Iceland Spar, Chapter Four: Kit Among the Vibes!

This chapter brings us back somewhat closer to what we might laughingly call "reality." Most of it's about Kit Traverse at Yale. Is Kit short for Christopher? As far as I can recall, he's never referred to by anything other than plain ol' "Kit."

We are here introduced to a fair few Vibes, including Scarsdale's son Colfax, Kit's roommate. He has one other previously-unmentioned son, Cragmont (who I don't think ever actually appears in the book; he's merely mentioned here), who married a trapeze artist at the age of thirteen. You can do that? There's a strong temptation to want to see the three Vibe sons as doubles of the three Traverses: Cragmont, Colfax, and Fleetwood, their patrician names contrasting with the blunt, working-class Reef, Frank, and Kit. And yet, I'm not sure there's a lot we can do with that: Fleetwood is the only one who gets any degree of page-time, and even that's really not much. Besides, there's no Vibe daughter to contrast with Lake.

Vibe has an inordinate level of interest in Kit; he even suggests that he wants to make him his heir. I know it may be pointless to argue that things in this book are or aren't plausible, but that seems excessive to me. But that may be the point; it feels thus to Kit, too: "And there was something . . . the man had been looking at him strangely. Not a fatherly or even foster-fatherly expression. No, it was--Kit almost blushed at the thought--it was desire. He was desired" (158). This isn't, like, a sexual thing, or at least not straightforwardly so. But we'll definitely have to keep all this stuff about desire and eros in mind moving forward; it's an important component of the novel's utopian vision.

Scarsdale's actual sons are disappointing him; not looking like heir material: Cragmont--I guess--for having run off to join the circus, Fleetwood for always being out doing weird colonialist "explorer" things that he doesn't really understand, and Colfax for being too square and scrupulous: he explains how, as part of his summer job, he would give him packages to take as bribes to various politicians, telling him not to look inside, and the kid always obeyed him, never skimming off any money nor nuthin'. What fun is that?

We also meet other Vibes, including Scarsdale's wife, Edwarda (née Beef); his brother, R. Wiltshire; and a cousin, Dittany. Edwarda is a mezzo-soprano! I'm making sure to note all the opera references in the book. She leads a sort of separate life from her husband: "Edwarda and Scarsdale found themselves together every day and yet leading almost entirely unsynchronized lives" (162). Toss another one on the "mutliple layers of reality" pile.

R. Wilshire is kind of like those apolitical Koch brothers, super-rich but not particularly interested in politics. He also fancies himself a composer, writing "horrible 'musical dramas . . . fake, or as he preferred, faux, European operettas on American subjects--Roscoe Conkling, Princess of the Badlands, Mischief in Mexico, and so many others" (161). That mingling of European and American culture is interesting, though of course, there are already plenty of actual European operas trying, with a lesser or greater degree of success, to tackled American themes.

Dittany...well, she has a thing with Kit for a while, although as I recall, she doesn't reappear after this section. She likes to be spanked, which...I mean, you can try to work out how that connects to the rest of the novel thematically, but frankly, I have the feeling it's just Pynchon being pervy, as he's known to be on occasion. There is one bit I'd like to call your attention to, which you absolutely one hundred percent would never notice on your first reading: "He was presently joined by Dittany Vibe, her eyes sparkling from beneath the brim of an all-but-irresistible hat" (162). And we will find out, much later, that Kit has a hat fetish. Again, I'm not sure if this is particularly thematically relevant, but it's interesting to see this fact prefigured like that.

Probably, actually, the meatiest part of this chapter is the stuff with Fleetwood, a complicated and ambiguous colonialist who feels alienated in the company of his family. He talks a lot about the invisible and paths to a hidden city, big themes of the novel. He gives Kit an account (or maybe this is just in his head) of being somewhere in east Africa with "Yitzhak Zilberfeld, a Zionist agent, out traveling the world scouting possibilities for a Jewish homeland" (165). I know a lot of Jewish people were searching for such a thing in what might seem like unlikely places, so this basically checks out. It's natural that Fleetwood would identify with this Jewish sense of dislocation; of search for an invisible place that to call home.

Anyway, Fleetwood saves Yitzhak from an elephant attack and earns his gratitude. He gives him "investment tips, plus the names of useful banking contacts all over Europe," and it's hard not to think, huh. Is this anti-Semitic? I mean, I don't think intentionally so, but it looks...well, it certainly plays into stereotypes, is all.

But regardless, Fleetwood isn't really interested in gold rushes and things like that, and they make Scarsdale apoplectic: this is "exactly the sort of 'unfairly earned' revenue which sent the Vibe patriarch into mouth-foaming episodes of unseemly behavior" (167). It seems rich for a capitalist to be bitching about money being unfairly earned, but who can fathom the mindset? His problem seems to be that money is appearing seemingly out of nowhere...but, I mean, can someone investing in stocks really complain about that? I'm having a little trouble sorting this stuff out.

We end the chapter with another Fleetwood anecdote: he's in Africa, and there are all these people there who are just seemingly hypnotized by it, who are just determined to go back into the jungle even after almost dying. Fleetwood "wanted to be like them...he prayed to become one of them. He went out into country even the local European insane knew was too dangerous, hoping to be invaded by whatever it had to be...nothing 'took.'" (168) Pynchon suggests that this may be because Fleetwood already comes from money, and possible even the spirits "somehow knew better than to get close to un-regulated funds whose source lay in criminal acts, however fancifully defined" (ibid). I don't know about this: either I'm misunderstanding something here (always a real possibility), or I just flat-out don't agree with Pynchon. Because come on, what is colonial exploitation but a search for "unregulated funds whose source lay in criminal acts?" This is a dichotomy that I'm not grocking.

Anyway, Fleetwood captures a native who's stolen a diamond and forces him to step down a mine shaft. Pynchon notes the uselessness and arbitrariness of this: "it scarcely mattered whether or not the Kaffir had stolen the stone, and perhaps had only been waiting for the right moment to take it out of the compound, where chances were good that within minutes someone would have stolen it from him" (169). And yet, there's this weird, symbiotic relationship between exploited and exploiters that strongly reminds me of the section in V. about the Herero genocide (and the fact that you probably haven't heard of that event if you're unfamiliar with V., boy. Just goes to show how nightmarish people are).

I don't know if Fleetwood is supposed to be a redeemable person or not, but he does experience moments of understanding, that "sooner or later [wealth] depended on some act of murder" (170). But regardless, everyone at the Explorers' Club seems to hate him now (shades of Lew Basnight being hated for reasons he can't understand?), so he decides to go north, as described in previous chapters, where he won't have to deal with these questions, only "the purity, the geometry, the cold." Though as Kit is going to discover, you can't escape politics by escaping into mathematics like that.