Carroll Eventyr finally gets his own section. Or part of a section seeing as how Pynchon loves to start a section from one character's point of view and then slip into the memory of another character when the first character remembers an experience they had with that new character and then that character has a memory of another character whose point of view we wind up slipping into.
That's a thing that happens, right? I'm not just a terrible reader? Am I?!
Well, that question is answered almost immediately as the point of view shifts to Nora Dodson-Truck observing Carroll in the memory of Carroll's medium powers first expressing themselves. She didn't quite catch who was coming through, nor remembered exactly what was said, but she recognized something spiritual happening because she immediately took a sidewalk artist's ochre chalk and drew a pentagram around her and Carroll.
Back to Carroll, he suspects that, perhaps, his sudden psychic powers expressed themselves as a way to keep Nora close to him (apparently they were engaged in an affair). Had he felt her slipping away and in an effort to keep her close, he called up "the control" (Peter Sascha, the voice, or spirit, on the other side that helps facilitate meetings with certain people passed on).
Carroll's drama with Nora, simply hinted at in the beginning of this short tale, careens into descriptions of the paranormal characters at The White Visitation. These general descriptions of the powers of the various people eventually focuses on Gavin Trefoil and his ability to change his skin color from albino white to a dark, purplish black. Speculation on how this could work scientifically turns into a mini-play (written by Rollo Groast to his father? Or just imagined by the narrator? Or by us, the readers?) about how the cells in the Central Nervous System react to becoming cells in the epidermis. It becomes an allegory of life and death on the human level, and the possibility of ascending to a heaven, an old home to be called back to. But which, ultimately, must remain theoretical, a dream, a fantasy, because no messages are ever sent back by those who pass on.
And now we see them, Nora and Carroll, together in their intimacy, in Nora's power, in Carroll's fear. Nora uses all those at The White Visitation as windows to something past the world we know. She tries to see something, some "Outer Radiance," but gets back nothing, time and time again. She has become empty in that search. Maybe, once, she used them for hope. But now she just uses them, cynically, to reiterate the Zero, to show her, again and again, that no matter what their powers profess to explain, she witnesses nothing. Nothing at all.
This is a complicated section featuring characters we never really learn a whole lot about. So I'm speculating wildly here with what textual evidence I'm able to comprehend!
Nora can't believe but it doesn't keep each of them from trying to convince her, to impress her with their abilities. Cherrycoke, the psychometrist, speaks of visions he sees when touching objects owned by other people. Over and over, he tells Nora things he should not know about her and yet she expresses her denials, no matter how accurate his guesses.
But Cherrycoke does get visions. His visions of St. Blaise's encounter with an angel on a bombing run the most substantial proof of his gifts. Nobody but St. Blaise and his wingman knew of this event but Cherrycoke picked up on it. St. Blaise believed it was a trick, Cherrycoke's divination of this event. But he couldn't have known from anybody else because the wingman was dead. And so Carroll Eventyr decided to reach out across the gap to this dead man, to certify what Cherrycoke had discovered.
The wingman's name is Terence Overbaby. Does anybody in academia know definitively how Pynchon picked his characters' names because this is getting ridiculous!
When Carroll tries to contact Terence, we, the readers, get a short biography of Peter Sascha, Carroll's spirit control. A medium himself, killed in 1930 by a blow from a police man, he used to do readings and séances for high ranking officials. One of them was Weissman, just back from Africa with his Herero aide (Enzian). Also at these functions, for his drugs (used in various paranormal ways, I suppose?), was Wimpe, the chemist who "befriends" Enzian's half-brother, Tchitcherine. These are connections I absolutely would not have made the first time reading this book.
During this scene at Sascha's séance, a man named Walter Asch has something happen to him. As each of the people at the event watch, they all interpret it in various ways. This theme, that we all interpret a "text" based on our own biases and experiences, we've seen previously in the way the members of The White Visitation viewed Slothrop's ability to predict rocket impacts with his hard-on. In these interpretations, we first experience a point of view through Enzian's eyes.
A new moment now, an interaction between Roger Mexico and Edward Treacle about needing to study death and the afterlife in order to understand life, since they are two sides of one conversation. Edward brings up the Herero as a culture who take it as gospel that they constantly speak with their dead.
Finally, we learn that Peter Sascha was in love with Leni Pökler, separated wife of Franz Pökler who worked on the rocket with Weissman, mother of Ilse, the young woman who would spend her life in a camp, only allowed short visits to go with her father to Zwölfkinder (if it was actually Ilse at all, of course!).
And that's it! Once again, just a lot of plot summary as I try to wrap my head around as much of this stuff as I can. Mostly so it's all in there when I need it for later sections when all of this information is referenced!
No comments:
Post a Comment