ATD/Iceland Spar – a twofold look at the workings of World Capitalism

I never thought I would write about calcites in here but seems that with Pynchon you always have to brace yourself for the unexpected, even the unknown or unknowable at times. So, here we go, as this is supposed to be my (much delayed, I admit) report on the second part of this literary giant's new, massive novel “Against The Day”.

Iceland Spar, the second part's title, is actually a quite common calcite (CaCO₃), whose peculiar optic quality of doubly refracting light distinguishes it in the most ingenious way to figure in this text as medium in effect, to evoke ever new and surprising uses of all that pertains to phenomena of chirality, both in more technical, physical applications and in ways more figurative or outright para-scientific in meaning. You will come across instances of doubling and yin-yang style counter-balancing in most every single episode and I shall leave it to you to discover the sheer joy this brings to the reading experience for yourself. Just be prepared for never taking things for what they seem to be on first appearance in here, but always keep expecting some complementary agent lurking around the next corner (or page for that matter). This being said, I think it best to just give you an outline of what actually takes place as the story-lines progress or happily go around in circles, for this is something not all too easy to always tell right away.

Here goes: (spoiler!)

It all starts off with the Chums of Chance failing in their mission to intercept the Vormance expedition, hindered in doing so by their own ineptitude just as much as by their sinister counterpart, the Czarist airship Bolshai'a Igra. As a consequence thereof, the ship brings unknowingly home to New York from cruising the Northern polar regions some up till then dormant evil in the guise of Insurrection and Pagan Revenge, unleashes the beast and in doing so sets loose the indomitable spirit of Insubordination itself, some anachronistic or atavistic incorporation of terror to the system, causing havoc and cataclysmic destruction in its wake.

Kit Traverse gets a first glimpse into the abyss of wealth's power to corrupt, yet somehow, for the time being and despite his young age, manages to stay clear of its charms and to assign his services to the kingdom of reason instead, to science and its seeming detachedness in the form of vectorism and its appeal.

Lew Basnight finally falls for the Anarchists' cause, if only out of his utter and eventually unbearable disenfranchisement with the workings and machinations of power playing him for a fool by using him for unknown but certainly dubious causes.

Webb Traverse, aka “The Kieselguhr Kid”, eventually meets his end at the hands of famed villains Sloat Fresno and Deuce Kindred, double-agents of the forces he so bravely, so vainly fought as much as he worked to the effect of bringing judgment down on himself in the form of deserved if not tragic doom - little man's forever loosing-end in the all but mythical relationship between abuser and abused. Which incident has both his eldest sons, Reiff and Frank, caught and suspended between taking up a married man's quiet, residential life, in Reiff's case with Estrella (Stray) Briggs, or tending to that other “family business”, unfinished in the customary sense of the Wild West, of taking revenge for his father's cold-blooded murder. Traveling down this latter road as can't be helped, obviously, Reiff comes to pick up the double-identity as “The Kieselguhr Kid”, thus living on his deceased father's legacy of trying to bomb into existence working man's justice in this world, at last.

Lew Basnight meanwhile exchanges the many disillusions of the New World for the venerable Old Europe, Britain's own shores, as he takes on an assignment as psychic detective in London for some very under-cover agency of questionable design, to immerse himself somehow in that vast and potentially disastrous battle between (not only) scientists Renfrew and Werfner, eventually being send on a mission to Göttingen, Germany, in order to do so.

In what has to be described as some curious intermezzo, or scherzo rather, the Chums are witnessed again, as they take ground leave in Venice for a short while, before being sent on to their next mission, this time, to recover some legendary and lost, Iceland Spar encrypted map of an ancient secret route to Inner Asia and its many riches, not setting course to that end however, without causing some considerable and irreparable damage to the city first, by bringing the Campanile crashing down – unintentionally so, of course, or do they really?

With intentions even more down-to-earth, so to say, but certainly all her own, Lake Traverse, late Webb's only daughter, marries no other than Deuce, her father's unscrupulous killer, and gives herself over without any constraints known of, while her younger brother Frank, after nothing more is being heard of Reiff, thinks it his turn to avenge his family's disgrace by pursuing the still at large assassinators, who themselves decide to part ways. Frank however takes to Telluride in his search, where he meets Merle Rideout and gets to know his daughter Dahlia, who's soon off to NYC, the very same direction at least, as Frank is to find out only later, which Deuce has chosen to travel in next.

