Chapter 33: Parallel Lines

Letting the real world intrude into this pleasant excursion into fantasy for a moment, I note the launch of Windows Vista. I hope the launch of Pynchon’s non-best-seller will have more of an extended affect on the world than a minor revision to the ubiquitous OS. (The new version of MS Office on the other hand may have a major impact!)

I’m now about two months into the four-month long project, and though I’m not quite halfway through the giant text I’m closer than I thought I would be two weeks ago. This personal text which accompanies the Pynchon text is certainly not academic, more like an extended meditation.

In this short chapter we return to one of the (minor?) narratives, this time involving Merle Rideout and Rosswell Bounce (Weather balloons bouncing off the New Mexico desert floor?) at the University. The narrator of the AGD wiki also notes the appearance of Chick Counterfly, the only member of the Chums to appear outside a Chums’ Chapter—though many characters in Chums’ chapters have crossed the boundary between the adolescent fantasy genre and the (more realistic?) other genres. Note also that Counterfly came to the Chums from the real world, and his name (Counterfly) seems to be a synonym for Gravity.

Pynchon’s exploration into Manicheanism, and the dualities and light and darkness continues his humorous deconstruction of binaries. Consider: Good Traverse versus Bad Vibe, Gravity versus Time, light versus darkness, photograph versus negative, scientist (Ph.D.) versus Engineer. As Pynchon says throughout V., excluded middles are bad shit. Note also the references to C.A.C.A (Caca=shit) in the previous chapter.

As both a Ph.D. and an engineer (or if time matters, Ph.D. now; former engineer), I am a living excluded middle.

As brothers of the film (“lens-brother”-p.450)—Pynchon returns to his love of motion picture—Bounce and Rideout are members of a Masonic-like fraternity!

The discussion of Lobachevsky—discoverer of non-Euclidean (hyperbolic!) geometry, ia yet another connection to GR.

Chapter 32: The Road to Shambhala!

Reviewer Allegra Goodman writing her “The Year in Books” column in New York Magazine states “The Wild West anarchist-revenge tale at the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day—cut out the other 600 pages and you’ve got the best novel of the year” (http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2006/25308/index1.html)

As great as the revenge novel is, I wouldn’t want to be without the comic relief of the Chums of Choice narrative. Furthermore, as I’ve argued before, each of the narratives build upon each other, as well as upon the narratives of the previous novels.

Take, for example, the theme of “light” vs. “darkness,” a thematic subject predating Shakespeare’s frequent use of the metaphor where light equals knowledge. The chapter begins with Lindsay Noseworth journeying from the looney B.I.N. (Biometric Institute of Neuropathy) to meet his unit in the Asian desert. Meditating along the way, the narrator notes that:

“To tell the truth, he’d been growing doubtful about starlightarching Academy Harmonica Band” (418).

The presence of th in any practical way, having lately been studying historic world battles, attempting to learn what lighting conditions might have been like during the action, even coming to suspect that light might be a secret determinant of history” (431).

In Pynchon, ideas seem to connect, layer upon layer, meaning upon meaning, attracted to some gravity of linkages which build until they finally collapse, like neutron stars, under their own weightiness. A simple revenge narrative, no matter how well-told, is not enough.

In this chapter, aboard a desert submarine, Pynchon compares sand to light, even to the point of noting sand’s existence as both particle and wave. The boys think they are on a mission to find the mysterious Buddhist lost city—Shambhala—a city of lost knowledge, but in fact the ship’s mission may be more mundane—oil exploration. By the end of the chapter the boys leave the ship before the undersand theatre erupts in a war of competing powers, ostensible fighting over oil rights.

How 21st century!

