Chapter 64: To Hell and Back!

A long chapter, but after a slow start, the chapter becomes rather central to the against the light/day motif. Reef, and Yashmeen will accompany Cyprian on a return mission to the Balkans.

Pynchon seems to have the same feelings about nationalism—the scourge of modernity:

“If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it take, but mobilize and go to war? Central governments were never designed for peace. Their structure is line and staff, same as the army. The national idea (my italics) depends on war” (938).

The mission to the Balkans is an Anarchist one—even Ratty and Coombs de Bottle have joined the movement. They hope to play “a co-evolutionary role, helping along what’s already in progress…the replacement of governments by other, more practical arrangements” (933).

Another great quote—could be a mantra for life:

“Yashmeen was the one who shared most deeply the Anarchist beliefs around here. She had no illusions about bourgeois innocence, and yet held on to a limitless faith that History could be helped keep its promises, including someday, a commonwealth of the oppressed” (942).

And a quote that takes me back to the 70s and Todd Rundgren’s Utopian visions:

“What are any of these ‘utopian dreams” of ours but defective forms of time travel” (942).

Yashmen and Reef’s daughter, Ljubica is born during the rose harvest. The boys find a “Tesla Ring,” and weapons of mass destruction (phosgene gas) but don’t confront the technology for fear of the consequences to Yashmeen and the Baby.

Cyprian seems to reach a point of enlightenment at an Orphic-Pythagorean monastery, and decides to stay behind—leaving Reef and Yashmeen a couple. “It may be,” Cyprian said as gently as he thought he had to, “that God doesn’t always require us to wander about” (958). Cyprian’s final question before entering into the nun’s vow of silence is “What is it that is born of light?” (959). Phosgene Gas? Nuclear fission? Fusion?

After Cyprian is left behind, Reef and Yashmeen journey across Thrace towards Macedonia into the light. Their mission seems to have failed, and war has broken out in the Balkans. Surrounded by armies, their only path to escape seems to be the one place Cyprian warned them to avoid—Albania

Ljubica, who seems to have some kind of amazing power, has a conversation with Ksenija, and Albania sheepdog, and companion of Pugnax. It seems the dog is shepherding the family to safety.

They finally escape to Corfu, and who shows up there but Auberon Halfcourt and his newfound love, the Japanese mathematician Umeki Tsurigane. The chapter ends with a father/daughter reunion.

Chapter 63: On the Mend

This chapter begins with Frank recovering from a bullet wound following a 1911 battle in the Mexican revolution. Stray shows up in the hospital set up in a church, as she is negotiating a prisoner exchange with the Federales. It turns out the prisoner she gets released is Ewball Oust, Franks anarchist buddy and fellow arms merchant. Ewball and Stray are something of an item.

Frank himself has a brief romance with Wren Provenance, the girl anthropologist.

There is a hallucinogenic dream of Aztlan, the legendary ancestral home of the Mexican people and Aztec ghosts.

Chapter 62: Pynchon, The Cockeyed Optimist

As I have said more than once in this blog, sometimes we try too hard in working out the complexities of Pynchon when we just need to enjoy. And sometimes when we face very complex threads we miss the obvious.

The Burgher King is another great sendup of a European theatrical genre like The Courier’s Tragedy in The Crying of Lot 49. The fact that it appears to star a young Bela Lugosi (age 27 in 1909) makes it even more interesting.

So to continue with my misreading.

As fast as this plot was becoming knotted again, it is freed as Kit rescues Dally and Love with the big L seems to win out.

Pynchon will never be convicted of optimism. However, this is really interesting to me!

After all, Gravity’s Rainbow begins with the famous scene of the train, going down into the depths, becoming more and more tangled in a web—there is no escape for the preeterite many. And that novel ends without much hope with a scene which announces that, after all, trapped in the web of language, we are all strangers in a theatre of spectacular capitalism. Think Baudrillard.

It looks as if AGD many end with the Traverse boys all happily coupled, while the evil Capitalist is undone by his own greed.

I’m only speculating here. And there are loose ends—Lake for one.

Chapter 61: A True Star

Dally and her mysterious friend Hunter arrive in London, where they reencounter the predatory Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, a woman Dally correctly recognizes as a woman who “gets jealous of oatmeal” (892). However, Ruperta undergoes a religious conversion of sorts while listening to a performance of Ralph Vaughn Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

In the meantime, Dally again begins working as a model, an activity which soon crosses the boundary to a kind of soft core prostitution, ending up yoked to one Clive Crouchmas, a businessman or sorts who had some sort of nefarious dealings with Turkey and Germany.
At a Tarot Reading, Dally is identified as “The Star, number XVII” (901), and meets Lew Basnight and the followers of T.W.I.T. Lew recruits her to spy on Crouchmas, not for T.W.I.T., but for some other mysterious power. Clive discovers Dally’s betrayal, and arranges for her to accompany him to Constantinople where he intends to exact some sort of revenge.
With just 9 chapters to go, the plot is becoming more complex, not less!

