Iceland Spar, Chapter Sixteen: Get the Fuck Outta Yale!

We rejoin young Kit, who is becoming decreasingly illusioned with his school: "Yale's charm had not only worn away at last but also was revealing now the toxic layers beneath, as Kit came to understand how little the place was about studying and learning, much less finding a transcendent world in imaginaries or vectors" (318). I mean, point taken, but can you imagine hectoring a randomly chosen group of college students: why aren't you finding a transcendent world in vectors?!? What's wrong with you?! Good luck with that one. Anyway, he wants out; "there was no role for his destiny as a Vectorist within any set of Vibe goals he could imagine" (319). Ya think? Note that he doesn't even know yet that Vibe has had his dad murdered.

He meets Professor Vanderjuice again, who has become a pizza maniac, obsessed with those "triangular slice[s] from the Italian cheese-and-tomato pastries to be found everywhere in that neighborhood" (320). Vanderjuice gives him a letter from Lake, and then he DOES know that his father is dead, though not, explicitly, how and why. It's been opened, so clearly Vibe knows that Kit knows, but does he know if he knows the details...? Very tricky.

Naturally, he instantly suspects, "but could he afford to pursue that line of thought? If his suspicions proved to have anything to do with them, what would that oblige him to do about it?" (322)

He's distracted, anyway, by this mysterious tower, "a peculiar dark geometrical presence" (322), put up, it transpires, by Tesla. That old infinite-power device is mentioned, but that's apparently not a problem anymore: "if it ever gets to be too much of a threat to the existing power arrangements, they'll just have it dynamited" (323). Indeed: why get all fancy about it when you can just use brute force?

Kit and Colfax go out by boat to investigate Tesla's structure, but they run into a storm and have to be rescued. Tesla tells them about visions he's had, "as if time had been removed from all equations" (327)--if only.

It turns out--this is no surprise--that Colfax had been keeping tabs on Kit. He really wants to get out of there, but how, without arousing suspicion? Vanderjuice suggests that if he's really interested in these abstract studies that he is, he should go to Göttingen in Germany, and Colfax agrees. Kit gets Scarsdale to go along with this without raising too many questions, and the chapter ends with a conversation between Scardale and Foley Walker, where the former expresses his frustration that there are all these damn foreigners and non-white people and workers that he can't murder as freely as he'd like to.

I am so tired, Foley, I have struggled too long in these thankless waters, I am as an unconvoyed vessel alone in a tempest that will not, will never abate. The future belongs to the Asiatic masses, the pan-Slavic brutes, even God help us, the black seething spawn of Africa interminable. We cannot hold. Before these tides we must go under. Where is our Christ, our Lamb? the Promise?

Not too subtle, is Scarsdale. Sometimes I think that might be a flaw in the novel: Pynchon really beats you over the head with this. Still, it's clearly not meant to be realistic, so I think it's okay. The chapter ends with Foley--and since I'm trying to figure out where his ultimate enmity towards Scarsdale comes from, this seems relevant. Foley, you'll remember, hears voices in his head, but this one is a little different:

But a voice, unlike the others that spoke to Foley, has begun to speak and, once begun persisted. "Some might call this corrupting youth. It wasn't enough to pay to have an enemy murdered, but he must corrupt the victim's children as well. You suffered through the Wilderness and at last, at Cold Harbor, lay between the lines three days, between the worlds, and this is what you were saved for? this mean, nervous, scheming servitude to an enfeebled conscience?

Yup!