Chapter 24: "To Hell you ride"

In Chapter 24, Frank is off to do “research,” to find his mother and sister, in Telluride. The narrator is quick to note that Telluride was the first town in the US to receive electric street lighting, and as Frank’s train approaches Telluride in the night, “the end of the world remained a possibility” (281). Is street light working “against the night?”

The references to hell (“To-Hell-you-ride”-218; “Little Hellkite”-291), seems ominous, and his long-term search for Deuce and Sloat, the “Four Corners Boys” (284), takes a detour as he encounters Merle Rideout, amalgamator at the Little Hellkite mine.

Along the way he encounters several other characters: Ellmore Disco, perhaps\ Finnish, Mexican, or “music-hall Chinese” (285); the deaf gunslinger Bob Meldrum, an ex-Pinkerton attempting to live up to the standard of fame established by Butch Cassidy (290); and stereotypical Japanese tourists, the “Sons of Nippon” (292).

Merle “can talk a little of their lingo” (292). Does he mean Japanese, or is this a joke about Japanese tourists—Merle, after all, speaks photographer’s lingo.

Chapters 22 and 23: More Revenge in Colorado

There is no plot device for a revenge tale quite like having the daughter of the deceased fall in love with one of her father’s killers. Lake not only falls in Love with Deuce Kindred, but, in some of the kinkier sex you will read in a novel this year, ends up in bed with both of her father’s killers simultaneously.

The previous chapter ends with Miles Blundell observing that “Bells are the most ancient objects. They call us out of eternity” (259). Lake’s sudden fall for Deuce begins with the question “WHAT WAS IT. Exactly, that had started in to ringing so inside Lake, tolling bone deep, invisible in the night” (262).

The break between Mayva and Lake is heartbreaking. Pynchon’s development of female characters has certainly improved!

Chapter 23 continues the revenge tale, this time turning to Frank and his developing relationship with a (bisexual) Radcliffe grad student, Wren Provenance., a girl anthropologist. Is she somehow related to Victoria Wren, the mysterious woman in V? By the end of the chapter she seems ready to head off to the South Pacific to do anthropological work (seems to be an allusion to Margaret Mead’s groundbreaking work in the South Pacific.

A humorous note: Franks and Wren’s whorehouse visit is ostensibly for “research.” Their final drinking night on the town in Leadville is similarly described.

Chapter 21: The Fall of the Tower

In this chapter, the Chums are in Italy, shadowed by their Russian doppelganger, Padzhitnoff and the Bol’shaia Igra. Their mission is to find “The Sfinciuno Itinarary,” a mysterious map to the secret Asian Jerusalem—Shambala. The secret to interpreting such a map is the use of an an/amorphosccope or a p/amorphosccope, “devices which when placed on or otherwise near a deliberately distorted picture, and viewed from the appropriate direction, would make the image appear ‘normal’ again” (249). Here again, we think of the medal on the cover of the novel, and the whole concept of “reading a map.” Pynhcon, once again, seems to be mocking his readers’ fervent search for clarity and meaning in his texts. Once again, he seems to be working against interpretation.

Their advisor on the ground, Professor Svegli, narrates a long passage, which seems to be the concept on which the “Chums narrative” is based: “if one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude” (250). Of course, the chums have their own human paramorphoscope—Miles Blundell.

Science Officer Chick Counterfly seems a bit mysterious again. He spends time with Renata, a woman with mysterious cigarettes, and produces a radioactive cigarette lighter, a device surely out of its time. Is Chick some kind of time-traveler? On the other hand, he seems like another sailor about to miss movement.

The chapter ends in an incident in which the tower, “The Campanile in the Piazza” is destroyed—perhaps by a torpedo from the Inconvenience, perhaps by a masonry attack (yet another Tetris joke) from the Bol’shaia Igra, or perhaps by some sort of Tesla field. Historically, the Campanile di San Marco mysteriously collapsed 14 July 1902--Bastille Day. Now we know the story behind the picture on the AGD wiki.

Immediately before the incident, Renata reads the “Tarocchi or Tarot cards” (253) for Chick. The card drawn is “number XVI, The Tower” (253).

