The Light Over the Ranges, Chapter Two: Terror in the Skies! Ominous Voices!

This section is divided into two parts, and there's a lot to say about them, so I'm going to divide it into two blog entries...or that's what I was going to say, but then I decided to just do the whole thing at once. This has more or less the same tone as the first chapter, yet also rather striking differences. It opens:

As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality--likes the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared increasingly likely, to help promote. (10)

I rather fancy you wouldn't see this in a boys' adventure novel. Beautifully written, though. Note the duality again: "the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction." And that they're here "to help promote" this "daylit fiction:" that they're here, in their capacity as these squeaky-clean boy adventurers, to push back against the world's dark realities...it's intriguing (and obviously, this will be considerably complicated later on). Another suggestive passage:

From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor. (ibid)

Chilling, and easily readable as a critique of America itself: from all this freedom, all this potential for greatness or beauty, everything gradually becomes more and more limited by the ruthless logic of capitalism until it's nothing but timeless, mechanized killing. Yow.

Anyway, this first part of the chapter basically concerns the Chums'--and Miles' in particular--blundering and nearly causing a crash. But then they don't. Obviously. And that's about that. We do start to see here--and more so in the second part of the chapter--intimations of growing sexual awareness amongst the Chums: here, over the rail of the ship, they see a man (who later turns out to be Merle Rideout, a significant character) and a nekkid lady, which precipitates "an 'eager stampede' to the rail" to get a look. Re that quote, incidentally, I do enjoy the way Pynchon sticks any phrase that seems suspiciously colloquial in "quotes" here, an authentic period detail. You see that a lot in Upton Sinclair's novels.

Anybody reading the second part of the chapter will definitely get caught up in the lines--the Chums are singing as song--that go "the Chum of Chance is a pluc-ky soul/Who shall neither whine nor ejac-u-late" (15). Obviously, we love to snicker at those old-timey people using "ejaculate" in this way, but here it's obviously a punning double-meaning referring to the Chums' putative non-sexual nature. Note also that Miles is playing a ukulele, a seemingly random detail that, much later in the book, will return and take on new significance. I can say that because I read and reread the Chums' narrative very closely back in the day for my dissertation; when we get to parts I'm less familiar with, I won't be able to recognize as much of this foreshadowing as I am here.

Anyway, Darby and Chick are keeping watch while Lindsay and Miles are on leave and Randolph is off doing...something. They bond a little bit. Chick has a father, Dick--who, again, we'll meet in a long time--whom he misses. They meet some aeronauts from a different organization, Bindlestiffs of the Blue AC, one of whom, Penny, is a girl! Gasp! This organization is more egalitarian than the Chums, it seems. Darby has a crush on Penny--again, the nascent sexuality--and the two groups have a little chat, about ominous lights and voices that they've heard in the sky. This relates, I think, to the passage in the first chapter about "up" and "north." We will learn more later. There's also an <i>extremely</i> relevant passage that really lays out Pynchon's attitudes to states as we conceive of them, and also prefigures the Chums' trajectory. It's long but worth quoting:

As the ordeal [the 1871 Siege of Paris] went on, it became clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege--through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities like the infamous pétroleurs of Paris. When the Sieges ended, these balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground, pledged solemnly to one another, proceeding as if under a world-wide, never-ending state of siege. (19)

Society, as conceived here, only exists to enslave people, and constrain them. You may recall the quote from the first part of the chapter about freedom dissolving into mechanized death. You can't rely on the government, so you have to rely on your fellows. This is a huge theme of the novel, and I look forward to exploring it further.