Iceland Spar, Chapter Three: I Am the Way into the Doleful City!

This is extremely interesting for sure. I was wrong about this being about the Chums; they're only featured briefly at the very beginning. Mainly, it's about the city in which this damage was wrought, which I know I called Washington DC, but I think at this point it's more of a meta-city than anything else (I was amused by city officials being referred to as "Tammanoid creatures" (130); it took me a minute to realize this was a reference to the Tammany Hall political machine).

So but the thing is, there's definitely more than initially meets the eye about this situation. You think, okay, the Arctic expedition brought back this...thing, and now it's fucking shit up. And this is true to an extent. It's explained that the scientists "believe[d] it was a meteorite they were bringing back . . . but who could have foreseen that the far-fallen object would prove to harbor not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well and a plan for carrying it out?" (149). Who indeed? They explain that "the Eskimo believe that every object in their surroundings has a its invisible ruler--in general not friendly--an enforcer of ancient, indeed pre-human, laws, and thus a power that must be induced not to harm men, through various forms of bribery," and that "it was not so much the visible object we sought and wished to deliver to the Museum as its invisible ruling component" (150-151). Trying to much around with these intangible forces rarely has a good result, as any number of motion pictures have taught us. And indeed, the creatures sets a lot of stuff on fire, "the Mayor and most of the City Council [were] among the incendiary Figure's first victims" (150).

And yet, the thing you note here is that this situation seems to be ongoing, and there's a peculiar lack of urgency to the response. Things are happening, but...in moderation: "military leaves canceled, opera performances cut in half--arias, even famous ones, omitted altogether--to allow for early audience dismissal" (152). Not the famous arias too!  You'll pull "La donna è mobile" from my cold dead hands! But this seems to be a very...low-intensity war, and you realize that there's definitely a metaphorical aspect to all this destruction: the city is being destroyed by a monster, but at the same time, it's being destroyed by...the day? Capitalism? The upshot is,

The city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence--not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be--its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. (153)

I don't know about you, but to me that seems a pretty darned good summation of our current situation, in the US. This was obviously written well before President T**** became a thing (and really, in your heart of hearts, can you believe that it actually is a thing? That this isn't all some sort of cosmic joke?), but we're obviously wounded, and equally obviously incapable of coming to terms with who's responsible or what it means, so...

I suppose I shouldn't just leave that chapter title hanging, so let it be noted that that comes from Dante, or some English translation thereof, and is the inscription on an arch at "some transition point into the forbidden realm" (154).

The last page of the chapter is focused on Hunter Penhallow (who had come back with the Arctic explorers, you'll remember), who is wandering around in the city, which is proving itself increasingly mutable:

The grid of numbered streets Hunter thought he'd understood made no sense anymore. The grid in fact had been distorted into an expression of some other history of civic need, streets no longer sequentially numbered, intersecting now at unexpected angles, narrowing into long, featureless alleyways to nowhere, running steeply up and down hills which had not been noticed before. (154)

You can compare this to SO MANY things: Borges, Calvino, hell, even contemporary stuff that Pynchon definitely wasn't thinking about, like China Mieville or Planescape: Torment. But perhaps more relevantly, it definitely seems to be a metaphor about modernity and its disorienting effects. You think you know where you are, and then...you don't. In Hunter's case, another comparison might be--of all things--Where the Wild Things Are, as he's wandering through the city, only "the streets had by now grown intimate, more like corridors. Without intending to, he was soon walking through inhabited rooms" (155). Inside and outside are all mixed up. The chapter ends with Hunter meeting some mysterious people who are leaving the city, by means of some kind of futuristic train, who invite him to go with them: "The longer they traveled, the more 'futuristic' would the scenery grow" (ibid). Clearly, he's traveling outside or at an angle to the current world and time--although he does appear again later in the novel in Europe, so this isn't the end. It'll be interesting to look back when he does reappear and see if we can glean more information about what the heck it all means.