In one of his best novels –Against the Day, Penguin Press, 2006– Thomas Pynchon pushes the limits of storytelling. His ambitious naturalism is exhaustive and the power with which he confronts the theme, startling. The poetic eloquence of his characters tirelessly sustains an intriguing vision of History and his dramatic intensity maintains the living physical presence of characters forced to experience the disjunction of redemption or damnation. Anarchist vigilantes, ambushed spies, visionary mathematicians, insatiable magnates, gunmen with the courtesan morals, spiritualists, vagabonds and explorers from a phantasmagorical geography all play out a plot in which no one knows who they really are. However, in the dense existence of this mystical fable, they all feel profoundly moved by the imminence of an apocalyptic collapse.

It is highly likely that the ever-impatient reader will be disconcerted by the arrogance of a story that, at first glance, seems to be a hermetic exercise in narrative complexity. However once we have overcome the capricious habit of our indolence, that laziness so many writers set out to praise, we will catch a glimpse of the meaning cleverly disguised in this revealing work of fiction.

Against the Day, set in the period between the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and the outbreak of World War I (a time chosen by the author as a replica of the present), employs the literary resources of all genres. Throughout its pages we find John Steinbeck’s indignant hope from The Grapes of Wrath, the cynical caution of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, the violent epic of the Western (one can see how the legend of the war against the Indians enveloped the shootout, which was just as foundational, between the trade unions and the detectives at the Pinkerton Agency), the juvenile license of the adventure novel (as if Harry Potter could walk through Yoknapatawpha), the intuition of science fiction, a free-flowing plot and the histrionic authority of an author who always knows where he is going.

Pynchon reminds us of Whitman when he enumerates his premonitions, of William Blake when he reveals the secrets of this world, and of Jules Verne when he instructs us with visionary artifacts. Combining the narrative energy of his forebears, Pynchon tells of the chaotic fury of an age that, while watching its boasting crumble, turns on itself in a desperate attempt to deny the power of this new turn of events. Is this not also a sign of our own times?

We have become accustomed to treating scientists we don’t understand with respect and flippancy; like oracles of inaccessible knowledge or creators of wisdom only they are concerned with. But in Against the Day, the mathematician works for powers interested in something more than just the business of technology. Tesla (the Prometheus of electricity torn apart by Edison, Marconi and Westinghouse), Hamilton (with his quaternions), Maxwell (with his electromagnetic theory), Poincaré (with his conjectures) and Riemann (with his hypothesis), all appear in this novel like sorcerers of a power far removed from the rational optimism of the Enlightenment. The contributions of their intelligence, ecstatic in the face of the unexpected depths of what is Real, have not altered our basic understanding of the Universe (we still prefer to converse with Euclid and Newton). And the truth is that we do not yet possess an adequate arsenal of ideas for their discoveries. If the world we have conquered and dominated seems unpredictable, uncooperative and even hostile, what will we do when we truly understand the abysmal revelations of Science? Will we be able to integrate them into a new common sense? Will we know how to create a new story of the origins of the world, the nature of the soul or the destiny of man? Against the Day is the most ambitious achievement to date in the quest to tell the tale of what occurs in this screeching hinge of History.

Pynchon’s imagination is one of tragic irony whose wisdom is masked by its parody of our anxiety. Against the Day is the fruit of conspiracy driven by powerful premonitions and a prophetic epic that will reveal the meaning of the expectant 21^st century. What prevails at the end of this great novel is the emotion each character has faced in the crucial dilemmas of their tortuous path: violence (in any of its sophisticated variations to which civilization has accustomed us) or the nearly indescribable mystery of a spirit that, truly, always blows where it will.

Of the symbolic symphony orchestrated by Pynchon before the eyes of his perplexed readers, one must point out the coda, the ancient stamp of the Tibetan government which the author reproduces on the endpapers of his impetuous novel: a white lion against the backdrop of the jagged peaks of the Himalayas.

Basilio Baltasar, the director of the Fundacion Santillana, is an essayist and journalist.

