Iceland Spar, Chapter Eight: Reef Traverse in the City of the Dead!

This Jeshimon setting is surreal and hard to make out. I mean that in a good way, but it's just so striking and weird then it's over. I suppose you could equate it with the journey to the Underworld in a classical epic, but I dunno. Seems too early in the book for that. Still, whatever it is, it's very atmospheric.

What can I say? It's a death-themed town, which is telegraphed by the fact that "for miles along the trail, coming and going, every telegraph pole had a corpse hanging from it" (209). There are towers on which corpses are laid for the vultures, which is where Reef will eventually find Webb. First, he meets the Reverend Lube Carnal (there's a name), who cheerfully tells him that "we attract evildoers from hundreds of miles around--not to mention clergy too, o' course, like you woulnd't believe" (210). Point made!

But it's not just about murder; it's about all kinds of sin and crime, in a cartoonish way:

In town an ambience of limitless iniquity reigned, a stifling warmth day and night, not an hour passing without someone discharging a firearm at someone else, or a public sexual act, often in a horse-trough among more than two parties, along with random horsewhippings, buffaloings, robberies at gunpoint, poker pots raked in without the hand being shown, pissing not only against walls but also upon passersby, sand in the sugar bowls, turpentine and sulphuric acid in the whiskey, brothels dedicated to a wide range of preferences . . . (211)

This mixture of serious and goofy crimes-for-crimes'-sake is bizarrely hilarious, and don't even get Pynchon started on sheep brothels, 'cause he won't stop, "some of the ovine nymphs in these establishments being quite appealing indeed, even to folks who might not wholeheartedly share the taste" (211). "Ovine nymphs" cracks me up.

Reef has to use grappling hooks to reach the just-dead Webb, Deuce and Sloat just escaping, gallop[ing] away giggling, as if this had been some high-spirited prank and Reef its grumpy old target" (213). Anyway, he makes it out of the city with the body, thinking about his future: "If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn't somebody ought to carry on the family business--you might say, become the Kid?" (214). That's a big "if," of course. On the way back, he kills time at night with a Chums of Chance book, the one about them fighting gnomes in a hollow Earth. "The cover showed an athletic young man (it seemed to be the fearless Lindsay Noseworth) hanging off a ballast line of an ascending airship of futuristic design, trading shots with a bestially rendered gang of Eskimos below" (215). Easy to picture that as the cover of a pulp novel, though even here you can see how the Chums are mutable: from the scenes we've seen so far, it's very difficult to imagine Lindsay (or any of them, really) as an action hero. He imagines the Chums "as if those boys might be agents of a kind of extrahuman justice, which--maybe!

Webb's funeral ends the chapter, with the various Traverses preparing to do what they feel they have to, Reef and Frank wanting to deal with the "revenge" portion of the program, "idea is to keep [Lake] and Kit clear of it" (216). Lake denounces the idea of this revenge cycle, and the toll it takes specifically on Mayva. "Might as well be dead already, the both of you. Damn fools" (217). I very much do not have a clear idea on Lake's role in the novel, and I'm not sure how much of that is Pynchon's fault and how much mine. I'm going to keep a close watch on her, regardless.