Chapter 31: Unconventional Adventures in Time and Space

The concluding chapter to “Iceland Spar” explores the concept of time. Pynhcon tells us as much in the opening paragraph:

At Candlebrow U., the crew of the Inconvenience would find exactly the mixture of nostalgia and amnesia to provide them a reasonable counterfeit of the timeless. Appropriately, perhaps, it would also be here that they would make the fatal discovery which would bring them, inexorable as the Zodiac’s wheel, to their Imum Coeli……(406)

The following from Wikipedia:
In astrology, the Imum Coeli (Latin for "bottom of the sky"), IC, is the point in space where the ecliptic crosses the meridian in the north, exactly opposite the Midheaven. It marks the fourth house cusp in most house systems (this is reversed in the southern hemisphere).
The Imum Coeli is said to refer to our roots and also to the least conscious part of ourselves. It symbolizes foundations, beginnings in life, what may have been experienced through parental inheritance and homeland influences, need for security and relationships with the home and family life. It also may describe the circumstances that we will encounter at the end of our lives. Because this house was the most distant point possible from the visible part of the horoscope, Hellenistic astrologers considered the IC to be the home of the underworld, or Hades.
In many cases the IC refers to a parent — traditionally, the father. Modern astrologers may use the IC as a significator for the mother, or for both parents. There is no consensus in modern usage for which parent is best represented by the IC. The point is moot for Hellenistic astrologers who considered the fourth house the house of the father, but did not use the Imum Coeli as the cusp of the fourth house. Using the natural houses system (see cadent houses) and modern quadrant house systems in which the IC is the cusp of the fourth house, some modern astrologers see a correspondence between the fourth house and the astrological sign Cancer. However, traditional astrologers, using whole-sign houses, never made this connection.
In whole-sign house systems the signs and houses have the same boundaries; hence the Imum Coeli can actually appear in the third house, the fourth house or fifth house; in cases of extreme terrestrial latitude, it may even fall in the second or sixth houses.


The darkness of their adventure here seems to support the Hellenistic view—the chapter marks the boys' adventure to Hades in a way their underworld passage did not. It certainly describes the approach of the end of their lives.

This is of course, remarkable for the Chums. Like the Hardy Boys, who solve hundreds of mysteries across a multitude of municipal, state, national, and continental borders, all during Frank’s senior and Joe’s junior year at Bayport High School, the Chums are ageless, seemingly immune to the vicissitudes of time. The narrator associates this with the Chums time aloft from the Earth, disobeying both the Gravity that would draw them to the surface of the planet as well as the Gravity that pulls us all towards Death. Their extended stay at Candlebrow leads to an amnesiac existence where they almost forget their service as Chums, most particularly in the hilarious section where they are attending a military-like school, the home of the “Marching Academy Harmonica Band” (418).

The presence of the Chum’s “hierarchy,” or “patriarchy” becomes more ominous. As the chapter closes, the boys are off to an assignment in Asia, and the “Tesla device” they use to communicate is revealed to be both a communications and a surveillance device. The fact that the nefarious Alonzo R. Meatman is a “duly authorized agent” of the “Higher Authority” (425) is particularly troubling.

Interestingly enough, after ending this section with a focus on the implications of avoding the gravitational pull of death, time, and time machines, the next section, “Bilocations, “seems to deal with the subject of overcoming spatial constraints and conventions, such as the convention that we can’t be in two places at once!

Chapter 30: The Chums and the Amazing Time Machine

My Columbian Exposition medal appears again in this chapter.

I was wrong—this is not the last chapter in “Iceland Spar.” There are two, both returning to the Chums narrative. In this case, the boys receive another “message” from the hierarchy (seems a lot like “them” in GR), in this case delivered by an urchin, one Plug Loafsley, who runs a gang of urchins and a child brothel. Plug leads the boys to a time machine, a contraption operated by one Dr. Zoot. Zoot acquired it from one Alonzo Meatman, a dangerous and unsavory character. It was acquired at “Candlebrow U., institute of higher learning out there in the distant heart of the republic” (405).

Again we see the gates of hell, complete with Dante’s injunction. We also meet one of Pynchon’s nymphettes—one Angela Grace (Angel of Grace).

I seem to be reviewing slower than planned. Probably be summer before I finish.

In the meantime--Go Colts! Go Coach Dungy!

Chapter 29: Espato de Islandia!

This chapter, the penultimate chapter in “Iceland Spar,” describing Frank’s adventures in Mexico, seems especially important to the recurring themes of the book. Everything in Mexico seems a strange, double-refracted version of Colorado: Mexican army, Mexican silver mines, an understanding that there are at least two (or more if you count Basnight) Kieselguhr Kids, even another Estrella!