Chapter 20: Shin, The Eternal Flame

Chapter 20 sees Nigel and Neville taking Lew to visit the mysterious Dr. Coomb de Bottle, doing “military”. We hear the story of the “Gentleman Bomber of Headingly,” (236) another terrorist whose bombs are disguised as cricket balls. The purpose of the visit is to acquire Cyclomite, the explosive ingredient to which Lew has become addicted.

Later he visits Renfrew, who tries to recruit him to capture the bomber.

At the end of the chapter, as Lew speculates about being a “double agent,” we find that “Lew swore he could hear an invisible roomful of laughter, and some applause as well” (242).

The connection to the Hebrew letter Shin, and Spock’s sign (Nimoy is Jewish) for “Live Long and Proseper in Star Trek, is obvious.

Chapter 19: Spiritualism in Merry Old London!

Chapter 19 gives us Lew Basnight’s adventures in London. Seems that Neville and Nigel are part of “T.W.I.T., or True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractyls,”(219) a kind of Pythagorean cult a bit reminiscent of the Pavlovians at the White Visitation in Gravity’s Rainbow. T.W.I.T. is led by Nicholas Nookshaft, the Grand Cohens. In Hebrew traditions, the Cohens were a priestly cast. He also meets Yasmeen Halfcourt, a beautiful young woman under T.W.I.T.’s protection.

Yasmeens makes another connection to cryptography, and perhaps Neil Stephenson. She notes that “ ‘On this island,’ she went on, ‘as you will have begun to notice, no one ever speaks plainly. Whether it’s Cockney rhyming codes or the crosswords in the newspapers—all English, spoken or written, is looked down on as no more than strings of text cleverly encrypted’” (224). For the British, the American’s earnest attempts to interpret are seen as silly. It’s all “a bit of fun” (224). Says a lot about the way we study texts.

There is also a great deal more reference to Tarot decks, the occultist Arthur Edward Waite, and his Order of the Golden Dawn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Edward_Waite). Interestingly enough, Waite was author of the New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry.

Great humor—the family which represents Temperance in the Tarot deck are the “Uckenfays.” Obviously a Pig Latin name!

T.W.I.T’s affinity for séances is also reminiscent of GR. The explosion at the Séance somehow seems to connect the London tale to Colorado. And the feuding professors, Renfrew and Werfner (anagrams for each other) are also connected to the Tarot deck, card XV.

There is a long meditation on what would have happened if Ernst August had succeeded Victoria on the British throne—seems to be a meditation on how England was one bullet away from fascism (230-231).

Chapter 18: A Family Funeral

Chapter 18 continues the revenge tale, as Reef brings the body back to Telluride. By the time he is back in Colorado, Reef is reading a Chums of Chance novel to the corpse, who starts speaking to Reef, saying “Something has happened to my eyes…” (215).


Later, at the funeral, it is clear that the boys intend to hunt down their father’s killer, an intention which has Lake labeling her brothers as damn fools. Reef returns to Nochecita long enough to attend to Stray, who gives birth to a son, Jesse. Jesse is Zoyd Wheeler’s grandfather in Vineland. It seems that Reef may intend to follow his father’s lead, and pretend to live a respectable life, even as he plays the role of Kieselguhr Kid.

Hamlet-like, the chapter closes with “Webb’s busy ghost, went bustling to and fro doing what he could to keep things hopping” (218).

Chapter 17: A Trip to Nevada

Chapter 17 follows Webb’s sons Reef and Frank to Nochecita, Nevada, where Reef is hooking up with his girl, Estrella “Stray” Briggs, or more properly, begging for forgiveness after their last fight. Stray is also pregnant, and lives with her girlfriend
Sage, who is being pursued by her ex- boy-friend Cooper, a kind of singing cowboy, as well as her Mormon ex-foster parents. Quite a complicated life for two dancegirls who lived above a gambling saloon.

Frank meets the next-door neighbor, Linnet Dawes, who seems somehow important, even if all they do is shuck peas together.

By the end of the chapter they have learned of their father’s abduction, and the Hamlet-like revenge tale seems on its way. Yet another genre--Shakespeare meets Charles Bronson.

Chapter 16: Every True Story Ends in Death

Chapter 16 is neither humorous nor fantastic. In some ways this chapter harkens back to those great American novels of the late 19th and early 20th century which chronicled the mistreatment of average men and women in a capitalist world, works by the likes of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Or as the writer of the brilliant Elegant Variation literary blog (http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/pynchon_week/index.html) puts it, “like a Louis L’Amour novel in reverse.” Lake Traverse’s descent into prostitution, and Webb’s brutal murder by thugs working for the mine bosses are certainly reminiscent of these genres.

