The Light Over the Ranges, Chapter Nine: The Chums of Chance and the Ontological Uncertainty!

For the record, I've been able to put up an entry a day because I started writing these well in advance. That won't continue forever; I'm reading the book steadily, but I'm not bolting it down, and at a certain point it'll be at least a few days between entries. Considering that you the reader don't exist, I'm sure you'll be able to adapt.

For the last chapter of the first part of the novel, we rejoin our ol' Chums, although we might be inclined to wonder whether these are the same Chums we know and love.

You know, if you go look at the blog entries I wrote about this book when I was first reading it, they're pretty embarrassing to me now: very short, and often little or no effort at commentary or analysis. Just straight summary. Now, I realize that there's a lot I'm leaving out of these here entries right now--each chapter would probably merit a substantial essay--but hey, at least I'm making an effort. And one advantage of that is that if I see something weird and mysterious, I have to at least think about it; I can't just skim past it. Well, I could. Who would know? But I don't want to. So things strike me that didn't before.

For instance: the beginning of this chapter. The Chums are over the Indian Ocean, but it's a very mysterious Indian Ocean. The idea is that there are SO many of these tiny islets, and at first they all got names, but then, at a certain point, people stopped naming them, and "one by one [they] vanished from the nautical charts, and one day from the lighted world as well, to join the invisible" (108). However, somehow, there are still people in the area. Who? Hard to say, except that they have armament available only to the European powers" (ibid), suggesting, perhaps, some relation to the "Great Game," which played a major role in previous Pynchon novels and will again here. But for now, and possibly for always, "their presence in these waters . . . was a mystery dark as the storm-lit seascape" (ibid). Whatever it is, it's enigmatic and memorable in a way that might make you think of Murakami (though obviously Pynchon is a much greater writer).

This is just a few pages, a short passage, but before we move on, I want to note that, in investigating this, Chick visits "a seaman's tavern down by the docks, one of those low haunts he had a sure instinct for finding wherever in the world the boys happened to be" (ibid). See? I told you he was the cool Chum. But you might ask: how is it okay for a Chum to be hanging around in dive bars at all? Surely this violates their rules and regulations in some wise.

Well, maybe you don't ask that; you probably understand perfectly well how mutable they are. But here, it's fast reaching crisis proportions. They're hanging around the Indian Ocean "to observe what would happen at the point on the Earth antipodal to Colorado Springs, during Dr. Tesla's experiments there" (109)--connecting this to the novel's "real" world--but that isn't really the important thing. They're having an argument over the ship's new figurehead, and here we see signs of disharmony in the ranks. Darby's voice has changed--you wouldn't have thought that would be allowed to happen--and he's talking about violent anarchism:

I say let's set off our barrage tonight in honor of the Haymarket bomb, bless it, a turning point in American history, and the only way working people will ever get a fair shake under that miserable economic system--through the wonders of chemistry! (111)

Meanwhile, Miles is behaving increasingly erratically, having these seeming out-of-body experiences, but even he is not as apolitical as he once may have been. "Explosions without an objective, he declares, "is politics in its purest form." (ibid) Lindsay is, predictably, pushing back against this, positing of fireworks displays (it's July fourth, remember) that "fireworks are the patriotic symbols of noteworthy episodes of military explosions in our nation's history, deemed necessary to maintain the integrity of the American homeland against threats presented from all sides by a benightedly hostile world" (ibid). That's all very well, and no doubt represents the unarticulated status quo from before the Chums were thinking about these things, but that's the thing: now they're thinking about them.

They seemingly resolve all their problems, and are unsure what had come over them: "after a while the boys would come to think of the episode as others might remember a time of illness, or youthful folly" (112). Everybody wants thinks to go "back" to normal, whatever that means. Make America great, again. But that is a foolish and impossible goal, and we get this ominous bit of foreshadowing:

Was it any wonder that when the opportunity did arise, as it would shortly, the boys would grasp unreflectively as a chance to transcend the "secular," even at the cost of betraying their organization, their country, even humankind itself? (113)

OMG. Though if I'm correctly identifying the episode to which this alludes, that seems a little overdramatic.

We get our first mention of Iceland spar, which is the title of the second part of the book. This is a mineral that--this is a real thing--has the property of bifurcating rays of light, which is obviously an extremely potent metaphor in this narrative, so much so that you wonder: did Pynchon plan this narrative, then learn about Iceland spar and just couldn't believe his luck? Or did he plan the entire novel around Iceland spar?

Be that as it may, the Chums are supposed to go to the North Pole to stop an arctic expedition. But they're a long way away; how to do that? Well--in one of the most flamboyant flights of fancy in the book--they get their quick by going underground, through the Hollow Earth that certain people believed in, though not so much by 1900, I don't think. While there, they encounter some of the inhabitants, including "a horde of hostile gnomes. If you want to know more about what happens, you can read all about it in The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth, which Pynchon refers to as "my harmless little intraterrestrial scherzo" (117). You might think that by this point, we'd be so far away from Boys' Adventure world that these intrusive authorial interjections would be gone. But nope!  Also, I want to read that book.  I'm not one hundred percent sure what to make of all this, beyond following the sort of general theme of old and new worldview clashing and mingling in interesting ways--but this is the end of the first part. Forward to Iceland Spar!