with the Ginsberg reading that Glass superimposed over the music with Lauren Flanigan singing the very same libretto (poem) - stands on its own. But I often think about music and books or art forms that in their specific details relate to one another, throwing a different light on your thinking about them or expressing the story in a different way. I think the Plutonian Ode does that.

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