Webb’s final break with his family members leads him to “shift over to the Uncompahgre for a while” (193). The Uncompahgre (a Ute word meaning where the water meets the red rock) is a remote region of western Colorado encompassing mountains, a national forest, plateaus, a valley, and a river with this name. It seems also to remind me of the Spanish expression for “I don’t understand.” The chapter certainly gives one a feeling of horror and bewilderment. This chapter is Pynchon at his most Marxist, the Pynchon who saw in his friend Richard Farina’s death in a motorcycle accident the actions of the invisible hand of repression silencing a progressive voice. And the Pynchon who, like Farina, knows that every true story ends in death.

I’m sorry these annotations aren’t spoiler-free.

As Webb dies, he watches “the light over the ranges drain away” (198). The writer of the Pynchon wiki notes the connection to the title of Part 1, but is confused by the plural "ranges", when he sees the literal reference to Webb seeing the light over the Unompahgre Range. I think Pynhcon is referring to light over “ranges of wavelengths or frequencies,” and this somehow may refer back to Tesla, and perhaps to the way in which shifting a wavelength (a property of double-refracting crystals like Iceland Spar) changes what we see, i.e. transports us to another reality. This scene may connect Part 2 (Iceland Spar) not only to Part 1 (The Light Over the Ranges), but also anticipates Part 3 (Bilocations). Or it is a simple nod to a kind of “Afterlife.”

Chapter 15: Oh What a Lucky Man He Was!

Chapter 15 returns to Basnight’s narrative. Lew is out “on the trail” (171), another one of Pryncon’s endless streets we remember from the beginning of V. He seems to be shadowed by a mysterious anarchist, one of his, or White City Investigation’s primary targets, The Kieselguhr Kid. The connection to The Kenosha Kid in GR is obvious. Just as the Kenosha Kid (the name probably refers to the Forbes Parkhill story in the 1931 pulp Western Rangers http://mysite.verizon.net/paul.mackin/kenosha/index.htm, in which the kid is a “Robinhood of straights and flushes”) seems to be a fantastic alter ego of Tyrone Slothrop, a character noteworthy for his seeming ability to defy the laws or probability (call him Lucky), so too the Kieselguhr Kid may simply be Lew’s growing sense of identification to the anarchist’s cause. In fact, in this chapter he seems to becoming addicted to cyclomite (another Pynchonian chemical, like Imipolex G in GR), which is some kind of psychotropic ingredient in dynamite, which Lew speculates “had been helping him build up an immunity to explosions” (184). Lew is another lucky one, escaping an assassination attempt when someone tosses an explosive his way. Just as Slothrop seems to be immune from rocket attacks, Lew may be immune from attacks by explosives.

Pynhcon’s deconstruction of the novel, building his own “Forbes Parkhill story” across the interstices that should separate ATG and GR as separate texts, seems to be a deconstruction of the very notion of genre itself. I continue to imagine these texts existing together in some set of notebooks (or computer files—not our Luddite!) from which the author cuts and pastes them into these works. Pastiche? Collage?

He is rescued from the assassination attempt by two English flaneurs, Neville and Nigel, who had followed Oscar Wilde on his American tour. By the end of the chapter Lew is on his way to England, his fateful decision to stow away with the (gay?) Englishmen as inanely casual as any decision made by Benny Profane in V., or Tyrone Slothrop in G.R. For Lew, the lucky guy, has just missed the famous Galveston hurricane of 1900 (http://www.1900storm.com/). When told this puts Lew into a state of neuroaesthenisia.

If Lew is numb at learning he just missed an event that killed more than 6000 men, women, and children, is the author holding up a mirror to his own feelings about 9/11 and the New Orleans hurricane?

Lucky. Hmmm. When consulting Tarot Cards with the boys shortly after meeting the Brits, he draws the Hanged Man.

