Chapter 40: Quaternion Pentecost

Back to Kit! A really important chapter where Kit is shot at with the Quaternion weapon. We wonder if this weapon, with its double-refracting capability, will lead to the displacement of Kit in time, or space (a bilocation, or a double kit, a doppleganger).

The chapter is heavy with allusions, to religion and military technology, Trinity being both a significant term in both Christianity and Hinduism, and the name Hindu/Sanskrit/phile Oppenheimer gave to the bomb. Mulciber one of Milton’s demons and a death eater in Harry Potter. The Quaternion Pentecost reminiscent of the speaking which is anticipated at the end of The Crying of Lot 49.

A writer in the AGD Wiki (http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page) notes this significant passage where the Quaternion Umeki speaks to Kit in his dreams, which seems like a bit of an Executive Summary or Abstract for one of the novel’s rhetorical intents:

“Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety.... Within the mirror, with the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim's guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist”(566).

What a wonderful passage (sic), a dark itinerary to an alternate world!

Chapter 39: In Flanders Fields

After Ryder shows Miles the fields of Flanders, and tries to describe the horrible slaughter that would occur in this countryside in a few years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Flanders_Fields), Miles realizes “that there had been no miracle, no brilliant technical coup, in fact no ‘time travel’ at all—that the presence in this world of Thorn and his people had been owing only to some chance blundering [this is Mile Blundell of the Chums of Chance speaking] upon a shortcut through unknown topographies of Time, enabled somehow by whatever was to happen here, in this part of Flanders where they stood” (555).

In Flanders Fields, where poppies grow. A poem about death. And the seemingly timeless, immortal Chums, unlike their Hardy Boy brethren, realize that they were right to avoid the promised immortality in Candlebrow, because the promise of these trespassers is a fraud. There is no turning away from mortality.

Like Kilgore Trout turning to Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions, pleading “Make me young, make me young, make me young….”, it seems as though Blundell had went on this trip hoping for some escape. Now he, or Chick, have the terrible responsibility of informing the boys that the promise of immortality “was all false, the promise was nothing but a cruel confidence game” (555).

We also learn in this chapter that Pugnax the dog has developed quite a taste for blood since their time in the Carpathians, home of Dracula.

We hope, that somehow, the Chums, who inhabit the sky, truly live in three dimensions, unlike the rest of us flatlanders, might find some way to escape the ravages of time.

Chapter 38: Mayo!

With the completion of this chapter I’m now half-way through the novel. It’s been three months since the book was released, so it looks like it will take me until nearly the end of May to complete the project. So I have underestimated this project by about 50%.
Some of that delay is due to the demands of my new job, so I’m not too disappointed with the pace of the project.

Chapter 38 will probably be forever known as the Mayonaisse chapter, as an agent of some mysterious cabal by the name of Pleiade Lafriskee attempts to drown Kit in a sea of Mayonnaise in West Flanders.

Plenty of humor here, including line where Kit amazingly confuses La Mayonnaise with La Marseilles. There are also new characters—a convention of Quaternion mathematicians, including a beautiful one named Kimura Tsurigane. One figures somehow that Kit. Kimura, and Yashmeen will all be entertwined in some sort of plot, if you know what I mean.

There is also a group of Belgium nihilist/anarchists who rescue Kit from the Mayo: Eugenie, Fatou, Denis, and Policarpe.

Also an interesting scene in which the previously referenced Dr. V. Ganesh Rao combines Quaternion vectors with Yogic body movements to Bilocate from the convention floor to the convention, where he emerges, physically changed, “with his foot in a tub of mayonnaise” (539). Ah, simple pleasures!

Chapter 37: Two Ships, One Wave (or Particle)

We return to Dally, and to Kit whose stories merge aboard the cruise ship Stupendica. We see Dally begin to interact with Erlys, who tells her the story of her meetup with Merle, and with her sister Bria. A relationship, even a romance seems to develop between Dally and Kit, but it is interrupted by a bilocation. Kit, going down into the engineroom of the ship, “A ‘deeper level’ where dualities are resolved” (519) finds himself in an engineroom where the Stupendica, transformer like, becomes a warship of the Austrian Navy, the Emperor Maximilian.

At first, I thought this was a joke, Austria being a land-locked nation. However Pynchon has done his research—Austria did have a navy, and the Italian port city of Trieste, 70 miles east of Venice was its home. The Stupendica arrives in Trieste, but Kit, unable to get from the Maximilian to the bilocated Stupendica, eventually escapes into Africa, where he becomes a good/bad luck charm aboard a fishing vessel.

Chapter 36: Meet Yashmeen

This chapter returns to London, and T.W.I.T., but this time the focus isn’t on Nigel and Neville, or Lew Basnight, but instead on Yashmeen Halfcourt. Lesbian, lover of Riemann mathematics, adored by Cyprian Lakewood, whose own sexuality is confused.

The reference here is to St. Cyprian, saint of self-denial and fidelity. Also noteworthy for his famous admonition that “outside the church there is no salvation.

By the end of the chapter Yashmeen is off to Gottingen to study mathematics, and we expect that a meeting with Kit Traverse is in the cards. We wonder if she also might be used by Professor Renfrew to somehow inflict revenge on his adversary, Werfner.

Chapter 35: Deuce, Chased by Furies

Continuing the revenge tale, we return to Deuce and Lake. Deuce is beginning to realize that his life is becoming one big exercise in contrition—he is slowly trying to win Lake’s forgiveness for the murder of her father—the unspoken topic between them.

In Wall ‘O \Death, Missouri, “ a sacred ruin” to “motorcycling pilgrims” (476), Deuce is mistakenly appointed as a deputy peace officer. He gets the message, via telegraph ticker, of Sloat’s murder. Lake seems almost relieved at the news, and Deuce angrily splits.

When he finally returns, she resumes her role: “the angel o’ damn mercy’s going to change him” (482). Deuce continues to beg for a mercy she won’t grant, but at some point Deuce feels as if he is no longer pursued by Furies. This leads Deuce to another move—he wants a baby, because, in his eyes and Lake’s astonished words, “We owe Webb Traverse, deceased, a baby” (486).

This can’t end well!

Chapter 34: Sleepwalking Through Life!

Back to Frank’s story. He is looking for Reef and Estrella, and finds her in a town of Biker cowboys—Fickle Creek, at the Hotel Noctambulo. She fails to recognize him. Noctambulo=sleepwalker. Who is sleepwalking through life: Stray? Reef? Frank? All of us?

Frank learns that Mayva is living a strange-existence (seems a perfect example of what Gayatri Spivak means by the subaltern. Here the widow of the pro-union anarchist survives by making ice cream in a company town-Cripple Creek.