The Light Over the Ranges, Chapter Five: Long Bas Night of the Soul!

We start out with a little Chums of Chance ontology, as the narration informs us that the Fair is good for them, as it "possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency." All of this gets very tangled and complicated when you think about their relationship to the world: are they outside of it? Kind of, but they're also now working with an anti-anarchist group, but now we're told that they're operating in an at least partially fictitious milieu, so to some extent this may be just the way the world works, but...to quote Cathy: ACK! Also, when asked whether or not they're "storybook characters," Randolph answers: "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly, although the longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction." I mean, okay, I get the point--real people who nonetheless are mainly known in a fictionalized way--but I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of the book just spelling it out like that. Seems clumsy. Yes! I'm going to criticize the book when I feel it is warranted! Which hopefully won't be too often. But there you go.

Anyway, for the first time, the Chums don't actually play a big role in the chapter: this is mainly about the detective they're going to be working with, Lew Basnight.

Now, Basnight's name: you can spend all day theorizing about names in Pynchon, and while this can sometimes lead to interesting insights, but a lot of the time it's like numerology, I feel: you can get any meaning and its opposite. You can find all kinds of ideas on the Against the Day wiki, and to show how nonsensical this can get, I want to point this out:

<i>Very possibly, Pynchon is having some fun here, working a whole sexual angle, naming his character after the phrase "BAS night," meaning a boys' night out, "BAS" being an acronym for "Bitches Ain't Shit" from the "song" by Dr. Dre (featuring Snoop Dogg, Dat Nigga Daz, Kurupt, Jewel).</i>

To which I can only say: what the hell are you babbling about? First of all, as far as I can determine, "BAS night" isn't actually a phrase. A google search turns up nothing; it doesn't even have an entry on urban dictionary. I doubt anyone is basing names on private phrases from your creepy fucking friend group. Secondly, you think Pynchon would have snuck misogynistic coding into the character's name...why, exactly? This is the problem: he's so wide-ranging and polysemic that people think they can shoehorn whatever nonsense they want into him.

Anyway, I don't think this is actually it, but if I were theorizing, I'd suggest that you could just stick a 'k' in there and then his name would be a bilingual "low knight:" a fallen figure in search of enlightenment, which certainly jives with his character here. Lew isn't--or at least doesn't think of himself as--political. He "wasn't even sure what Anarchists were, exactly." No, he has his own problems, the main one being "a sin he was supposed once to have committed," for which "he was denounced in the local newspapers" (37). It's hard to figure out what to make of this, exactly, apart from putting it in with the way many or most of the characters in the novel are stuck in a hard-to-fathom world, looking for some kind of transcendence. Lew's wife, who leaves him, is name "Troth," which seems kind of on-the-nose.

Lew wanders around Chicago, and anyone wanting to analyze the novel in terms of architecture would definitely have a field day; that thing is rather outside my area of expertise (if indeed I could be said to have such a thing), however. He becomes involved with a group of mystics of some sort (of course, later he becomes involved with another hermetic society, the TWIT; he seems to be on an extended quest for enlightenment). This part, again, is tricky to parse, but he stays in this "Esthonia Hotel," where "penitents" apparently often go (39). Even if the mechanism is a bit obscure, however, he does seem to achieve some kind of enlightenment: "he had learned to step to the side of the day" (44), a suggestive phrase if ever there were one, given, like, the book's title and all. I think it would be overly literal to think of this as him phasing to different dimensions, but as we'll see later in the book, there is an element of multiple worlds, so who knows?

Anyway, in the course of this, he becomes involved with Nate Privett from the detective agency, who is looking to surveil "the labor unions, or as we liked to call them, anarchistic scum" (43). But I really do have to call out one part, which is meant to demonstrate how observant Lew is:

"That box on the bottom shelf--how many colorado-claros left in it? Without looking, I mean."

"Seventeen," said Lew without any hesitation the man could detect.

"You know not everybody can do that."

"What?"

"Notice things. What was that just went by the window?"

"Shiny black little trap, three springs, brass fittings, bay gelding about four years old, portly gent in a slouch hat and a yellow duster, why?" (42)

COME ON, man. That's just hacky writing, and given how beautifully most of the book is written, it really stands out. Even if Lew noticed all this stuff, he would not respond like that. This is how "geniuses" are written in bad TV shows.

Um, yes. Sorry for ending this one on a negative note. I'll try to do better next time.