Chapter 14: The Long Island Vibes

In Chapter 14 we flash back to Kit’s narrative while at Yale, where he rooms with another one of Scarsdale Vibe’s sons, the youngest, Colfax. Vibe is not at all impressed with his sons, who he characterizes as “a crockful of cucumbers” (157). And seems to be offering Kit the opportunity to be he heir. Kit is uncomfortable with both the offer and Vibe’s manner: “The man had been looking at him strangely. Not a fatherly or even foster-fatherly expression. No, it was—Kit almost blushed at the though—it was desire” (158). This seems reminiscent of the homoerotic desire of Captain Blicero for his young charges in GR.

Despite declining the offer, Kit soon becomes acquainted with all the Vibes. Besides Scarsdale and his son Colfax, we also meet Cragmont, who ran away at age 13 and married a trapeze artist, and the black sheep of the family, Fleetwood, who we know of through his journal of the Vormance expedition. Dopplegangers again: both Scarsdale Vibe and Traverse Webb have three sons, and both have a son who is ‘on the outs’ with Dad: Fleetwood and Kit being another set of Dopplegangers. We don’t meet a vibe sister here, but we do meet Cousin Dittany, with whom Kit has a series of romantic trysts.

The narrative then shifts to Fleetwood Vibe’s adventures as an explorer in Africa, a location familiar to readers of both V. and GR. At the end of the chapter we learn of his intentions to join the Vormance expedition.

A few notes from the Pynchon wiki: first, Dittany is a group herb that sybolizes love. Second, look at the name Vibe: V I be. It harkens back to the earlier novel's African adventures of the man who would become Blicero in GR. Furthermore, the references to Rand (think also Rand, Krueggerand, and Ayn Rand) give the story an African connection, and a connection to the earlier novels. I also think of the mysterious Rand Corporation, the think tank that did/does research for the CIA, and I notice that Tesla's "invention" of a power source so cheap it can't be measured is the very invention John Galt developed in Atlas Shrugged.

Chapter 13: Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here

Chapter 13 begins with the Chums heading south after the meeting with the Vormance expedition, Chick Counterfly commenting that “I cannot but wonder what is to become of those unfortunate devils” (149). We then begin to find the answer, as the leaders of the expedition sit before a Board of Inquiry investigating the events that led to the disaster.

“Your whole Expedition got hypnotized by a rock?” (149).

We begin to learn more. It is months later, and the city was burned, and mostly abandoned. The creature, “a Figure with supernatural powers” (151),…began “to burn its way out of its enclosure” (152). Maybe the city isn’t New York, but the expedition had arrived via “a narrow waterway from long ago that still ran up into the city” (151). The board is meeting in a building overlooking the city with a view from “turret windows” (150). The museum where the meeting is being held sounds like some kind of fortress.

This entire chapter seems to be built around the principle of clarification, as if the author is adjusting a lens similar to the lens of Iceland Spar the Chums adjust to receive their video message. A very subtle, and very interesting merging of form and content.

We learn that the “man-shaped light” from the previous chapter is a projection of light from “the Cathedral of the Prefiguration,” and is “not exactly of Christ, but with the same beard, robes, ability to emit light” (153). The narrator meditates that “the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence” (153).

Is the monster modernity itself? Is this the sudden transformation Woolf talks about?

The citizens build a “great portal inscribed I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY—DANTE” 154. Now the city seems to resemble Belona in Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren.

The chapter ends with Hunter Penhallow following another of Pynchon’s paths that become mazes, finally boarding another of his “trains,” in an attempt to escape the city. The penultimate sentence in the chapter seems to describe the train ride as a journey into modernity itself: “The longer they traveled, the more ‘futuristic’ would the scenery grow” (155). Is this his first reference to futurism?

Chapter 12: The Escape!

Chapter 12 is a difficult read. Most of the chapter is the narrative of Fleetwood Vibe, who describes the encounter between the Vormance expedition and the Chums of Chance. Many references in the Against the Day wiki (http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page), but little hint of what is really happening. There is a warning delivered by the Chums to the expedition about a “Zone of Emergency” (139) because the “Nunatak” (139) upon which their command post sits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunatak) is actually some strange object, which the Chums reveal to the expedition by means of some strange ray ( radar?). The Chums have grown a little, and their science officer is now “Dr. Counterfly” (139), who wears goggles with lenses made from Iceland Spar.

