The Chumps of Choice

A Congenial Spot for the Discussion of Against the Day, by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Cornell '59, and Any Other Damned Thing That Comes Into Our Heads. Warning: Grad Students and Willie-Wavers will be mocked.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Oh, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All?

(pp.661-693)

If you study the heuristics and logistics of the mystics
You will find that their minds rarely move in a line
So it's much more realistic
To abandon such ballistics
And resign to be trapped in a leaf on a vine
-- Brian Eno, "Backwater"
This section, a two-chapter number, ends the "Bilocations" part of the book. Big Important Shit gets said and done in this section, so pay attention, you there at the back!

In the first chapter, we're back with Kit and Yashmeen as they travel from Göttingen toward Kashgar. The first leg of their journey finds them in Intra, on the shores of the Lago Maggiore, which transects the border between Switzerland and Italy.

They are following the the footsteps of the mathematician Riemann, Yashmeen's idol. He had traveled down this way from Göttingen forty years earlier, passing from the "rationalized hell" of the Seven Weeks' War into Sunny Italy, only to die in Custozza. As Kit and Yashmeen make the same journey, the cold rationality of Northern Europe gives way to "much less to engage the rational mind." The Haupt-Bahnhof of Frankfurt, scene of a hideous train-crash a few years earlier, joins other deadly technological catastrophes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century -- the collapse the Venice Campanile and the roof of the Charing Cross Station in London: "equivalents of an Anarchist bomb, though some believed equally laden with intent." Switzerland rises before them like a refreshing dessert after a heavy, greasy German dinner.

They visit Riemann's grave ("I think I should not cry," sez Yashmeen bravely), and she recounts to Kit the memory from her girlhood in Russia of the stranniki -- men who have walked away from their humdrum lives and become voluntarily homeless, "their only allegiance to God." She identifies her exile from Göttingen with these men: "Now I am expelled from the garden. Now in a smooth enough World-Line comes this terrible discontinuity. And on the far side of it, I find that now I am also strannik." She begins to feel her hopes for the zeta-function fade.

At the "fabled" (and, apparently, fictional; I could find no mention of it) Sanatorium Böpfli-Spazzoletta, a spa for those suffering from the "consumptive chic" fashionable in Europe, the Kit and Reef strands of the story meet. Reef, who's been tunneling nearby and who has fallen in with the nymphomaniacally inclined and mellifluously named Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, now affects European clothing -- "a tourist from someplace out in Deep Europe," it seems to Kit. Some uncomfortable chitchat ensues. Ruperta and retinue have been spa-hopping across Central Europe, visiting some spas so remote they have to have their own potsage-stamps printed up just to get correspondence to official Swiss post-offices.

Reef, it seems, had at some recent point misunderstood the concept of "lap-dog." Hilarity ensues. (We see here a certain dumb slavishness to his own willie that we hadn't seen in Reef before; a certain moronic naïveté in someone who, by his own admission, runs the grift.)

Kit introduces Yashmeen to Reef, occasioning the observation that "for a moment she had thought she was seeing Kit and his own somehow aged or gravely assaulted double." Reef appears ready to move in on Kit's action, which annoys both Kit and Ruperta: "Your brother's little wog seems to've taken quite a fancy to you."

Later, alone together at dinner, Kit tells Yashmeen of the Traverse brothers, for purposes of comparison. Reef: "Reckless." Frank: "Reasonable." Kit: "Just the baby." Yashmeen suggests another "R" word: "Religious." ("Hard to tell if she was teasing.") This seems to be in aid of a seduction attempt, but, like so many of these things, communication goes haywire, and they talk at cross purposes: "I say something?" "You didn't say something." Call your correspondent just as hamhanded a romantic halfwit as Kit, but I'm damned if I can figure out what Yashmeen wanted him to say either. "Ite, Missa est."

