night-time terrains passing below them had become – more than anyone could ever remember, as isolated lanterns and skeins of gas-light had given way to electric street-lighting, as if advanced parties of the working-day were progressively invading and settling the unarmed hinterlands of night. But now at last, flying in over southern California and regarding the incandescence which flooded forth from suburban homes and city plazas, athletic fields, movie theatres, rail yards and depots, factory skylights, aerial beacons, streets and boulevards bearing lines of automobile headlights in constant crawl beyond any horizon, they felt themselves in uneasy witness to some final conquest, a triumph over night whose motive none could quite grasp. (1032) In other words, electrified modernity has not only spread its tentacles across the continent; itshows the consequences of these global economic and political processes for individual human beings. The seamy side of Western capitalism is spotlighted in Against the Day through for instance the depiction of the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, where nineteen striking workers (including a number of immigrants) were killed by the National Guard of Colorado, or through the novel’s many descriptions of the wretched conditions of production our consumer goods hail from. The double face of modern consumerism is underscored in a scene where Dally Rideout visits a department store in New York and abandons herself to the pleasures of shopping. The twelve stories of the department store soar impressively above the surrounding streets, but the imposing “gray modernity” of the building conceals a secret: [T]he size of the