Most of the remaining chapter describes the teams expedition to acquire this object, cart it back to the ship, and into the hold, where the object, now revealed to be some sort of creature, escapes, announcing prophetically “The man-shaped light shall not deliver you” (145) and “Flames were always your destiny, my children” (145).

Along the way we also encounter a bilocated (in two places at once) shaman, Magyakan, an acquaintance of Hastings Throyle (143), who also delivers a prophetic message, comparing the creature/object they will encounter to the sled dogs.

We also learn that Pugnax has been left behind, and that he is the leader of the dogs who are on the verge of forming “a canine labor union” (144).

After the creature’s escape (think King Kong), Fleetwood Vibe struggles to return to the safety of civilization, ending up in a city in chaos—New York? DC? He ends up in a line waiting for a train, a line reminiscent of the Chicago slaughterhouse of Part 1, and the train which leads not to escape, but entanglement, at the beginning of GR.

The chapter ends in an “Explorer’s Club” in Washington D.C., a scene reminiscent of Colonel Pargiter’s London club in Woolf's The Years. This enigmatic scene ends with the chilling “they were speaking of the unfortunate events to the north, the bad dream I still try to wake from, the great city brought to sorrow and ruin” (148). It seems to be referring to events in New York, yet may be the author’s personal (I hesitate to make such a leap regarding this author) speculation about 9/11.

Part 2, Chapter 11

Why is a scholar of rhetoric, composition and professional writing (I’m not a literary scholar) producing a commentary on a novel? Two reasons. First and foremost: for fun. Ever since the day I finally finished Gravity’s Rainbow (back in the 1970s), I’ve taken great pleasure in working my way through Pynchon’s complex tapestries of narrative, scientific and technological elaborations, jokes, bawdy songs, and descriptions of time and space (history and geography). The second reason is scholarly. Pynchon’s use of writing genres has always struck me as more political than the practice of most writers. Since the use of discourse for political purposes was the original impetus for the creation of rhetoric as a scholarly discipline by the Greeks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric), such an interest is natural for a rhetorician. Since Against the Day is set in a period of extraordinary political and social change (1893 to about 1930), a period marked by the emergence of modernity, my scholarly interest is intensified. Since I first researched the early Futurists in my dissertation on the manifesto genre, I’ve been interested in trying to understand this period where the social consciousness of Western cultures experienced a sudden shift in worldview, a period my own grandparents lived through. As Virginia Woolf put it in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924): “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”

Every so often, a text enters the academic canon[1] carrying a message less about scholarly arguments, literary interpretation, or cultural performance, and instead seems to be primarily focused on engaging its audience in political action. We sometimes label such texts as polemics, a mental act that tends to classify the texts as belonging to a rhetorical genre: texts like Luther’s "Ninety-Five Theses", Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto, and The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society. Even more rarely, we encounter texts which seem to mix the political, the rhetorical, and the literary—many of the works of Virginia Woolf come to mind. Against the Day seems to inhabit the same space.

Part two of the novel is titled “Iceland Spar.” Iceland Spar is a double-refracting calcite used for optical purposes. The strange medal or seal seen on the book’s cover looks as though it may be an object which might be understood if viewed through the lens of Iceland Spar. In Chapter 10, the Chums use a pearl transformed through the magic of “induced paramorphism” (114) into Icelandic Spar to view a “message from Upper Hierarchy” (114). The message appears on “a reflective screen set on one bulkhead...[where] like a photographic image emerging from its solution, a printed message began to appear” (114).

A number of recurring themes seem to be coming together around “Iceland Spar.” The concept of revelation, particularly the use of science to achieve revelatory enlightenment, is familiar to those of us who remember Captain Blicero (Captain of the White North) and Pointsman in GR. In some ways, Pynchon’s portrayal of certain scientists who pursue truth a rabid fervor exceeding that of Pentecostal Christians, is similar to his lampooning of Psychiatry through his portrayal of Dr. Hilarious in The Crying of Lot 49. These scientists and engineers are invariably found to be in the service of a hierarchy, and we may be slowly being introduced to another one of these Luddite narratives involving Dr. Tesla and Kit Traverse’s work for Scarsdale Vibe. Is Vibe the mysterious hand behind the Chums of Chance, also?