Reef joins a morose Kit in his room, wangles "a couple of cc's" of Champagne. Reef sidles around to the subject of Scarsdale Vibe, and the unspoken commitment among all the Traverse boys to avenge their father's death. Vibe's in Europe, buying up "some of that Fine Art... doin what the millionaires do." Vibe's headed for Venice, and Reef insists the moment's right for action. Reef gets Kit to bring up the subject of assassination first, to be the first to suggest a plan; for his part Reef "look(s) to be all passion and no plan." The sticking point for the brothers: They don't know what their father wants.

A séance is arranged, to ask the man himself. Madame Natalia Eskimoff, a medium whose "séances were known, you'd say notorious, for their impertinence" -- for "These people are dead! How much more rude does it get?" -- is enlisted, to Reef's grifter's skepticism. A highly suspicious contact with Webb, heavy with generalities and mighty light on material usefulness, ensues. The belligerent Reef is persuaded to try his own hand at the mediuming game, and this time Webb's voice is unmistakable, full of regret at his misdirected earthly anger, his miserable fatherhood. Having channeled his father's profound sadness from the land of regrets, Reef himself is in despair at what he's become: "I don't even know who I fuckin am anymore."

Kit dreams of Webb. Kit is a child; Webb is alone but not lonely, playing poker solitaire with cards that seem to morph into numbers-in-themselves. Kit tries to regress to his childhood, to a state of dependence on his father, but can't help recognizing the cards as artifacts of his adult life, a life in which he's used his mathematical mind to betray his father's ideals: "He must have wanted all along to be the one son Webb could believe in." It is a sad and guilty Kit who wakes up, his betrayal of Webb heavy on his mind, imagining Mayva's disapproval: "There's still traces of his blood all up and down this country, still crying out..."

Kit suffers a crisis of -- what to call it? Faith? Belief? in the once-glimpsed transcendence of Vectorism, of the coexisting world of imaginaries, a "spirit realm" that exists beside and unseen by the world of real numbers. Here's a real important passage: "His own father had been murdered by men whose allegiance, loudly and often as they might invoke Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that real axis and nothing beyond it." Vectors are nothing but illusion.

"Someplace out ahead in the fog of futurity, between here and Venice, was Scarsdale Vibe. The convergence Kit had avoided even defining still waited its hour. The man had been allowed to go on with his dishonorable work too long without a payback. All Kit had anymore. All there was to hold on to. All he had."

(Sock-Dolager!)

A disoriented Kit consults with a sleep-deprived Yashmeen about the "detour to Venice for purposes of vendetta." Yashmeen has been ordered off their mission to Kashgar, diverted by T.W.I.T. to Vienna and Buda-Pesth to be the subject of mysterious Psychical Research Activity. She hands him an envelope to be handed to her own father, after Kit's "detour": "Telepathy... would not be -- you say, 'a patch?' -- a patch on the moment you actually put this in his hands."

She boards a boat, and Kit is left, disconsolate, alone.

The action moves to London, where Neville and Nigel, foppish and doped-up as ever, spray seltzer bottles at passersby. Lew Basnight is accompanying them to a fashionable West End play, about Jack the Ripper, entitled Waltzing in Whitechapel. The play is about a troupe of actors trying to put on a play about Jack the Ripper: "An actor playing an actor playing Jack, why that's artificial don't you agree?"

Lew surveys the crowd from their box and sees who he thinks is Professor Renfrew, but who turns out to by Professor-Doktor Joachim Werfner. The two bear a mighty strong resemblance. Lew renews his acquaintance with Colonnel Käutsch, our old pal from back at the Chicago Exposition, who's no longer cursed with the thankless task of chivvying Franz Ferdinand about. Käutsch has a pet theory that the true agent of the tragedy of Mayerling, in which the Crown Prince Rudolf and his Vetsera died in a murder suicide pact, was in fact Jack the Ripper.

Werfner, dismissive of the idea, notes that there were hundreds of "possible" Jack the Rippers, each equally plausible to the observer. "Hundreds, by now thousands, of narratives, all equally valid -- what can this mean?" "Multiple worlds," chirps Nigel. "Precisely!" cries the Professor.

I think some loose ends are beginning to be tied up, nicht wahr?

Lew, mystified by Werfner's presence in London, "where he should not be," reverts back to his "pernicious habit" of Cyclomite-nibbling. Well, wouldn't you?

