ATDDTA (6) 166-170 b

[bekah]

Fleetwood is in bed in the mansion, "declining into a sickbed of 
remembrance."    More adventures in South Africa,  trying to get rid 
of some American "stain,"  "crossing the frontier,"  making money and 
dealing with Kaffir.

*******************
168
"He was only faintly visible in the dark, at a window on the haunted, 
floor of the house, almost a fixture in the room from some previous 
era,  there for some outdated domestic purpose."

Now Fleetwood has somehow returned to the house and Kit sees him faintly?

*******************

168: 5;	"He was remembering, declining into a sickbed of remembrance."

The last volume of "Remembrance of Things Past" by  Proust was 
dictated from his sickbed

*******************
168.8	"In Africa he had known saintly lieutenants who were fated to 
die young, fugitives from all across the wreck of the Eastern 
Question, traders in flesh and firearms indifferent to the nature of 
the goods they handled, who would emerge from the green other world 
after months, their cargo vanished not only from possession but from 
memory as well, sick, poisoned, too often dying, cursed by shamans, 
betrayed by magnetic anomalies, racked by Guinea worm and malaria, 
who, despite it all, wished only to return to the embrace of the 
interior... Fleetwood wanted to be like them..."

Fleetwood wants to disappear or emulate Kutz in Conrad's Heart of 
Darkness (1902) ?  and/or Child of Storm written by H. Rider Haggard 
(1913) starring Allan Quatermain as the adventure-bound hero in King 
Solomon's Mines.   (Sean Connery film- 2003)
<http://www.online-literature.com/h-rider-haggard/child-of-storm/>


The Eastern Question was the pre- WWI (and continuing) problem of 
what to do with the Ottoman Empire as it fell apart.  Greece, Serbia 
and Bulgaria wanted it destroyed and the Great Powers were more than 
willing to help for their own reasons.  There were slaves in parts of 
the Empire and Turkish opium was exported widely.
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heroin/etc/history>
(history of opium)


*******************
168:14	"Fleetwood wanted to be like them...He prayed to become one 
of them. [...] Nothing 'took.'"

  William Gibson's 1981 short story "Hinterlands" 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinterlands_%28short_story%29>
there is a similar case of people willing unsuccessfully to be 
"taken" by the unknown (albeit without Pynchon's explanation as to 
why this doesn't happen)
<http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_149-170#Page_168>

*******************
168:20	 "Massawa"
<http://home.planet.nl/~hans.mebrat/eritrea-geography.htm>

"Fleetwood found a coaster heading south to Lourenco Marques on the 
other side of South Africa..." 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozambique>

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168:21	"...where he spent a week in various local cantinhas 
gathering information"

cantinhas  =  Portuguese taverns

*******************
168: 23:	"... in exchange for Portuguese colonial-market wine, 
the rotgut rejectamenta of Bucelas and Dão..."

Rotgut= poor-quality and potentially toxic alcoholic liquor.
Rejectamenta= rejected -  so the reject wine.

Bucelas, Portugal is a famous
wine-growing region. Dão is a type of Portuguese wine.
<http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_149-170#Page_168>


*******************
168: 25	"When it felt to Fleetwood that every bit of American 
predisposition had been leached away at last, he got on a train for 
the Transvaal."

What kind of predisposition is he trying to get rid of?   (the thing 
that makes him want to disappear - 168.8 ?)


*******************
168: 28	"The moment he crossed the frontier, he understood what he 
was supposed to be doing out here - he was headed for Johannesburg to 
make his own personal fortune, in that hell of chronic phthisis, 
scabbed veldt, shopkeepers' avarice,seething rickshaw traffic 
desperately too few white women, a town belonging to the unhistoried 
... 'like Baku with giraffes,' as he wrote home.   The Veldt went on 
far too long..."