We hear of Kit, the youngest Traverse offspring, who at the expenses of his old father's employing mining corporation's owner Scarsdale Vibe studies in Yale, but has learned to suspect his very mentor of having had ordered the assassination of Webb at the time. Unwilling to keep with the original plan, which saw him eventually become Vibe's heir and thus involved with all the capitalist scheming he stands for, Kit arranges with the help of Professor Vanderjuice to travel abroad, to Göttingen as a matter of fact, to further pursue his studies of mathematics and vectorism over there.

Dahlia Rideout in New York, by seeking to start a career in showbiz, unexpectedly sees herself reunited after all these years with Erlys, her (life-)long sought after run-away mother, by now wife and assistant to magician Zombini as well as mother of some couple-three children. Together, as a family, they set off to go to Venice, where Zombini hopes to obtain one perfect specimen of those famed Iceland Spar lenses or mirrors, in his case to be applied for de-refracting purposes to mend the outcomes of one of his more daring and as of yet bothersomely, dangerously irreversible feats.

Next, Reef Traverse, who's still in the business of impersonating and keeping alive the phantom of “The Kieselguhr Kid” by moving across the country and setting of some sticks of dynamite here and there, after failing to take revenge on his father's murderers Deuce and Sloat, tries to settle for good and for life with Stray and their son Jesse, but forces once provoked won't let him be. So, once more condemned to be forever drifting, he goes to Denver, posing for an Englishman, where finally he teams up with fellow anarchists, Irish Wolfe Tone and Flaco, the latter of whom he departs to Europe with. All the while in something like a drug reverie, Frank manages to eliminate Sloat Kindred in some obscure village in Old Mexiko.

Finally, it is time again for the Chums of Chance, to take us aboard the Inconvenience to witness what turns out to be an all too predictably vain attempt of theirs to escape their tiresome assignments, which are handed down to them by the upper Hierarchy ever so erratically and condescendingly. Where this mind-boggling maneuver that includes the use of some ill-conceived time-traveling machine is bound to fail, they end up instead, being handed over exactly the one map of that olden Venetian route into Inner Asia they were to find, and next they know, is they're in for their follow-up task, namely, to leave for the town of Bukhara - and await further orders there.

So much for the summary; now if you don't mind, let me have a short word on the literary dimension to all this. With regards to any poetical paradigm underlying the text, any post-modern strategy applied, it seems quite obvious to me that Pynchon is well beyond that. To resort to any such simple devices as some spotlighted breach in the traditionally afforded continuum of fictionality is a method long since passed over and left behind by this author and not him alone for the sheer demureness such a notion of tradition implies. No, what Pynchon (and not for the first time in ATD) brings to bear on his writing instead is a flagrant dismissal, yes, an unadorned disregard for whatever right to dominion over any kind of narrative and its objectives the helm of fictional consistency might claim to hold, being as it is, utterly unwilling to buy into any concept of literature, which requires the author to convincingly deceive the reader. This is a task he unapologetically leaves to him, the reader alone, to work out on himself if he be so inclined.

Regardless of what some critics have written, I reckon ATD to be a massive masterpiece of this still young 21^st century of ours. “Gravity's Rainbow” remains his outstanding oevre of truly historic proportions and literary importance, but even so, ATD may be just his finest piece of writing so far.
Its relevance lies with its para-dogmatic precision (yes: precision) of Pynchon's carefully crafted circumscription or, more literally, parable of our times. Pages 150-155 may very well be the best rendition in words of the events of 9-11 to this day.
The many turbulences we face nowadays, Pynchon makes a more than eloquent statement to these ends, takes terrorism for what it is, an equilibrium of sorts, but a sick one. He portrays the purposefully neglected underbelly to the might of possession, the counter-reason that absurdly, fittingly, makes a hell lot of sense. And so it does, too, ATD i.e.

I will get back to you with more on this, meanwhile here's my preliminary recommendation: Read it!

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