Lew begins to become aware that he's not being told everything he needs to know by T.W.I.T. He notices in the Two N's a certain evasiveness, and he twigs to the conclusion: "They were impersonating British idiots. And in that luminous and tarnished instant, he understood, far too late in the ball game, that Renfrew and Werfner were one and the same person... that this person somehow had the paranormal power to be in at least two places at the same time... and that everybody at the T.W.I.T. had known this, known forever, most likely -- everybody except Lew."

Bilocation!

Lew looks it up. Bilocation has been a stock in trade in the mystical line, well, pretty much forever. Dr. Otto Ghloix, an alienist (psychiatrist) (from Switzerland, how interesting) attempts a cod-Freudian explanation: "What crime more reprehensible than to betray that sacred obligation for the shoddy rewards to be had from Whitehall or the Wilhelmstrasse?" Lew protests that he takes T.W.I.T.'s deception personally; Ghloix reminds him that "it is quite common in these occult orders to find laity and priesthood, hierarchies of acquaintance with the Mysteries, secret initiation at each step, the assumption that one learns what one has to only when it is time to."

Which is just about exactly what's been going on with us Chumps for 687 pages, 's all I'm sayin' on that matter.

"Simplifies things, in a way," sez Lew. Brother, you said a mouthful.

The Cohen, knowing that Lew has been reading up on Bilocation and having offered some advice on its study, observing the Plafond-Lumineux, a complex lighting-fixture that seems to give off more light than the sun, muses, "We are light, you see, all of light... When we lost our aetherial being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to -- [highly amusing stage direction] -- this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of once having moved at the speed and density of light.... Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey."

Atonement. It now follows us -- and Lew -- everywhere.

Lew thinks back to Chicago, to Troth. And we finally get a hint at that terribly oblique and mysterious crime of his back in Chicago! It was a bilocated Lew who'd done whatever-it-was, but it was this Lew who paid the price! He fingers his Browning revolver, tempted... "Whoa there now, Detective Basnight"... But now Lew's turned, his soul has resurfaced. He's beginning to feel again -- "who's to say how far Lew may have taken his contrition at working as long as he had on the wrong side, for the wrong people... in an era where 'detective' was universally understood code for anti-Union thug... somewhere else was the bilocational version of himself, the other, Sherlock Holmes type of sleuth, fighting criminal masterminds hardly distinct from the sorts of tycoons who hired 'detectives' to rat out on union activities."

Everything beginning to fall into place? Three crises of conscience -- four, if you count Yashmeen's -- all trending toward the same malign Plutocratic Presence? Dare we hope?

('Course not! This is Pynchon, not Clifford Odets!)

But that Penance thing, that sure is present, ain't it?

Lew finds Renfrew, thinking to take him by surprise with the accusation that he's not just the same sort of person as Werfner, but exactly the same person. Renfrew's discombobulated, out of sorts. He pulls down a huge map of the Balkans, babbles about Werfner's plans for the Balkans, (Lew imagines a bilocated Lew conducting the exact same interview with Werfner in Göttingen) a frustratingly undefined line of ... something... called das Interdikt.

"It's to do with the Gentleman Bomber," blurts Renfrew. "His immediate detection and apprehension that much more necessary you see." Well, now, here's a job for the right kind of detective! Lew can't get a straight answer from Renfrew about das Interdikt, but maybe the Gentleman B. can be "persuaded" to give up the gen? Lew splits for Fenner's cricket ground, "through the owl-light," to check him out. He's there. But he vanishes.

Lew repairs for a consultation with Dr. Coombs de Bottle to try to get some answers about das Interdikt and its relationship with the Gentleman B. What de Bottle tells him about phosgene anticipates the horror of the impending chemical warfare of World War I.

Then, suddenly, everybody's gone. Chunxton Crescent is a ghost town. The Cohen, Madame Eskimoff, the Two N's -- gone. Off to Buda-Pesth, where (we know) Yashmeen was headed for that Psychical Research Activity. Those Swiss-spa potsage stamps are all over the correspondence. Lew is suddenly without obligation to T.W.I.T.