Published in El País (Spain)

Anyone who has repeatedly walked across the chaotic space of Cairo’s Liberation Square must have felt exhilarated by the spectacle it has offered over the last eighteen days of protest. The last occasion I did so was in February 2008 and my arrival then at a nearby hotel from the airport coincided with the announcing of the Egyptian football team’s victory in the Africa Cup of Nations: thousand of people jostled there, hugging and singing under a sea of flags. Mahmoud Darwish’s bitter words from Memory of Oblivion immediately came to mind, on football as a safety valve for the suppressed anger of Arabs at the humiliations and insults they have long suffered. After Sadat’s murder and Mubarak’s dictatorship, the populace seemed resigned to a political scenario shared by most related countries: poverty, illiteracy, horrendous class differences, corruption, tame parliaments and rigged elections. The so-called Father of the Fatherland – like Ben Ali in Tunisia – perpetuated himself in power and prepared his heirs in the fashion of the republican dynasties ruling in neighboring states. Some experts on Islam spoke of fatalism. Muslims, they said, can only be governed by dictators and theocrats.

The Christ-like immolation of young Tunisian, Mohammed Buazizi, (did Christ realize what he was letting loose on the world after his crucifixion?), followed by dozens of Arabs who turned themselves into human torches, rather than committing suicide and taking with them hundreds of supposed traitors in the pay of Zionists and crusaders, revealed the level of despair felt by wretched existences with no future horizons, thus bursting the dam that had held their fury in check over decades. The Cairenes packing Liberation Square suddenly realized they could control their own destinies and say enough of all that. Adults, families, youngsters, lawyers, bloggers, trades-unionists, without distinction as to creed or ideology, shared a similar faith in the need for urgent change. I followed them day after day, hour after hour, on television with an excitement and emotion I have rarely experienced before.

It is difficult to foresee how the indispensable democratic transition will be carried though under the tutelage of the Army. The pathetic reforms offered by Mubarak hours before his covert expulsion from power were unacceptable. The Egyptian people is demanding a genuine democracy that encompasses all political and religious sensibilities in the country: a constituent assembly, a provisional government, free elections, a new constitutional framework, social welfare policies for the most impoverished sectors. All this is on the agenda and requires pragmatism, rapid implementation and the quest for a consensus that excludes no group or party.

The somber predictions of a Muslim Brothers’ take-over of the popular rebellion, as happened with the FIS in the Algerian elections called by Chadli Benjedid, have no basis in reality. The Islamists are only too aware of their previous failures and don’t want any repeats. On the contrary, the triumph of the spontaneous movement of the Egyptian masses is the greatest defeat that Jihad extremism has suffered since 11 September. Obama clearly understood that in his famous Cairo speech: democracy, not dictatorships like Ben Ali’s or Mubarak’s, constitutes the best bulwark against Al Qaida terrorism.

The victory of the crowds in Liberation Square is a victory for all Arab peoples and threatens equally the “the worse it gets, the better” of Netanyahu and the discredited Palestinian National Authority, Gaddafi’s Libya and Ahmadinejad’s Iran. The political chessboard in the Middle East has been completely upturned and the anxiety corroding the theocratic regimes of the Arabian Peninsula is no less than that suffered by an ever more autistic Israel that can boast no more it is the “only democracy in the region”.

The revolution we are living through has also demonstrated the craven role played by the European Union in its relations with governments on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The patronizing attitudes shown by Sarkozy and Berlusconi towards the deposed dictators were as harmful as they were cynical. Currying of favors and self-interest must not be allowed to prevail over the defense of the values that we are so quick to proclaim in public. The millions of people who have gone into the streets to uphold the latter should make us ashamed at so much hypocrisy. Let us join then with the demonstrators in Cairo, Alexandria and other Egyptian cities who have ceased to be subjects of a corrupt, oppressive regime and today are hailing their victory as newly fledged citizens.

