Iceland Spar, Chapter Seventeen: Flowers of Young American Womanhood in White Slavery Horror!

This one is about Dally, who arrives at New York City with little incident. The first important person she meets is a waitress named Katie, an aspiring actress (of course) working at Schultz's Vegetarian Brauhaus. There are a lot of Chinese people around, notably a gang leader named Mock Duck (okay) and a fake-gang leader Hop Fung, who's in charge of the "white-slave simulation industry," which exists--I guess--to titillate tourists. It's not really clear how they actually make money, since this isn't a stage show; it seems to be more akin to a Happening, where these things are randomly staged in the city streets. But regardless, Dally is hired, and she "began to learn some of the all-but-impenetrable signs and codes, a region of life withheld, a secret life of cities that those gypsy years with Merle had always denied her" (339). Obviously, this "secret knowledge" is a big thing in Pynchon and this book in particular.

Anyway, she's noticed in the course of all this, most importantly by Scarsdale's show-business brother R. Wilshire Vibe, who wants to put her in his shows. Things start heating up as the Chinese gang war begins to get serious, and Dally's work becomes less and less stable. She gets a new job as a card girl for terrible "Bowery Amateur Nights." This part is dumb, but it made me laugh: "The nightly talent included Professor Bogoslaw Borowicz, who put on what he called "Floor Shows," which, due to his faulty grasp of the American idiom, turned out to be literal displays of floors--more usually fragments of them, detached and stolen from various locations around the city" (343).

She's going to get an acting job as Calpurnia in an adaptation of Julius Caesar called--another LOL moment--Dagoes with Knives, but an upset boyfriend of another potential actress prevents that. Never mind, though: there's a party at R. Wilshire's, and Dally is invited! She's going to bring Katie as a guest, so they go to a department store for clothes, and that's where Dally glimpses a stranger:

Dally knew she had to get an immediate grip on herself, because if she didn't, the next thing she knew, she'd be running over there screaming, to embrace some woman who would of course turn out to be a stranger, and all the embarrassment, maybe even legal action, that was sure to go with that, and the word she'd be screaming would be "Mamma!"

But she disappears before any more can happen. At R. Wilshire's party, there's a magic show going on. Dally wanders around, and an older man drugs her and tries to abduct her, but she's saved by the magicians, who secrete her in their Cabinet of Mystery. When she wakes up, the magicians are gone, but she meets them again soon enough--this, of course, being Luca "the Amazing" Zombini and his family, including her erstwhile mother, Erlys, and a bunch of her half-siblings. The novels calls them "stepbrothers and sisters," but is that accurate? Are they still stepsiblings if they're related to you by blood? Unclear. It could not matter less.

She plays around with the kids, and--OPERA WATCH--"Nunzi and Cici hummed in harmony the familiar theme from La Forza del Destino." I've seen the Verdi opera, but I have to admit, I'm not really sure what "the familiar theme" from it would be. It's about a young noble couple the father of the female half of which does not approve of the match, and the guy accidentally kills him. They're separated, she joins a nunnery, and they're reunited before she's murdered by her implacable, vengeful brother. Cool story. Can we connect it to this novel? Well, not in any concrete way, but certainly the theme of an unavoidable tragic destiny can be applied to the history that it's about.

We learn--this is interesting--that Luca is using light bifurcation in duplication tricks: "it's all about the light, you control the light, you control the effect" (354). So "it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way" (355). The problem is, he doesn't know how to reverse the effect, so there are evidently a number of doubled people in the world not too happy about this. You've gotta also think back and ask: so, was Dally so doubled in the Cabinet of Mystery? She did lose consciousness. Was she transported, unbeknownst to her, to a different version of reality, at some angle to her previous one? I don't think we get even provisional answers to any of this, but it certainly goes with the book's preoccupations.

They whole family is going to go to Europe to "the Isle of Mirrors in that Lagoon over in Venice . . . they still do produce and market the finest conjuror's mirrors in the world. Somebody there is bound to have an idea" (355). An' Dally's going too! Though there is a little friction with her mom. She reveals that Merle isn't her real father; that she'd already been pregnant by the late Bert Snidell when the two of them met. Dally is shocked by this, but she notes, reasonably, that "Merle gave us a home. And your 'real' father, well that is Merle, more than the other ever would've been" (357). Also fairly, she still feels abandoned by her mother, but that is where we must leave things for now.