The shit's about to hit the fan.

"Ite, Missa est."

Discussion

I think there is some validity to the criticism that Pynchon's characters don't have inner lives until it's convenient to Pynchon that they have inner lives. Discuss.

18 Comments:

At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:13:00 AM, Blogger Will Divide said...

Well done, Chum. Ow's the eye?

I think you gloss over Reef's inane encounter with Mouffette, in that she is, so to speak, certainly leading the lunk on. (Where's Pugnax when we need him?). I also think it is pretty damn funny that the first time our writer addresses the Reader directly, is to relate the case of a character getting bit on the dick. One comes away thinking much less of Reef.

(There's a certain Nabokovian tang in the very silly priapic encounter-the Reader is frequently appealed to in Lolita for example-and we'll note that the dog is a papillon, that is, butterfly. Thanks, teach!)

What stood out for me is the rendering of Webb's voice from the grave and the notion that the dead have their own concerns that have very little bearing on the missions we give ourselves in life. Avoid regret, seems to be Webb's overall message back, and love one another.

Fazzoletto is Italian for handkerchief. So Spazzoletta: a spa and a spaz spitting into a hankie.

 
At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 8:01:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fazzoletto is Italian for handkerchief. So Spazzoletta: a spa and a spaz spitting into a hankie.

and "pazzo", IIRC, means "crazy" in Italian. (the only thing i learned from Catch 22)

 
At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 8:22:00 AM, Blogger Ol' Pal D said...

At this point, I succumb(ed) to the usual Pynchon-effect, the very attempt to (at least for little ol' grumpy me) parse what's actually going on (let alone what the author's attempting to get across, if anything at all) is distracting at best... I can't say for certain I buy the whole 'it's just two parallel worlds' line-of-thinking, it's too cheap, like 'it was all a dream' or similar... don't take that wrong, Neddie, your tools bite into the problem much deeper than mine do, so to speak...

It's difficult to post on certain questions without drawing almost-spoilers or smug "you'll need to wait and see" comments, but as someone who hasn't read too much farther ahead, are you thinking the Gentleman Bomber could be a bilocated Keiselghur Kid? And why would that matter? At that, why is it important *anything* in this sprawl really matters? I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I mean really - what *is* the point? At this stage in the work, I wonder if I even *want* to see things neatly tied-up.

At the risk of shattering the illusion of sheer intelligence I've worked so hard to construct, I find the process of reading something that makes only partial sense to be fascinating, like a great long night with great people, little things popping up and sticking in memory, the rest a blur-ality. Possibly naive, or an excuse? Don't think I have much of a choice, either way. Haha!

 
At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 9:50:00 AM, Blogger Neddie said...

Sanatorium Böpfli-Spazzoletta

Th' Pynchon Wiki sez it's an "allusion to the Davos tuberculosis sanatorium of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain," but I see no direct allusion. Consumption was all the rage in Europe at the time, and there's a whacking huge body of literature about it.

However, I saw echoes of "Death in Venice" (ha!) in Kit and Yashmeen's journey south from Göttingen.

I can't say for certain I buy the whole 'it's just two parallel worlds' line-of-thinking, it's too cheap, like 'it was all a dream' or similar

The passage where Kit loses his idealism for Vectors isn't quite just a "two-parallel-worlds" thing. He's realizing that Vectors, which deal with imaginary numbers (my math is pathetic, I'm just interpreting how I read the text), were interfering with his ability to act in the material world -- that his dereliction of his duty vis-a-vis Webb, his disappearance into beautiful imaginary numbers, owed to his acceptance of money from Vibe (measured in the realest numbers of all).

But the explanation offered by Werfner in the next chapter, the "multiple worlds" idea, is a reflection of Kit's dilemma. If there are multiple worlds that are made possible by the decisions we all make daily (this is how I read Werfner's train-station metaphor), the only truly real world is the one we inhabit because of the decisions we've made. The others, the "might-have-beens," (imaginary numbers) are impossible to live in, even if a bilocated version of ourselves does.

