ATDTDA (2): Lew Basnight

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

                 Mark Kohut: 

                  why, d'ya suppose more than one reviewer---although later 
                  ones might have repeated one good reviewer---said Lew 
                  Basnight was "unnecessary" in ATD?......could have been 
                  left out?

  Well, for one thing---Pynchon always writes assuming that more than one 
  reading is required, and Lew's adventures are particularly fine proof of that.

                   Working premise: Pynchon isn't perfect but

               1) He knows what he is at least attempting with every 
                    character, every scene, every word, no?        So, Lew 
                    Basnight is not a superfluous character.
 
               2) What is his major function in ATD?....So far...

Chapter 5: Lew Basnight's Story
This chapter begins with the Chums of Chance ferrying 
Lew Basnight, the spotter for White City Investiagtions. 
But the chapter is another one of Pynchon’s diversions 
off the main plot line, in the case telling us Lew Basnight’s 
story. These stories are a frequent feature in his longer 
novels, particularly GR. In that work, the stories of Roger 
Mexico and Tchitcherine parallel the main storyline of 
Slothrop, giving the novel a structure symbolically 
resembling the musical leitmotif 

                                         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotif

Baslight is guilty of some heinous crime, which causes him 
to lose his wife, Troth, and leads him to a teacher of 
Country Dance, Drave, who sets him up in the Esthonia Hotel, 


(I'm stepping into this passage, showing where "Stevens" had been led astray 
here, hardly anybody seems to notice the particulars of a magick ritual:

                                     a slow ritual movement, 

                                     a country dance, 


                                     almost


                                ---though Lew, 

                                    pausing to watch,

                                    was not sure what country. 

  And I wish I could contact my Ex, from Kitka, to get into the Etymology of
  "Drava", because if my intuition is correct, "Drava" means "health" and thus 
  associates Drava with the old healing traditions of Bulgaria, based in
  large part on old magic---note the connection to an old river name as well. 
  Now we continue)

where we meet Hershel the bellhop. Guilt and sin is one of Pynchon’s
recurrent themes, and in the past he has made the Calvinist distinction 
between the damned, the elect, and the preterite, who try to act like the 
elect, though they don’t know their heavenly destination. Baslight 
seems to be one of Pynchon’s preterite many (as opposed to the 
Chosen Few), and in the chapter identifies himself as a “Presbyterian” 
(41). Although hired by Nate Privett of White City Investigations to track 
“the labor unions, or as we like to call them, anarchistic scum” (43), 
Lew “was not in the detective business out of political belief” (37).

Nate also has a special talent (like Slothrop?): he is a sensitive; he 
can see better than other people. He notices details the average 
observer misses, a great talent in the detective business.

http://researchmethodsprowrite.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_researchmethodsprowrite_archive.html

(me again; I think that Lew's qualities as a potential "sensitive" were 
being picked up by those Bulgarians at the end of the labyrinth.)
 
            3) And as we read?

AtD pages 1051---1062 and over into the "Rue-du Depart".
Crucial actions, crucial developments, crucial magick. Also,
Lew ties into the overall genre of the Dectective Novel, present
throughout Pynchon's fictions. Alchemy and photography---
also present in Vineland, move around Lew and Merle. Like the
weird alchemy of:

http://fp1.com/sept98/features/staleywise2000/fullshow/img/23.jpg