In Chapter 11, we begin to think so. The boys are in search of the Étienne Louis Malus, a floating scientific lab named after the scientist who did pioneering work on double refracting crystals! Pynchon, a writer who resists interpretation, seems to be hitting us in the head with a Rosetta Stone here. The Chums encounter a Russian Doppelganger of themselves along the way—Tovarishchi Slutchainyi (123) is Russian for “accidental comrades,” or “Chums of Chance.” The boys miss the steamer, which recently left the Icelandic village of Isafjordr, and the reader leaves the Chums as they meditate over Blue Ivory figurines carved from the “Preserved bones of real prehistoric mammoths” (125) in search of “some expression of truth beyond the secular” (126). If the Bad Vibes have made a religion of secular science, then the Chums’ search for something else seems to be Pynchon’s hint to us that the boys, despite their service to the mysterious Upper Hierarchy, are basically “good” or “innocent.” Or, he is setting up their fall from grace.

The remainder of the chapter describes the stay of the steamship at Isafjordr. We meet Dr. Vormance, leader of the expedition, and their scientific officer, Dr. Counterfly, who may be Chick’s mysterious con-man father. We also meet Fleetwood Vibe, who is monitoring the expedition at the behest of his father who is financing it. And we meet Iceland natives Constance Penhallow, and her grandson Hunter, an artist who stows away with the expedition, another naïve mascotte, doppleganging, or “double-refracting” Darby’s role with the Chums! Oh Pynchon!!!!!

We also meet the scientists of the Transnoctal Discussion Group, (a noctal is a barbiturate—seems to be associated with the night, sleep, and death. Of course, the group is meeting in Iceland, where the winter nights are so long as to make the day almost disappear—i.e. act Against the Day), a group of mathematicians who somewhat resemble Pointsman’s nefarious group of S-R Psychiatrists in GR. The group includes Dr. Vormance; Dr. Templeton Blope, a Quaternion mathematician from the University of the Outer Hebrides—another possible connection to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon; Blope’s “collegial nemesis” (131), Dr. Hastings Throyle; “noted Quaternionist Dr. Ganesh Rao of Calcutta University” (130); and Otto Ghloix, Expedition alienist. There may be others.

[1] I am using the term academic canon to refer to texts which elicit significant interest from academic audiences, rather than using the word to refer to a contested mental model of accepted literary texts.

Chapter 10: Subterranean Genres

Where the previous two chapters presented us with relatively conventional narratives one might expect to find in a historical novel, in Chapter 10, Pynchon again detonates our genre expectations. We find ourselves back with “The Chums of Chance,” monitoring electromagnetic emanations in the Indian Ocean, ostensibly on the side of the globe from Colorado Springs where Doctor Tesla is conducting his experiments. We learn more about the Chums, and hear that intrusive narrator common to the adolescent adventure novel. As we learn that Miles Blundell is as sensitive to the happenings of the spiritual universe as he is oblivious to the physical, the narrative plunges into pure fantasy as the boys receive orders to “proceed by way of the Telluric Interior to the north polar regions” (114). The boys proceed to the south polar ice where they enter “the great portal”(115) and traverse the axial route through the Earth’s interior, a journey where they encounter the “Legion of Gnomes” (117) and get caught up in the machinations of “the royal court of Chthonica, Princess of Plutonia” the story of which the narrators defers, instead “readers are referred to The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth” (117).

Pynchon’s deconstruction of readers’ genre expectations at this point reminds me of Woolf’s similar moves in The Years, where she disassembles the family sagas of her time (as well as her own family history), narratives such as Galworthy’s The Forsyte Saga.

The reference to Tunbridge Wells, England, refers to a common expression in England, where a conservative reader after writing a newspaper editor claiming some outrage of modernity signs the letter “Disgusted of Turnbridge Wells” (http://www.icons.org.uk/nom/nominations/disgusted-of-tunbridge-wells) The town is also the setting for some action of Forster’s 1908 novel, A Room with a View.

The boys received their orders via a pearl which is transformed to a calcite crystal known as “Iceland Spar” (114). This chapter concludes Part One of the novel, “The Light Over the Ranges” (pages 1-118). Part two is titled, “Iceland Spar.”

