Bilocations, Chapter Seven: Quaternions, Nihilism, and Mayonnaise!

We are still with Kit, who disembarks at the city of Ostend in Belgium. He meets some fellow math enthusiasts, who are holding a conference in the city: specifically, these are Quaternionists. Oh no, more inscrutable math! Quaternions are a kind of complex number. Or, according to wikipedia, they're "a number system that extends the complex numbers." So, like, Complex Numbers DLC, you might say? Although you definitely wouldn't? Well, of course, complex numbers are at the heart of Riemann and his hypothesis, so we're on familiar ground there. I don't know that I'll be able to get a LOT deeper into quaternions, but all this complexity and all this existing on the liminal barrier between real and imaginary is at the heart of the novel, clearly. But while he does meet the Quaternionists, in this chapter he mainly hangs out with "a cell of Belgian nihilists, styling themselves as 'Young Congo'" (527). Again, this juxtaposition of radical politics and abstract math is what we expect. They aren't in favor of the atrocities in the Belgian Congo per se, but they're kind of detached from the whole thing--"they [the Congolese] are as savage and degenerate as the Europeans"--nihilism, remember? They admire Jean-Baptiste Sipido, an anarchist who tried to assassinate the Prince of Wales (and then was acquitted because he was only fifteen at the time). Young Congo is working with "a pair of Italian naval renegades, Rocco and Pino" (529). They've stolen the plans for a manned torpedo, and they plan to use it to blow up King Leopold's yacht, which seems like a noble causes.

Even though we don't have THAT much quaternionist action here, we do have SOME: notably, Kit meets this Japanese mathematician, Umeki Tsurigane, with whom he's later going to have a THING, and who I think is sort of distastefully fetish-y in that "Good Heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful!" way. Well, we'll see. He also meets his ol' pal Root Tubsmith again. I would like to reprint a paragraph which seems to get into some of the math in a fruitful way:

Actually, Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought they knew of God's intention--that space be simple, three-dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term, and a scalar as well--simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to defend."

Am I going to have to get into vectors at some point here? Probably. Anyway, then we get the lyrics to a jaunty tune, "The Quizzical Queer Quaternioneer." Naturally.

One of the Quaternionists is named Pléiade Lafrisée...BUT: she's actually a spy. She's reporting to (and sleeping with) a sadistic Belgian government agent named Piet Woevre "whose taste for brutality, refined in the Congo, had been found by security bureaux at home useful beyond price" (540). When I said that Deuce Kindred was the most unpleasant character in the novel, I may have been forgetting about this guy. He puts me strongly in mind of Brock Vond, the fascist DEA agent in Vineland. He doesn't trust these mathematicians, and he wants Pléiade to spy on Kit. I really truly genuinely don't remember what happens to him, but I sure hope he dies horribly.

Later one of the nihilists, Policarpe, accurately describes the situation: "It's a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn't make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting" (543). That's not...NOT how I feel about being an American about right now.

He meets Pléiade at a cafe; she's wearing a hat, and he all know about Kit's hat fetish--"the strange and weirdly twilit country of hat-fetishism" (544). I'll keep an eye out, but I don't think this ever comes up again--one of these weird little jokes sans punchline you sometimes see in Pynchon.

Now: mayonnaise! We get quite a lot, actually, about its history, and from what I can glean from wikipedia and the like, it appears to be basically accurate. Pléiade asks him to meet her that night "out at the Mayonnaise Works, and you shall perhaps understand things it is only given to a few to know" (545). I...think these "Mayonnaise Works" are, in fact, a fabulist invention. So he goes there. But it's a trap! Or so it seems. The mayonnaise starts overflowing and filling up the building, and as much as I like mayonnaise, drowning in it does seem like it would be a notably unpleasant way to go. He manages to kick through a window and get barfed out in a geyser of mayonnaise, "in a great vomitous arc which dropped him into the canal below" (547). There, he's picked up by Rocco and Pino, who are out on their torpedo. They drop him off back in town, and that is the end of this entertaining chapter.