Translated by Peter Bush
From El País 14 February 2011

Juan Goytisolo is Spain’s pre-eminent novelist and essayist. He went to exile in Paris in 1956, has not returned to live there since and now lives in Marrakesh. Two new books of his were published this summer: Níjar Country (Lumen Books) and Exiled From Almost Everywhere (Dalkey Archive)

Sunday night I had been writing a piece about Donald Trump that I had been preparing to send to El Pais when the networks announced Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Unlike many of my friends (vaguely left of center) I take political “buffoons” like Trump seriously. It may be due to my childhood memories of World War II, when intellectuals laughed at the “buffoons” until too late. At least Sarah Palin, a “birther” and Queen of the Tea Party Movement has a geographical ceiling, her habitat is the south and southwest. Trump had no such ceiling: he had acquired a tea party following by asserting Obama was not born in the United States (What? A Black guy for president!!!) And unlike Sarah Palin, he also was a big shot in media circles, and he hobnobbed with east coast money. In the 1980s he learned two valuable lessons: it doesn’t matter how much money you lose (and Trump has lost plenty) as long as it is a BIG loss. There is no right or wrong, there exists only BIG.

In the 1980s freshly minted new money crowd, Trump and his first wife Ivana jumped in to fill a void, and become leaders of the new money crowd. Now Trump was using the same technique in politics. The Tea Party has created a void in the regular Republican Party, which hardly exists anymore. Trump has again jumped in, this time into the political arena. He immediately boasted that he was the guy who had managed to knock Obama out of the ring by forcing him to produce yet again , this time on TV, his birth certificate. And over night Trump was leading in the Republican polls for president. Suddenly Trump was questioning not only Obama’s birthplace, but was defining him as a sort of spook right out of Philip Roth’s prescient novel “The Human Stain.” Trump questioned: Had anyone ever seen Obama at Columbia? At Harvard? How come he was on the Harvard Law Review? Trump now personified what the noted historian Richard Hofstader way back when called the paranoid style of American politics, which was a mixture of hysteria, suspicion, and racism. Trump was taking a swipe at America’s affirmative action legislature, which transformed American universities into its present multicultural mix, which has meant that no longer could the children of the well placed automatically be assured of a place in the top elite universities.

By Sunday night the narrative had changed. Obama the cool strategist, and strategy is what he does best, had separated the boys from the men: Bin Laden was dead and the Trump craziness was now looking like what journalists were calling the silly season. Now,coming back to El Pais’s central question: what are the moral and legal aspects in the death of Bin Laden. let me make myself clear: I am totally opposed to all forms of torture, including water boarding, which I regard as barbaric. The issue of water boarding was brought up on Monday by spoil sport members of the Bush administration – Rumsfeld and Cheney – who want now to seize credit for finding Bin Laden through what they have announced was their legitimate and successful use of water boarding. But “enhanced methods” such as water boarding were made illegal years ago, and I don’t see how scraps of information possibly received in 2002, as Rumsfeld and Cheney now boast about, would have waited until 2011 to become of use. The returns are not yet in as to the real sequence of events, which took place over a period of ten years, and it certainly doesn’t explain, why, if the Bush team possessed this valuable piece of information, they abruptly called off the hunt for Bin Laden, claiming he was no longer an important target.

Was it lawful to kill Bin Laden? According to the rules of law, it is lawful to shoot the leader of your enemy, Bin Laden was the head of Alkaida, and he personally had ordered the attack on 9/11. That the raid on Bin Laden was accomplished with a minimal number of Navy Seals in three helicopters and almost no casualties is amazing. Compare this to the destruction caused by bombings in many countries including Libya and Iraq – it certainly would have been far safer for Obama to order the bombing of Bin Laden’s mansion-like headquarters, than the risky maneuver with the Navy Seals, but the collateral loss of human life would have been tremendous.

Now about our unannounced entry into Pakistan. Neither individuals nor governments are obliged to behave like masochists. If Obama had informed Pakistan of his plans, we would have had a suicide mission. Our problem with Pakistan is tremendous. We need them. They betray us. We haven’t figured out what to do about this.