Iceland Spar, Chapter Nine: Enter the T.W.I.T.!

For the record, my actual reading is considerably ahead of this.  I'm not updating this as I read, though I do write a blog entry after each chapter.

Now we're back with Lew, who, with Nigel and Neville, has reached England. He is introduced in short order to the group that the two of them work for, True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. and--apparently on the principle of "go with the flow"--starts doing the same; as Pynchon notes, there were quite a lot of spiritualist groups like this at the time, "as the century had rushed to its end and through some unthinkable zero and on out the other side." You don't have to be a super-huge Pynchon professional (Pynchon Professional--that'll be my new job title) to know that "Beyond the Zero" is the title of the first part of Gravity's Rainbow. It refers, supposedly, to the point at which a conditioned stimulus is totally inoperative. Does that apply here? Well, it's all very allusive, but not...super-much? I would say? It seems more to refer to this novel's own themes: the onrush of the twentieth century, specifically.

But what IS the T.W.I.T., exactly? Well, a tetractys is a triangular structure consisting of ten points: four at the base, three above that, then two, then one. The idea here seems to be seeing these points as part of a more-than-three-dimensional structure "until you found yourself getting strange, which was taken to be a sign of impending enlightenment" (220). Think of the whole idea of moving ninety degrees and hitting different realities.

The current leader of this group--the "Grand Cohen"--is named Nicholas Nookshaft, whose highly suggestive name always makes me giggle. "Cohen" is a word for a leader of a Jewish religious group, but we may also think of Genghis Cohen from The Crying of Lot 49. There was that incident where another writer accused him of stealing that name, to which Pynchon in turn wrote a snide letter-to-the-editor. Which is fair enough, but Romain Gary is not some no-name, insignificant author: he's the only person to ever win the Prix Goncourt twice, once under his real name and once a pseudonym. I've only read La vie devant soi, (in French!), but it's very good. Now I'm just rambling.

ANYWAY, ol' Nookshaft suggests that the explosion that Lew was caught in could have sent him...somewhere else. "An unscheduled explosion, introduced into the accustomed flow of the day, may easily open, now and then, passages to elsewhere" (221). A lot of mutability in the novel, most obviously with the Chums, but why not elsewhere too? Also, per Nookshaft, anarchist setting off explosives are "shamans," which certainly accords with the reality of the book.

Next, the novel introduces one Yashmeen Halfcourt, who will become a very important character. Her father, Auberon, is a Lieutenant-Colonel somewhere in Inner Asia, and Yashmeen (who seems to be college-age at this point) is under the T.W.I.T.'s protection. At this early stage, there's not that much to say about her: she's incredibly beautiful. That seems to be her main trait at this point, which I know sounds sexist, but she will grow substantially later on.

Right, so what, specifically, are the T.W.I.T. doing? Well, they're searching for people--twenty-two people--each of whom corresponds to one of the twenty-two major arcana of the Tarot deck. And what's their crime? Well, not really a crime, per se: "It is more of an ongoing Transgression, accumulating as the days pass, the invasion of time into a timeless world" (223). Okay, that still doesn't explain what they're doing with any specificity. But it's the best you'll get. Obviously, Pynchon's just daring us to try to decide which character in the book corresponds to which card, but it's not that easy because it's not necessarily just one person each: "The chariot can turn out to be an entire fighting unit" (225), for instance.

But actually, there are some examples presented, and they're not actual characters in the novel. Temperance, for example, is a whole family, the Uckenfays. Ha ha. The "temperance family" is named "Fuckin'." Pynchon you card.

We also receive mention of these two professors, one German and one English, Renfrew and Werfner. More doubling, and more than that: their rivalry has become greater and greater over the years, such that it's somehow representative of the geopolitical rivalry known as the Great Game. Good lord.

They have a medium that they work with, naturally, Madame Eskimoff. A T.W.I.T. member and government official named Clive Crouchmas--I mention the name because I know he's going to come up again later--"had been trying to get in touch with one of his field-agents who had died in Constantinople unexpectedly, in the midst of particularly demanding negotiations over the so-called 'Bagdad' railway concession" (228). This is presented in such a deadpan way that the ludicrousness of this--of contacting a man's spirit to hash out legal negotiations and concessions--could easily go unnoticed.

The chapter ends with Nookshaft hashing out a theory that reminds one of Philip K. Dick after he had his mental breakdown: the idea that Queen Victoria, by her "unbending refusals to consider the passage of time" (231) (requiring for a long time that only images of her as a young girl be put on stamps, her unwillingness to accept Albert's death) indicate, maybe, that we're actually not living in the world we think we are; that "the whole run-together known as 'the Victorian Age' has been nothing but a benevolent mask for the grim realities of the Ernest-Augustan Age we really live in." And who's responsible for this? Werner and Renfrew! I mean, in fairness, ideas like this aren't really required to make sense, per se.