Baku - between Russia and Iran on the coast of the Caspian Sea.  He's 
been around.  The Baku were from " Gravity's Rainbow" 
<http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?>

Johannesburg
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannesburg>

also known as eGoli (place of gold)

  Johannesburg is the source of a large-scale gold and diamond trade, 
due to its location on
the mineral-rich Witwatersrand range of hills.  (the Rand gold)

Phthisis  * Literally, means a wasting disease but almost invariably 
will mean pulmonary tuberculosis
* Any debilitating lung or throat affections; a severe cough; asthma

*******************
168:34	The Veldt went on far too long without a tree in sight, only 
smokestacks a
and stamp mills,...sending up an inescapable white dust that either 
remained in the air
for one to breathe or descended to coat housing, clothing, vegetation,
skins of all colors.

South Africa's high veldt (photo)
<http://www.pbs.org/journeytoplanetearth/hope/wakkerstroom.html>

*******************

169:2	It would be necessary to plunge in, from whatever condition
of bourgeois stultification, whatever prevailing weather, market narrative,
fluctuations in harvests - including Death's - might have defined his
average day, to leap as stoically as possible into the given fever and
conduct himself as survival and profit might direct in the way of
intoxication, betrayal, brutality, risk (deep descents into the
abysses of the gold reef proving minor next to the moral plunges
available, indeed beckoning, at every hand), sexual obsession,
gambling for epical stakes, seduction into the haunts of the dagga
rooker and opium slave.

dagga rooker - marijuana smoker,  a South African colloquial term for 
a person who smokes  marijuana
dagga,  the South African word for marijuana


Fleetwood in Johannesburg is apparently making his fortune in
diamonds and/or gold.    Cullinan diamond mines near Johannesburg
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Mine>


  eGoli - the City of Gold <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eGoli>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannesburg>

eColi?  (sounds good -  gold disease)

*******************

168:23 ->	"There is a story that he had shot a coolie, but the 
other story  was that it was a Kaffir he had caught stealing a 
diamond, and that he had  given the Kaffir a choice,to be shot or to 
step into a mine shaft half a mile deep. He was a thief, after all 
... Fleetwood gestured him with the Borchardt toward his fate and 
felt a queer euphoria expanding to fill his body, amazed to see, 
moreover that the Kaffir not only recognized the state but was 
entering it himself.  The American Stain, after all, would not be 
eradicated."

*******************

168: 37	"The legal pretense would have taken the merciless honed edge 
from  the joy of the deed itself, it scarcely mattered whether or not 
the Kaffir had  stolen the stone..."

"joy of the deed itself"   (eeks)

<http://www.khulsey.com/jewelry/kh_jewelry_diamond_mines_pg2.html>
(scroll to bottom photos)

*******************



170: 1      Fleetwood gives the Kaffir a choice and the Kaffir chose 
to fall  into the pit  "a relatively humane long descent into the 
abyss through the blue ground, the side-tunnels whistling by faster 
and faster - rather pleasant.  Fleetwood imagined for as one fell, it 
would grow warmer,  wouldn't it - perhaps even...

**  "... like being taken back into a dark womb."

*******************

170: 10       Fleetwood dreamed about it.   "Seemed to be whispering 
advice. Warning that there was some grave imbalance in the structure 
of the world, which would have to be corrected."

*******************
170: 13      "Then each time (he dreamed)  Fleetwood  would be not so 
much overcome by remorse as bedazzled  at having been shown the 
secret backlands of wealth, and sooner or later it depended on some 
act of murder, seldom limited to once."

*******************
170:17      "It comforted him to imagine that on the Karmic ledger 
the Kaffir and the Jew balanced out."

But in fact, as Fleetwood was informed in these lucid dreams close to 
dawn, all the gold in the Transvaal could not buy the remission of a 
single minute of whatever waited for him.  He laughed angrily. 
"Purgatory?  A higher law? Kaffir next of kin chasing me across the 
world?   Be serious."

Alden Vormance was going north to get a meteorite.


I think that Fleetwood stayed in the house and died.