Chapter 9: Kit and The Good Doctor Tesla

In this chapter, Kit Traverse, aspiring engineer, goes to Colorado Springs to apprentice himself to the famous inventor, Dr. Nikola Tesla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla). Along the way he is intercepted by Foley Walker, right-hand man, and doppelganger for the financier, Scarsdale Vibe. In fact, Walker, when questioned by Kit, identifies himself as Vibe, saying “I am he(100).” Much of the rest of the chapter is built around the union of Walker and Vibe, or “The Twin Vibes (102) as they are known. Walker/Vibe offer Kit a full scholarship to Yale, which Kit accepts over the warning of his father. There are warnings that the contract he signs to become “one of “Doc Tesla’s boys” (103), is a deal with the devil.

The early reference in the previous chapter to “The Feast St. Barbara (81) is worrisome, as the Saint’s father killed her for converting to Christianity. Is Kit guilty of a similar conversion?

Tesla immediately recognizes Kit’s talent, his ability to visualize complex mathematical solutions to complex problems, an ability Tesla also possesses. In a revealing passage, which tells us something about the novel’s title, Tesla notes that

“When I could find time to sit still, the images would come. But it’s always finding the time, isn’t it.”
“Sure, always something….Chores, something.”
“Tithing.” Tesla said, “giving back to the day” (104).

Chapter 8: We Begin to Traverse the Webb!

This chapter introduces us more fully to Webb Traverse and his family: wife Mayva; sons Reef, Frank, and Kit; and daughter Lake. The chapter also revolves around two important historical events of the period which greatly determined the trajectory of their lives. First, the Repeal of the Silver Act in 1893, after which the Federal government no longer purchased silver to back the currency. This put the Webb family into desperate poverty as the entire state of Colorado entered a depression. Second, the miners’ strike at Cripple Creek in 1894 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripple_Creek_miners'_strike_of_1894), a strike where the bosses were so brutal that the state militia was actually called out to protect the workers! The successful strike led to a backlash among mine owners, who famously hired the Pinkerton Agency to protect their interests.

Webb is a hard-core unionist, and his union card is “The most precious thing I own” (93). The card is emblazoned with a wonderfully Marxist motto: “‘Labor produces all wealth. Wealth belongs to the producer thereof’” (93).

We also meet some other characters. Webb’s accomplice in the anarchist bombing business,Veikko Rautavaara, the Finnish veteran of the Cripple Creek strike, and the Reverend Moss Gatlin (religion and Gatling guns?). Gatlin gives the moral imperative for Webb’s terrorism: “If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself?” (87). It’s Eldridge Cleaver’s formulation all over again!

Chapter 7: We Ride Out West!

I'm taking a break from grading student blogs to present my next post on the Uber-book.

This chapter (pages 57-80) gives us the story of the photographer, Merle Rideout, and his daughter, Dahlia, as they troop across America after the fair, Dally growing up into a young woman destined to make “life complicated for every rodeo clown that crossed her path” (75). She appears to be another complex woman-child, like Bianca in GR, and Zoyd Wheeler in Vineland. And while (so far at least) there is none of the troubling child sexuality Pynchon was chastised for describing in GR, at least one commentator on the Pynchon Wiki (http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_26-56) saw the introductory scene with Dally on page 27 as “the first sour note of the book.” Pynchon is always trying to show his audience the socially-constructed nature of such concepts as childhood, but all too often these attempts come off as exploitative to some readers.

The chapter meanders, even as Merle and Dally wander across America, finally arriving in Colorado where Merle's chemical (bomb-making?) skills attract the attention of the anarchist Webb Traverse, who sets him up as head amalgamater at the Little Hellkite mine near Telluride. Along the way we learn that Dally resents the loss of Chicago (after the fair, small midwestern towns and cities pale in comparison—‘How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’) and her mother, Erlys, both facts for which her father seems to receive blame. By the end of the chapter Dally learns that Erlys, who married the magician (The Great Zombini) she ran off with, now lives in big city New York with “a dozen or so kids” (75). We know a mother/City/daughter reunion will soon be in the works.

We also get one of Pynchon’s strange anthropomorphic fantasies, reminiscent of “Byron the Bulb” in GR. This time the character is Skip, a manifestation of ball lightning, a phenomena sometimes associated with Tesla (http://amasci.com/tesla/ballgtn.html).

Rideout’s chemical interests also meander in alchemy, and he discusses quicksilver and the Philosopher’s Stone with Webb Traverse. Interesting connection here with Enoch Root, Neal Stephenson’s character from Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver (http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:Enoch_Root).