I'm groping toward Buddhism, here, and I think Tom is too.

 
At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 9:51:00 AM, Blogger Neddie said...

Oh, and Will: The eye, though still weirdly swollen in the mornings, is much better, thanks.

 
At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 9:56:00 AM, Blogger Neddie said...

If there are multiple worlds that are made possible by the decisions we all make daily (this is how I read Werfner's train-station metaphor), the only truly real world is the one we inhabit because of the decisions we've made. The others, the "might-have-beens," (imaginary numbers) are impossible to live in, even if a bilocated version of ourselves does.

And, goddammit, we must never lose sight of the fact that these people are fictional characters, and all these decisions they have made were actually made for them by an author. That's why that conversation between the Two N's at the theater pricked up my ears: actors playing actors playing real people. Two layers of fictive separation between characters and reality, not one.

 
At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:04:00 AM, Blogger Neddie said...

actors playing actors playing real people.

(Forgive the ongoing lunatic conversation with myself -- the Voices in My Head -- but I'm still grappling with this stuff...)

I don't have my copy of the book handy, but didn't Tom append the adjective "Modern" to this self-referential plot device?

 
At Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:09:00 AM, Blogger Neddie said...

I find the process of reading something that makes only partial sense to be fascinating, like a great long night with great people, little things popping up and sticking in memory, the rest a blur-ality.

I particularly enjoy knowing that this is only my first time though the book, and that a second, third, fourth, etc., reading will unfold more and more of this marvelously baroque ... thing ... that or may not make concrete sense in the end. (The book's or mine.)

 
At Wednesday, June 13, 2007 8:56:00 AM, Blogger Ol' Pal D said...

I particularly enjoy knowing that this is only my first time though the book

I wonder if at least part of this can be attributed to my (and I expect each one of your) interest in one story-thread over another - in my case, the Vibe/Traverse thread, possibly because of it's relatively sharply-drawn lines, has been the most, well, interesting. Adding to that my inability to follow along with (let alone draw conclusions from) a large portion of the math, I notice myself becoming impatient during the long stretches, crossed-up against (on the one hand) the urge to just f'n skip over this shiz and (on the other) the dutiful need to read every word.

Considering the idea of a second and third reading, and so on, in which I'd expect the other plots would stand out in relief, this impatience seems petty and silly. Thanks for the (inadvertent? advertent?) head-slap, Neddie - well-appreciated.

ukvtsabi - the answer one gives, in a good sushi restaurant, to the question "what made you choke like that?"

 
At Wednesday, June 13, 2007 10:38:00 AM, Blogger Civic Center said...

Ol' Pal D writes: "At the risk of shattering the illusion of sheer intelligence I've worked so hard to construct, I find the process of reading something that makes only partial sense to be fascinating, like a great long night with great people, little things popping up and sticking in memory, the rest a blur-ality." Thanks for that, one of my favorites comments among many over the last year, and I'm with you on the illusion of sheer intelligence part too.

I haven't read "The Brothers Karamazov" since I was 16 but the three Traverse brothers seem to be based on that template: Reef/Dmitri the sensualist, Ivan/Frank the strange philosopher, and Kit/Alyosha as the religious mystic thrown violently into the world. And just to stretch the analogy to absurdity, maybe Lark as the stand-in for the illegitimate son and parricide Smerdyakov.

By the way, this isn't the first time Reef has been seen talking to his willie. On page 368:16, in the section where he's just left Stray with baby Jesse and hooked up for the first time with Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin: "Reef had long, desultory conversations with his penis, to the effect that there wasn't much point missing Stray too much right now, was there, as it would only blunt the edge of desire, not only for Ruperta but whoever else, Yup Toy, or whoever, might drift by over the course of their travels." This aspect of Reef vis a vis Kit is also underlined by the fact that everybody, with the exception of Kit, gets laid on the last night at the spa, Reef with a bevy of hot tub beauties and Ruperta with Yashmeen.

One final observation: The first page of this section, 661, has actual dates that let us figure out what year we're in exactly. Has this ever happened before? I don't remember it.

