AtDDtA1: 10-13

[Paul Nightingale]

Ch2 begins with descent as Ch1 did with ascent. The tone is markedly
different, the Stockyards and "flesh learning its mortality" (10) in stark
contrast to the thrill of anticipation that accompanied ascent (3).
Subsequently, descent is almost disastrous (11), invoking mortality again.
Here, Randolph's "broodful reflections [are] interrupted by Darby". Again,
then, the juxtaposition of one mode (the distanced, reflective overview) to
another (the interactionist); so another kind of 'descent', just as Ch1
progressed in the opposite direction.

Conventionally one thinks of macrocosm and microcosm as occupying different
levels; the metaphor employed is spatial (as with the term 'distanced
overview', of course). One way of visualising the blurb with which we all
started--a convention, even cliché of many films, for example--would be to
show a map upon which the journey in question were outlined, as though we
are 'up there' looking down. Hence, the "streets and alleyways in a
Cartesian grid" (10), followed by the rewriting of the scene in the
Stockyards, "unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in
straight lines and at right angles" replacing "the smell" (an assault the
senses cannot resist) with which the passage begins. (And I might have
observed earlier that the shift from one phase to the other in Ch1 is marked
by Randolph "studying an aeronautical chart of the country below them", 6).

Randolph's reflections are assaulted similarly by Darby's "tug at the sleeve
of his blazer" (11). His response to the interruption is "screamed", so
extreme that Darby is "frighten[ed] ... nearly out of his wits" (12). In Ch1
Randolph was able to remain aloof because of Lindsay's "humourless severity"
(4); and now Lindsay it is who observes the insubordination that will lead
to Randolph being "preoccupied with the crisis and staggering across the
deck" etc (12). Eventually, after a reversal of sorts, Darby is "gazing down
at [Randolph], inquisitively".

This phase ends with the Chums gazing down on the photographer and his naked
model, "casting apprehensive looks upward" (13) as "exploded ballast-bags"
echo the "lavatorial assaults" earlier (5). The Inconvenience is still in
descent; the Stockyards have been replaced, however, by a scene that lends
itself to scopophilia.