Much of the early part of the chapter details the events surrounding the Michelson-Morley experiment, for which Mickelson won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment). For some reason Morley didn’t, and the narrator speculates that Morley was a doppleganger for the gangster, Blinky Morgan, Cleveland’s foremost desperado (http://www.gsbbooks.com/cgi-bin/gsb455/10225.html). The experiment, which proved that the Aether (a mysterious substance through which it was postulated that light waves travel through space) did not exist, was an important precursor to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, a coming event that hovers over this novel, and this era, much in the same way that the World War does. For Pynchon, relativity may also symbolize social relativism, the destruction by science of the certainty of faith and religion, and its accompanying social/moral structure, the grand advance of modernity which also seems to be Virginia Woolf’s grand theme in The Years. The believers in the Aether are shown by Pynchon to be religious acolytes, and Roswell Bounce (great name! UFOs and weather balloon) compares their disappointment with the results of the experiment, to the “cults who believe the world will end on such and such a day” (62).

At any rate, it’s a portentous time that is being chronicled, and Pynchon leaves us with a peek at one of his themes: “Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that ‘photography’ and ‘alchemy’ were just two ways of looking at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals” (80). Could this also presage atomic energy? And the Calvinist belief in predestination is also reinforced: “And maybe his and Dally’s long road out here was not the result of any idle drift but more of a secret imperative, like the force of gravity” (80). Photography as the union of silver, chemistry, and light. As in GR, the laws of Physics (and Chemistry) and fate are a central part of the inextricable web of human and non-human connections. Will Merle’s new friend “Traverse the Web”?

An amazing chapter. If Pynchon can sustain this through the remaining 1000 pages (big IF), he may have eclipsed the accomplishment of Gravity’s Rainbow. Silly, narrow-minded critics! What a fun, FUN read!

Chapter 6: The Invisible Hand

Chapter Six relates the remainder of Lew’s time in Chicago, and brings the fair to a close, ending with its abandoned buildings occupied by the homeless and hungry—certainly not the elect.

Basnight is assigned to shadow the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination would be the spark that ignited the conflagration early 20th century historians and journalists labeled the great war. In this early part of the book we are moving from World’s Fair to World War. In this narrative with the Austrian Archduke, Pynchon returns to the Balkans, which he mined in writing his first novel, V.

Basnight befriends Max Khäutsch, his counterpart in Hapsburg security, a Trabant, which is German for “satellite,” servant of a high ranking person. The Archduke is an irresponsible child, ditching his bodyguards. Basnight rescues him from a Negro bar in Chicago’s South Side. The Duke is a selfish Sod, wants to hunt big game—the American Buffalo—with his Mannlicher—a real German rifle, and one of those irresistible words Pynchon can’t resist.

The Duke also wants to rent the stockyards for some midnight fun which sounds suspiciously like a hunting expedition where the prey will be stockyard workers, detritus of the Hapsburg Empire. “‘Hungarians occupy the lowest level of brute existence’” (46) notes the Duke. With the Austrian’s version of the Negro, the gulf between the elect and the preterite and the damned is huge.

Basnight’s next assignment is shadowing anarchists, including “the traveling Anarchist preacher the Reverend Moss Gatlin” (49). After watching the Reverend, and listening to the huge crowd sing from “the Workers’ Own Songbook” (49), a song adapted from Blake’s “Jerusalem,” we see that Basnight is becoming sympathetic to the Anarchist’s cause.

Privett transfers Lew to Colorado to be “Regional Director” (51) for White City Investigations’ work against Anarchists in the West. During his final flight with the Chums, Professor Vanderjuice warns Lew that “the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map, but gone, absorbed—a dead duck” (52). From the gondola of the Inconvenience, the group observes that the twisted labyrinth of the stockyards (think Borges) is the terminus point for the Oregon trail, that all routes narrow to this one path (think the opening scene of GR again), and that at this terminus point America is nothing but a giant killing machine. Capitalism (the reference to Kinsley’s famous Chicago steakhouse on page 56 is no accident) has managed to absorb the strange anarchist era of the old West. Instead of a True West with True Cowboys, we are left with Buffalo Bill’s Traveling Show, in all its market driven, Barnumesque splendor.

A long, brilliant chapter!