Iceland Spar, Chapter Eighteen: Reef Wanders About!

Sorry I couldn't think of a good title. That's the way it goes some days. :( :( :(

This is a long, wide-ranging chapter about Reef and his peregrinations. He's wandering through the American west with Stray and their son Jesse, doing his thing as a card sharp and occasionally committing desultory sort of terrorist explosions. It's chaos out there: "the San Juan range was a battleground now, Union miners, scabs, militia, owners' hired guns, all shooting at each other and now and then hitting somebody for a one-way passage into that dark country where they all collected" (362). Stray suggests that "there's a sheriff to take care of it" (ibid), but Reef recognizes the futility of relying on the law. He has an exchange with a sheriff that looks, uh, relevant to our current concerns:

"My job is to prevent the sides from tangling," one of these sheriffs tried once to instruct Reef.

"No, Burgess, your job is to see that they keep on killing Union people, without none of us ever getting to pay them back."

"Reef, now if they've broken the law--" (363)

Tell me you won't hear this exact line of reasoning from today's law-and-order fascists.

However, don't think that Reef is too emotionally intelligent here. He argues with Stray, and in a way that underestimates her commitment to him, to the doom of their relationship. "hangin you, I can understand," she says, "but they might decided to hang me, too. Is 'what else'" (363). But Reef, consciously or not, doesn't construe this correctly:

What he did not of course detect in this was the promise Stray knew straight enough she was making here, to stick by his side, even far as the gallows, if their luck should turn out that way. But he didn't want to hear anything like that, hell no, and quickly pretended this was all about her safety. (ibid)

This is good character drama, I think. Anyway, Reef's out riding one day when he hears an explosion that quickly sets off an avalanche that he barely avoids (and the horse is fine too, you'll be glad to know). He doesn't know, but he strongly suspects that this was an attempt by the mine owners to bump him off. But this is the pretext he needs to leave. Well, I say "pretext," but I think it's a mixture of genuine concern on his part that his presence could be dangerous for his family and an excuse to do what he'd been wanting to do. People aren't too simple.

So now he's up to his old tricks, only on the east coast. He takes up with a rich English tourist named Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin (hoo boy), who is basically amused and titillated by his rough-shod American ways. She and her crowd are on a tour of hot springs, "in search of eternal youth or fleeing the deadweight of time" (368). They end up in New Orleans, where they quarrel and she abandons him, at least for now. And I have to correct myself: I was wrong to suggest that there were no named African American characters in the novel, because here we have a bandleader named "Dope" Breedlove--though here, at least, he doesn't do much. He IS an anarchist, however, and he introduces Reef to an Irishman named Wolfe Tone O'Rooney (Wolfe Tone being the name of an eighteenth century Irish martyr), who had wanted "to meet the great Wild West bomb-chucker known as the Kieselguhr Kid, but sadly he'd not been heard from for some time" (370). From there, he also meets an explosion enthusiast named Flaco, who suggests that there's a lot of blasting work to be done in Europe if he's interested...? A lot of characters sort of being drawn towards Europe, we can see.

Flaco explains his philosophy:

We look at the world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with less. An we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life under it resembles Death. If dying is a deliverance into a condition of total non-freedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to address the problem of the State is with counter-Death, also known as Chemistry. (372)

That's probably a good statement of the book's goals. It's a mistake, however, to take from this that anyone wants to abolish society. We often forget that an-archism literally means no hiearchies, not sauve qui peut. If it's not clear how that works, maybe it will become more so as the novel progresses. Or maybe not! You weren't promised anything!

OPERA WATCH!:

[Flaco] was a survivor of Anarchist struggles in a number of places both sides of the Atlantic, notably Barcelona in the '90s. Provoked by the bombing of the Teatro Lyceo during a performance of Rossini's opera William Tell, the police had rounded up not just Anarchists but anybody who might be in any way opposed to the regime, or even thinking about being. (ibid)

Really now, shouldn't Pynchon give it its original French title? It's Guillaume Tell. This was a real incident. Police will naturally take any opportunity for overreach. ACAB.

Anarchist utopia:

Everybody at the Deux Espèces was waiting for his own particular outlaw-friendly ship, of which there were several out on the sea-lanes at any given moment...as if there had once been a joyous mythical time of American Anarchism, now facing its last days after the Anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated McKinley--everywhere it was run, Anarchist, run, the nation allowing itself to lapse into another cycle of Red Scare delusion as it had done back in the '70s in reaction to the Paris Commune. But as if, too, there might exist a place of refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, someplace all the Anarchists could escape to, now with the danger so overwhelming, a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, some group of green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far from the sea-lanes to be of use as a coaling station, lacking nitrate sources, fuel deposits, desirable ores either precious or practical, and so left forever immune to the bad luck and worse judgment infesting the politics of the Continents--a place promised them, not by God, which'd be asking too much of the average Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include, somewhere, at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next. (372-373)

I really just quoted that at length so I'd have it at my fingertips. There's a lot there, for sure. Anyway, Wolfe Tone is off to Mexico and Reef and Flaco are, apparently, Europe-bound. And this entry is too long already, so that is IT for now.