 
At Thursday, June 14, 2007 9:46:00 AM, Blogger Monstro D. Whale said...

From Neddie:

"He's realizing that Vectors, which deal with imaginary numbers (my math is pathetic, I'm just interpreting how I read the text), were interfering with his ability to act in the material world -- that his dereliction of his duty vis-a-vis Webb, his disappearance into beautiful imaginary numbers, owed to his acceptance of money from Vibe (measured in the realest numbers of all)."


A vector is just an ammount (known as a scaler) followed by a trajectory. In other words, fifteen pounds is a scaler, fifteen pounds going northwest is a vector. The problems in math that Kit is working out are when you do the math to determine the trajectory and you get an imaginary number. What does it mean to have an imaginary trajectory?

The solution that these mathameticians posit is that the trajectory is only imaginary in three dimensional space. Viewed from even dimensions (because i squared is equal to -1, and i cubed is -i). So, as the dimensions move higher through cycles the trajectory changes from i to -1 to -i to 1, or from real to imaginary and back (i^1, i^2, i^3, i^4, respectavely).

What the hell does that mean, well in math, it means that real forces can move in imaginary directions. It also means that real and imaginary are dependent on what dimension you're judging them from (like the speed of light, they are relative).

I think Pynchon's using this as a metaphor for a number of things. First, the cross over between fiction, real, realistic fiction, total fantasy, unbelievable reality, etc.. It's impssible to say that the Chums are fantasy, and that the Traverses are just fictional because along comes a Tetzel worm or multiple Jack the Rippers or people who can reincarnate without dying.

But the real metaphor, I think is the way that we, as people, can be so many people, not in a totally fictional transmogrified way, but in role assumption and abandonment. The anarchist becomes the plute becomes the terrorist becomes the shadow government becomes the aggressor becomes the lover becomes the chump becomes the guy trying to get oral sex from a dog (man that was funny). Are you talking to a ghost, or are you talking to a guy, or are you talking to a guy whose talking to a ghost whose talking to a ghost (whose talking to a rocket if it's GR).

 
At Thursday, June 14, 2007 3:12:00 PM, Blogger Monstro D. Whale said...

Oh, and Neddie, yes, Modern.

But then, Pynchon's in this game too: ATD is, among other things, a fiction about what it is to be a fiction, and just how real fictions are...or maybe it's how fictional real things are. Either way I guess

 
At Thursday, June 14, 2007 5:00:00 PM, Blogger Will Divide said...

Thx, M. for a very elegant explanation of the thematic math.

Ned, I would say that Pynchon's characters do have inner lives (which here tend to be stretched against the action, or acted out fantastically.) What they have only fitfully, when needed, are emotional ones. While not exactly affectless, the characters' emotional crises tend to glide under the narrated surface of the tale, often heard, rarely seen.

Another Vector, ja?

 
At Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:40:00 PM, Blogger Monstro D. Whale said...

One last thing on the whole i thing. I'm going to get this wrong, but that's okay...think of this as right in spirit.

When i is involved in a calculation it rotates the axis (like icelandic spar or explosions that send people into another dimension, or various cards of the upper arcana that infer two people). So that a number with an i involved is actually located opposite its non-imaginary equivalent on the axis.

George Gamow explains this in layman's terms in a page and a half in the book "One, Two, Three, Infinity" which I recommend highly to the math and science illiterate, but I loaned my copy out so I don't have it.

 
At Sunday, June 17, 2007 5:13:00 PM, Blogger Monstro D. Whale said...

Does Lew cross over to another dimension at the end of this section? Is that why everyone disapears?

 
At Sunday, June 17, 2007 6:07:00 PM, Blogger Neddie said...

Will: You're right, as usual. "Inner" lives, "emotional" lives -- your word is better.

Monstro: Thanks very much for that amazing lucid explanation of Vectors. That cleared a whole lot of questions for me.

My son approached me for help with his science homework a few weeks ago. In that section of the curriculum, they were talking about scalars and vectors, and it never occurred to me that that concept of a Vector and Kit's obsession were in fact exactly the same idea.

 
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