The following rant from Joaquin, the parrot, answering the question as to why Mexican cities are called doubly: Zacatecas, Zacatecas; Guanajuato, Guanajuato:

“Think! Double refraction! Your favorite optical property! Silver mines full of espato double-refracting all the time, and not only light rays, naw uh-uh! Cities too! People! Parrots! You just keep floating along in that gringo smoke cloud, thinking there’s only one of everything, huevon, you don’t see those strange lights around you” (387)

Frank does follow one light, a vision from a dream which he thinks will lead him to Deuce. Instead it lands him in jail, but he is broken out by a band of hilarious Mexican anarchists.

His newfound friend, Ewball Oust, turns out to be a doppelganger for Bob Meldrum in at least one way—he’s an incredible marksman.

Frank ends up with three Merxican native Americans, who lead him to a strange cavern. As he approaches, “Framk understood that he had been waiting for the unreadable face of the one duende or Mexican tommyknocker who would lead him like this up some slope, higher than the last roofless wall, into a range of hawks and eagles, take him beyond his need for the light or the wages of the day, into some horn-screened mouth, in beneath broken gallow-frames and shoring all askew, allowing himself at last to be swallowed by, rather than actively penetrating, the immemorial mystery of these mountains” (391).

WOW!!!

A magical piece of crystal in the cavern seems to be a mirror leading him to Sloat’s location.

This is such a Marxist or anarchist narrative at its heart. The day is the time of work, the time of the bosses. Pynchon is truly working “Against the Day.”

And at chapter’s end, he finds a Mexican tavern, and dispatches Sloat. The first revenge killing enters the book.

Chapter 28: Reef in the Big Easy

It seems as if everyone is heading to Europe! This chapter is about Reef, and by the end of the chapter it seems as if he is going to be heading to Genoa Flaco, an anarchist he met in a jazz club in New Orleans—“the Maman Tant Gras Hall, a concert saloon juts off Perdido Street” (369). Can’t help but notice the connection to China Mieville’s leftist fantasy series which began with Perdido Street Station.

Reef’s journey to New Orleans, disguised as Thrapston Cheesely III, comes as he leaves his new family (Stray and his son Jesse) behind in Colorado after the mine owners tried to kill him with an avalanche.

I laughed at the name Yup Toy (367), as in yuppie toy, and his ridiculous British names like Ruperta Chirpingdom Groin (367) and the deliriously French Madam Aubergine (Mrs. Eggplant!).

Mrs. Groin’s Medici collar (368) seems to associate her with the ruling class, and her break-up with Reef in a club full of Negro entertainers puts Reef squarely on the side of the preterite!

Chapter 27: Dallying in New York City

Chapter 27 is Dally’s New York adventure and her eventual reunion with Erlys. Between her arrival on the train, and her meeting with her mother (another of Pynchon’s “cute meets”), th reader encounters an array of characters:
Katie, a waitress at Schultz’s Vegetarian Brauhaus, and an aspiring actress
Mrs. Dragsaw, manager at the Brauhaus
Chinchito, a circus midget with a voracious sexual appetite, and an organ rather
out of proportion to the rest of his body
Mock Duck, Chinese gangster
Hop Fung, director/producer of New York street theatre
Tom Lee, a Chinese gangster
R. Wilshire Vibe, Broadway producer
Con McVeety, assistant to the young Vibe
Various Vaudeville Acts

Katie and Dally end up at a party given by RW Vibe, where she is mysteriously rescued from a probable date rape artist by the party’s act, which coincidentally is The Great Zombini. The magician’s assistant is her mother, Erlys.

After meeting her siblings, and confronting her mother (briefly) over her abandonement, Dally learns Merle is not her real father. She is the daughter of Bert Snidell, who died in an accident in Cleveland before she was born.

Luca Zombini is using Iceland Spar in his act, to cut his subjects in half, creating, not body parts, but two identical subjects. Unfortunately, he discovers it is nore than an optical illusion—in some sense, twins are created. The family, including Dally, is off to perform in Venice where Luca wishes to consult with the makers of his double-refracting calcite device, “The Isle of Mirrors in Venice” which makes “the finest conjurors mirrors in the world” (355)/. Just as Dally is mysteriously transported from Vibe’s party, it seems that Iceland Spar has some sort of ability to transcend time and space.

