Against the Day, Chapter Four: The One with the Looney Tunes Cameo!

As I've admitted before--or if not, I am here--I sort of bog down in the book at this point. It's not that I don't enjoy it, but it gets, we cannot deny it, sort of hard to follow. At least in the specific details. We'll see.

It opens with a letter from Yashmeen to her dad Auberon, telling him how she doesn't feel good staying with the T.W.I.T., and how frankly she's not sure about what he's doing either: "I find I cannot set aside your profession, the masters you serve, the interests which all this time out there in Inner Asia, however unconsciously, you have been serving." She tells him about a dream she had where they took off in a "great skyborne town" with "a small band of serious young people, dedicated to resisting death and tyranny, whom I understood at once to be the Compassionate" (749). Seems to mirror both the Chums transfiguration and the eventual future of the Traverse family (including Yashmeen--spoiler?).

Anyway, she doesn't know if she'll ever hear from her dad again. She's feeling "a strange doubleness in my life" (750), of course. And that's about it.

Kit's heading east, but without a camera: "By then he was noticing how many Europeans had begun to define themselves by where they'd been able to afford to travel, part of the process being to bore interminably anybody who'd sit still for it with these ill-framed, out-of-focus snaps" (751). Maybe they should get some pointers from Merle.

He continues his trek: desert punctuated by oases in a geography of cruelty, barkhans or traveling sand-dunes a hundred feet high, which might or might not possess consciousness." Hell, if you can have sentient lightning and tornadoes--why not? He falls in with a guy who tells him about a local folk hero named Namaz Premulkoff, who fought back against the Russians and may or may not be dead, it's not really relevant.

He finds Auberon, who anti-climactically turns out to be not lost at all, but rather "quite comfortably settled into a high-European mode of residence at the palatial Hotel Tarim" (753). He lives just across from his Russian counterpart--always with the counterparts!--one Colonel Yevgeny Prokladka. There are stories about the airship Bol'shaia Igra--belonging to the Russian version of the Chums--flying overhead.

There's a prophet operating nearby, known as "the Doosra," who presents "a sharply detailed vision of north Eurasia, a flood of light sweeping in a single mighty arc from Manchuria west to Hungary, an immensity from which all must be redeemed...and brought together under a single Shamanist ruler--not himself but "One who comes" (756). But "what is to come will not occur in ordinary space," which seems to calls us back to all this talk about zeta functions and imaginary numbers.

And now the moment you've been waiting for:

One day the noted Uyghur troublemaker Al Mar-Fuad showed up in English hunting tweeds and a deerstalker cap turned sidewise, with a sort of ultimatum in which one might just detect the difficulty with the prevocalic r typical of the British upper class. "Gweetings, gentlemen, on this Glowious Twelfth!" (757)

Not much more to say, really. He only appears in this one brief section, and seems to just be here so Pynchon can stick Elmer Fudd in his novel. Well, there are worse things to do. He's actually a messenger form the Doosra, demanding their help, which they declare themselves willing to give--though (gasp!) I think there may be ulterior motives.

I dunno. Auberon thinks back to when he rescued Yashmeen from a slave market--he may have had non-paternal motives for that, it's honestly really not super-clear to me. But she figures heavily in his thoughts at any rate. Kit tells her a bit about what she's up to.

Kit must be wondering at this point, what am I doing here? And what should I be doing next? Happily (?) for him, Halfcourt has more for him to do, "a long-shelved plan to project a mission eastward to establish relations with the Tungus living east of the Yenisei" (763). See, this is the issue I have, because okay, fine, he's going to do this thing...but why? Seriously, what are the motives behind all these things? Is it just me or is it the book? Well, in any case, he is off, going with Dwight Prance, this British agent, and also with a guy named Hassan from the Doosra.

Auberon ain't feeling so great: "Look at me. An elderly man in a shabby uniform. Look at what I have done with my life. I must never so much as speak to her again" (765). He vanishes, but then reappears later in the city of Bukhara, looking for guides to finding Shambhala. He wants transcendence too. Will he find it? I doubt it! But maybe. Read on.