The AGD wiki makes a point here that leads to a question: is the search for knowledge hopelessly intertwined with the search for power?

Chapter 60: Jenny was a Friend of Mine!

In this chapter, in which Reef, Cyprian, and Yashmeen fall into a ménage-a-trois, the novel seems to be lurching towards its conclusion.

I must comment on one of Pynchon’s names here—Jenny Invert. This classmate of Ratty and Cyprian’s is “That girl from Nether Wallop, Hants, three feet taller than you’s I recall, wizard trapshooter, president of the Inanimate Bird Association chapter down there” (866). Invert is a term that has a history as a pejorative for a homosexual, so we might assume Jenny is a lesbian. But there is also the famous 1824 stamp which shows an inverted JN-4 (Jenny) air plane (actually a bi-plane—Sic!).

Summary: Cyprian and his former bedmate, the prince Spongiatosta, end-up plotting their matchmaker’s (Theign’s) demise, and Cyprian ends up invited to the Prince’s ball. The deed, Theign’s execution, is accomplished by the Croation assassins, and the three-way begins at the Ball.

Ten chapters to go. At the current pace, about another month.

Chapter 59: Buddha's Terrorists

Reef is reconnecting. Flaco tells him of his encounter with Frank/Pancho in Mexico, and Reef learns that Frank “‘got one of them’” (851). He also encounters Kit in a dream, where Kit forgives him, but Frank views himself as unforgivable.

Reef and Yashmeen hook up, and plan to rescue Vlado from Theign. Yashmeem discovers a mathematical code in the schoolbook Vlado left her, and when she felt herself about to grasp an intelligence so grand and fatal that she deliberately retreated” (863).

Who is Vlado? What is the Black Hand? What is their relationship to Shambala?

Chapter 58: Sarajevo Spring

Pynchon’s reference to “an entire branch of spycraft known as Applied Idiotics” (823) here reminds us of other references (T.W.I.T., Cyprian’s helper Bevis) and other idiots in the novel. Is Pynchon recovering the Shakespearean fool?

Bevis’s fascination with Jacintha Drulov is another one of Pynchon’s Humbert Humbert moments. It must be remembered that he studied with Nabakov at Cornell.

The references to Virgil, who accompanied Dante into the Inferno, and the Argo, reminds us that Cyprian may be on a tragic quest.

We also learn of Colonel Kautsch’s fate as his homosexuality is discovered.

Danilo lets Cyprian know that “You have come to Sarajevo on a dummy assignment” (832), and the Serbian terrorist organization “The Black Hand” helps Cyprian avoid the Austria-Hungarian attempts to assassinate him. Ironically, the organization is often credited with starting WWI with the assassination of one of this novel’s minor characters, the Hapsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The seal of the Black Hand looks a lot like the mysterious seal on the cover of the novel’s dust jacket.

Cyprian, the former sod who suddenly seemed to be on his way to achieving a kind of Buddhist enlightenment, achieves a sort of Spring Awakening. And by the end of the chapter our flaneur paraphrases Oscar Wildes’ mythical last words (“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death”) when he tells Jacintha, “her own Ultraviolet Catastrophe” that “I am offended only by certain sorts of wallpaper” (848).

Wilde and Nabakov—inspirations for this chapter.

Chapter 57: Cyprian's Quest

Theign sends Cyprian and Bevis Mositleigh into the Balkans, in response to the Bosnian crisis—Austria-Hungary declared their intention to annex Bosnia permanently, which upsets the Serbs, the Russians, and the Turks.

Who does Theign serve? It seems as though his allegiance may be as much to Austria as to Britain, or more likely, to Theign himself.

The name seems related to the Anglo-Saxon Thegn, or soldier, who became the Thane, or leader of a hundred.

Cyprian puts Yashmeen, who is being pursued as a “Judensau” (807) or Jewish pig/sow, describing the emerging anti-Semitic fever which culminated in the holocaust, under the protection of Vlado Clissan, a Balkan pirate.

Chapter 56: All Hail, Marx and Lennon!

The Tunguska event makes Shambala visible to the crew of Inconvenience. In a great passage the writer notes the effect of the event, “as if those precise light-frequencies which would allow human eyes to see the city had finally been released. What it would take longer for the boys to understand was that the great burst of light had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world” (793). This conceit, that the Chums, characters from a series of adolescent novel, lived in a space somehow separated from “the real world,” is one of most interesting constructs in this novel. The ripping of this veil is a loss of innocence, and a loss of belief which the Chum’s readers had so eagerly suspended.

The event has changed the sky, even as far away as Venice where Dally sits discussing the danger she is in with the princess Spongiatosta. Cyprian notes the change, “Something’s wrong with the light, Moistleigh” (801).

The chapter ends by connecting all of this “light” with the book’s title, where “light” seems to become a synonym for “day.”

“As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and against the day” (805).