An aside: Before going to the party, the girls enter a giant department store—a kind of Macy’s with the name I.J.&K. Smokefoot’s. Guarding the entrance are two bouncers, who Katie refers to as “Jachin and Boaz…Guardians of the Temple” (346). The reference is to Solomon’s temple, and these are the names of the two pillars. Look closely at the high priestess card of the tarot deck, above.

Chapter 26: The Tale takes a German Turn

Chapter 26 returns to events in the life of the youngest of the Traverse brothers, Kit. Kit is in a bit of a crisis following the death of his mentor Gibbs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Gibbs). Gibbs work in Entropy seems to connect to some of Pynchon’s earliest work, both V. and the short story “Entropy.” At the same time, he learns of his father’s desk.
In his crisis, which the narrator ascribes to “Eigenheit theory—vectors right in the heart and soul of it all” (324) The German word means “ownness,” something Kit, a slave to Vibe’s capitalism, lacks. It also seems related to the mathematical concept of Eigenvalue (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Eigenvalue.html. There is also the character Dudley Eigenvalue in V.

Kit turns to Professor Vanderjuice, mentor of the Chums for advice, Venderjuice suggests that Kit study in Gottingen, Germany. Kit works with Vanderjuice to manipulate Vibe to allow such a move, but by the end of the chapter we wonder who is manipulating who. The earlier hint that Scarsdale Vibe has sexual designs on young Traverse seems to be confirmed. Foley, the other Vibe, had “learned not to disrespect another man’s longing” 334).

Vibe’s designs on Kit seem quite nefarious. Foley muses “It wasn’t enough to have an enemy murdered., but he must corrupt the victim’s children as well. Lake and Kit are already under Vibe’s influence. How long before Reef and Frank follow?

Chapter 25: Dallying Around in Telluride

In Chapter 25, Frank ascends to the Little Hellkite Mine via Tomboy Road, entering a haunted, even supernatural mining area where he meets the ultimate tomboy, Dally. She is busy “poring what could only be nitro into holes drilled into these living mountain depths” (298).

Dally leads him to Merle, who informs him that the mine owners want him dispensed with, and he learns that last-night’s friend, Bob Meldrum, is hunting him. Dally takes him back to town, via an underground passageway haunted by dwarfs, tommyknockers, who appear to be the same creatures encountered by the Chums of Chance during their foray through the center of the Earth. Once again, the fantasy world and the real world have a strange intersection. Dally takes him to stay in a safe house, the Silver Orchid whorehouse.

There is also a conversation with Merle about a kind of alchemist in New York, Dr. Emmons, who has discovered a process to transform silver into gold. Merle has him view some of Emmon’s “argentaurum” through a piece of Icelandic Spar calcite, which reveals to Frank the transmutation of silver into gold.

Franks suspects Merle is a conman, trying to get money out of Frank for the secret of Emmon’s process, but Merle says no—like his father, Frank isn’t searching for wealth—he craves some kind of secret knowledge.

Frank is still searching for Deuce and Sloat, and Merle refers him to Dr. Turnstone, who confesses he was in love with Frank’s sister Lake, but lets slip that Lake has run off with Deuce Kindred.

A stunned Frank is shocked and angry. “When I find her, I will kill the bitch” (312). This is getting very Shakespearean now.

In search of Deuce and Lake, Frank talks to an old gambling partner of Reef. Jimmy Drop. Jimmy tells him a story of 11-year-old Lake skating with a mysterious partner, “some kid from town, management kid, not much older than she was, and Webb Traverse came in saw it and just pitched a fit” (314). Who was her mysterious partner—one of the Vibe boys?

Elmore Disco helps Frank escape Telluride by helping disguise him as “Pancho, the Bassoon Player” (315).

There is a Shakespearean soliloquy at Webb’s grave: “It’s like we specialized Pa. Reef is runnin on nerve, Kit’s gonna figure it all out scientifically, I’m the one who just has to keep poundin at it day after day, like that fell back east tryin to turn silver into gold” (316).

Speaking of back east, with Merle, Frank watches Dally board the train to New York to find her mother. Frank tells her to contact his brother Kit, “cause you and Kit are two of a kind” (317).