The Light Over the Ranges, Chapter Three: Doings in Chicago!

This is a short chapter. It starts with Miles and Lindsay wandering through the exposition, with its riot of color and detail. You can extract all kinds of meaning from this, no doubt: the novel notes the invisible barrier separating "white" exhibits from ones that show "the signs of cultural darkness and savagery" (22). Clearly, this kind of thinking is emblematic of the American disease, but there's still, at least potentially, something positive about all this heterogeneity--in spite of the fact that, inevitably, exhibitors from far-off countries are playing up Orientalist tropes to appeal to the dumb Americans, like the Tungus people who are employing to scantily-clad women "who, being blonde and so forth, did not, actually, appear to share with the Tungus many racial characteristics" (23) (let's note in passing that the Tunguska Incident plays a role later in the book, though it's not clear how related to that this is). "This doesn't seem," Lindsay notes, "quite...authentic, somehow."

They meet a card sharp who tries to pull a three-card monte scam on them, which Miles detects thanks to his occasional mystical sight, which is here introduced. The card sharp is black, which probably provides us an opportunity to acknowledge the somewhat uncomfortable fact that there are very few black people in Pynchon. I could be wrong, but I would not be prepared to swear that there's a single named black character in the whole of Against the Day. There are a few in his other novels, but I think the only really significant one is Enzian in Gravity's Rainbow. I'm not accusing Pynchon of anything nefarious, but it's definitely an odd blind spot, especially in a book like this that spans so much of the world.

(Confession time: he's habitually referred to as "Oberst Enzian," and for an embarrassingly long time I thought "Oberst" was his given name, when in fact it just means "colonel" in German. It's his RANK, dammit!)

So that's the first half of the chapter. I found the second half actually kind of shocking, and I'm embarrassed that I hadn't seen this before, but: Randolph goes to a detective agency called White City Investigations to meet the boss, Nate Privett. The Chums are meant to be employed as the World's Fair as "antiterrorist security." He specifically compares his agency to the Pinkertons. The HELL, Chums? Now you're narcs, are you? Screw that! The Pinkertons would definitely be seen by Pynchon as villains, as they are by me; totally opposed to his liberatory, so this isn't like an accident or anything. It does emphasize the contradictory nature of the Chums' existence, however: on the one hand, they serenely fly above the land-dwellers, free of their conflicts and their oppressions. On the other hand, they're explicitly drawn, at least at first, as representative of something like the "American Way," which obviously is extremely not apolitical and which can't help drawing them into a kind of politics they generally want to avoid. So, we'll see how they navigate all this stuff; now I'm curious.

Just one other thing: I was reading a bit about the history of anarchism in the United States, and I learned that there was an early anarchist journal--active at the time of the novel--called Lucifer the Lightbearer. I never thought of it this way, but Against the Day is very preoccupied with light; it's a metaphor that I haven't one hundred percent wrapped my head around. I never thought to associate it with anarchism, but that may be a fruitful way to think about a lot of what's to come in the novel.