Bilocations, Chapter Six: The Passenger Ship that Is Actually a Battleship from the Future!

We've seen plenty of non-realist elements in the book so far, but I must give this chapter credit: it's really a bravura display. It has some real chutzpah to it. Here we have the Zombini family, Dally included, on a Translatlantic liner. Also on board is Kit Traverse, on his way to Germany (hanging out with another mathematician, Root Tubsmith). We start with a lengthy discussion between Dally and Erlys about, naturally, their relationship and Merle. Flashback segment showing how she first met Merle.

Erlys is trying to set her daughter up with Kit, who's been looking at her. You will remember that they already know each other at one degree of separation, since Dally briefly knew Frank out west. We get some idea of Kit's mindset here:

"I love those two knuckleheads," his whisper growing passionate, "they're my brothers, they think they're trying to protect me, but they don't know I'm deep in it, up to my ears, all this--" his gesture taking in the boat, the orchestra, the hight, "the suit on my back, bought and paid for out of the same bank account that--" (627)

All of this is extremely true.

Anyway, they dance a little, but it never goes any further than that, because "it had begun to seem as if she and Kit were on separate vessels, distinct versions of the Stupendica, pulling away slowly on separate courses, bound to a different country" (629). This may seem like a metaphor, and indeed that is exactly what it may be at first, and maybe always, but the if so, it definitely gets a bit out of control. You see...

S.S. Stupendica [was not] all she seemed. She had another name, a secret name, which would be made known to the world at the proper hour...what she would turn out to be, in fact, was a participant in the future European war at sea which everyone was confident would come...The Stupendica's destiny was to reassume her latent identity as the battleship S.M.S. Emperor Maximilian--one of several 25,000ton dreadnoughts contemplated by Austrian naval planning but, so far as official history goes, never built." (630).

So the ship is sort of wavering back and forth between being one of these two things. Does being on the one as opposed to the other imply movement in time as well as just dimension? It's not clear. But it certainly seems to make sense. At any rate, Kit gets separated from Root and from the Zombinis; they're back on the Stupendica and he's stuck on the Maximilian. Brief appearance by "an American stoker named O.I.C. Bodine" (632). Yes! It's Pig Bodine, or an ancestor thereof, who had previously appeared in V., Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. O.I.C. may nominally stand for "Officer in Command," but I persist in thinking it really means "Oh! I see Bodine." It's a brief cameo; clearly just an Easter egg for Pynchon fans. But I like it!

The Maximilian is headed for the coast of Morocco: "they were destined for plantation on the Atlantic coast...as 'colonists' whose presence there would then justify German interest in the area" (636). Along with other passengers in his situation, he escapes ashore under cover of night. Are you confused about the situation? Well, he discusses it with "Moïses, a resident Jewish mystic:"

Not unusual for these parts, actually. Jonah is the classic case. Recall that he was traveling to Tarshish, whose port, five hundred miles north of here, we call Cádiz today, one of whose alternate names is Agadir. But tradition in this Agadir is that Jonah came ashore just to the south of here, at Massa. There is a mosque commemorating the event...as if the Straits of Gibraltar acted as some metaphysical junction point between the worlds." To which Kit responds, "This smoke in here I've been breathing, this wouldn't be . . . um, hasheesh?" (638). 

I don't want to stereotype, but my experience in Morocco is that when you're a foreigner, literally every single dude you meet tries to sell you hash. So, yeah.

Anyway, he heads to Europe on a fishing boat. Dally, meanwhile, is baffled at his disappearance. Are they in different times now? They must be. Or not? Hmm. They end up in Venice, anyway, where "a military band played medleys of Verdi, Denza, and local favorite Antonio Smareglia. "Denza" is Luigi Denza. Smareglia is...well, I thought he might be made up, names sounds vaguely Pynchonian, but no, he's a real guy who wrote ten operas, none of which are available on video. Alas! And on that melancholy note...we end the chapter.