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Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day situates itself on several thresholds: between the nineteenth and twentieth century, between gaslight and electric light, between fantasy and rationalized “reality.” This essay proposes that another key crossroads in the book is a literary one, between populist and “high” literary forms. Specifically, I look at the novel’s references to two writers occupying very different spaces at the fin de siècle: H. G. Wells and Henry James. James is commonly read as a progenitor of the twentieth-century avant-garde; Wells, by contrast, is regarded as a populist writer whose importance is qualified as being that of an early practitioner of science fiction. The works of James became the embodiment of high culture—dense, sophisticated, technically innovative—while those of Wells became synonymous with familiar aspects of low culture—shallow, childish, and plot-driven. Wells and James clearly saw a difference between their works in their own time; after a decade of friendly correspondence, they had a famous falling out over their respective positions on the novel: James declared his distaste for Wells’s “diversity” and politics, while Wells satirized James’s “unity” and lack of politics. At its outset, Against the Day announces itself as being part of the same disreputable literary territory as Wells’s work: it incorporates elements of the ghettoized genres of western, pulp, serial and science fictions, and, in that the book sympathizes with the anarchic Traverses, Pynchon’s politics are clearly Wellsian as well. This paper proposes to see Against the Day as a response to the James-Wells split, and as an announcement that perhaps the art of the novel revered in the last hundred years was only one way the genre can go: Pynchon’s return to a populist or “low” genre is in fact a radical political gesture. After a century of the primacy of individual perception and consciousness, Pynchon’s novel rejects James’s mastery and the High Modernism that technique helped inaugurate.