Iceland Spar, Chapter Two: The Narrative of Fleetwood Vibe!

I wanted to make that title a play on "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," but Fleetwood Vibe has no middle name that we know, making it fall flat. Oh well. Anyway, the point is, there are obvious Poe and Lovecraft vibes here.

I wanted to call it that because this takes the form of excerpts from his journal. The Étienne is accosted by the Chums, only now they're big bearded men: "'You are in mortal danger,' declared their Scientific Officer, Dr. Counterfly, a scholarly sort, bearded and bundled like the rest of them" (139). This is clearly related to the idea of reality splitting off in multiple directions; the fact that we're in the land of Iceland spar only accentuates that. Don't worry; they'll go back to being kids soon enough.

Fleetwood and Company come aboard the Inconvenience, which is very steampunky at the current time. The Chums warn them in very strong terms about the dangers of going after this...thing beneath the snow and ice. It appears that they've forgotten about Iceland spar for the time being, though it's safe to say that Iceland spar has not forgotten about them. We get an ominous description:

Though details were difficult to make out, the Figure appeared to recline on its side, an odalisque of the snows--though to what pleasures given posed a question far too dangerous--with as little agreement among us as to its "facial" features, some describing them as "Mongoloid," others as "serpent-like." Its eyes, for the most part, if eyes be what they were, remained open, its gaze as yet undirected--though we were bound in a common terror of that moment at which it might become aware of our interest and smoothly pivot its awful head to stare us full in the face."

This section may be the most enigmatic in the book. Obviously its related to the ideas of multiple realities and bilocation, and is probably also prefiguring the Trespassers ("they have no more choice than your own sled dogs, in the terrible, to them empty, land upon which they have chosen to trespass, where humans are the only source of food" (143). Still...it escapes, somehow, apparently, it's kind of impressionistic, and is causing terror in Washington DC. We'll see this in more detail in the next chapter. And yet, as far as I can remember, after that there's no further explicit mention of these incidents, which make you think...what? It's just the way Pynchon operates a lot of the time, but...well, I'll see if I can't connect this to later events in the novel better than I have in the past.

The last part of the chapter takes place in an Explorers' Club--those hotbeds of nineteenth-century colonialism. We get a preview of Fleetwood in Africa, of which, as I recall, we'll get more details later. Colonialism is colonialism, whether in the south or the north, as much as a lot of people deny it can be the latter because, you know, white people. I just want to highlight the following, which is a very explicit invocation of the Trespassers--in case you weren't sure about previous references:

If "another form of life" decided to use humans for similar purposes [as sled dogs], and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh. (147)

But now, we shall leave Fleetwood to "the bad dream I still try to wake from, the great city brought to sorrow and ruin" (148), and rejoin the Chums.