ATDTDA (5.2) - Constance Penhallow

[Carvill John]

[Again I must begin with an apology. This post is a touch disjointed. I had 
intended to shake it into some coherent order last night, but my son wasn't 
in the mood for settling so...]

Part Two of the book, 'Iceland Spar', begins on page 121, but the passages 
featuring the Chums failing to catch the Etienne-Louis Malus could be looked 
on as a kind of a prologue, and I'd suggest that the Iceland Spar section 
proper begins on page 126. Fittingly, Pynchon starts this off by giving us 
one of his atypically explicit bursts of exposition. Instead of relying on 
us to go off and look up Parisian ray-fancier Etienne-Louis Malus, he spells 
it all out for us - Iceland Spar, polarised light, so forth. So is that 
significant? Why does Pynchon make this explicit? To point out the 
importance of that curious calcite, of light, and even photography?

Well, I haven't read nearly enough of the ATDTDA posts so far, but even I 
know there's been a thread on photography, mainly focusing on what Pynchon's 
attitude to that particular blend of science and art might be. I'm guessing 
he's ambivalent, as he is about many technologies. There's little doubt of 
course that he 'unambiguously' dislikes having his photo taken, but that 
doesn't preclude him taking an interest in the art - or technologies - of 
photography in general, just so long as you don't aim them directly at him.

And there's a lot of photography in ATD, what with Merle and all, and 
photography is one of many ways into one of those nodal points where a load 
of thematic strands come together in a thick little knot. Where would you 
even start with trying to untangle it?

Leaving aside the personal Pynchon aspects, there are links from photography 
to sliver halide, to silver mining, to dynamite, and thus to capitalism and 
anarchy. In another direction, connections run through light to electricity 
to religion, aether, mathematics, etc. Then there's the nexus of 
photography, alchemy, and chemistry, and explosives.

And of course the recent technologies of railroads and rail travel widely 
credited at the time with having altered - and even 'annihilated' time and 
space, and a lot of the book's thematic elements revolve around these 
matters.  So as well as photography's links to light, you can add time and 
spacec as well.

And if Pynchon is in fact flagging the significance of all this stuff about 
light and time and so on here, I'd say it's worth noting that he mentions 
polarised light, which makes me think of polarising filters in photography, 
of rays, refraction, birefringence, and angles of 90 degrees.

While we're about it, lets just mention that as far as I'm aware, none of 
the reviews - at least in the mainstream press - mentioned that 'Against the 
Day' is a translation of photographic term 'Contra Jour', which can also be 
translated as 'Against the Light'.  Kind of a major significance to omit, 
no? And they would have known about it if they'd been reading the posts on 
the p-list. I'm ashamed to admit I can't remember which p-lister it was who 
pointed the 'contra jour' thing out but all credit to him.

Ok, so photography is a blend of technology and art, and once you've 
mastered the technical aspects of photography - and I personally definitely 
have not - then you get on to the really tough part, the art, and an 
important aspect of that is the framing. And here, in one of my favourite 
passages of the whole book, we hear a little about framing:

"From her ancestral home on an island just the other side of the promontory 
from town, Constance Penhallow, now passed into legend, though not herself 
ambitious for even local respect, watched the arrival of the Malus. When 
required she could pose with the noblest here against the luminous iceblink, 
as if leaning anxiously out of some portrait-frame, eyes asking not for help 
but understanding, cords of her neck edged in titanium white, a 
three-quarters view from behind, showing the face only just crescent, the 
umbra of brushed hair and skull-heft, the brass shadow amiably turned toward 
an open shelp of books with no glass cover there arranged to throw back 
images of a face, only this dorsal finality. So had her grandson Hunter 
painted her, standing in a loose, simple dress in a thousand-flower print in 
green and yellow, viewed as through dust, dust of another remembered country 
observed late in the day, risen by way of wind or horses from a lane beyond 
a walled garden... in the background a half-timbered house, steep gabling of 
many angles, running back into lizard imbrication of gray slatework, shining 
as with rain... wilds of rooftops, unexplored reaches, stretching as to 
sunset..."

In my initial reading of ATD, while I hugely enjoyed the first part, 'The 
Light Over the Ranges', and in fact reckon that part alone could stand as a 
rebuke to all the short-sighted negative reviews, I did wonder about the 
lightness of tone, and thought there was a certain Pynchon quality missing 
(there wasn't, but I only realised that later), which if pushed I'd have 
described as 'strangeness'. But when I got to the initial Iceland Spar 
sections I felt that strangeness was restored, as the narrative begins to 
thicken and the style gets more dense and allusive. And you probably 
couldn't get a better example of that than the Constance Penhallow 
paragraph.

You could spend a lot of time pondering this paragraph, or just re-reading 
it to enjoy the poetry and rhythms of the prose. Even the little details, 
like the repetition of the word 'as' - 'as if', 'as through dust', 'as with 
rain', 'as to sunset'.....

What got me, though, was the sense that this could have been lifted right 
out of Gravity's Rainbow, and I started wondering about some of the themes, 
and some of the words. 'Gabling' was one, there seems to be a lot of 
architecture in ATD, especially the tops of buildings, and I started poking 
around in other Pynchon books, looking for gabling. Didn't find any. But, I 
had more luck with 'gables', as in this passage from GR:

"Like signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, 
Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won't interpret, not any more. Just 
as well, probably. The most persistent of these, which seem to show up at 
the least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so many of 
these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely wet gray 
as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low horizons. They 
hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years ago 
mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball's rise and fall into 
stairsteps of range and height, Ax and Ay, allowing them to grow smaller and 
smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped 
upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer, 
smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed 
down intact-it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania 
films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Ax by Ay, flightless themselves . . 
. film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Reminders of impotence 
and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel shapes, whole and shattered, appear 
now over the green plains, and last a while, and go away: in their shadows 
children with hair like hay are playing Himmel and Hölle, jumping village 
pavements from heaven to hell to heaven by increments, sometimes letting 
Slothrop have a turn, sometimes vanishing back into their dark gassen where 
elder houses, many-windowed and sorrowing, bow perpetually to the neighbor 
across the way, nearly touching overhead, only a thin lead of milk sky 
between."

So not just gables, but 'a strangely wet gray', which seems to fit with the 
"gray slatework, shining as with rain". Then of course there's all the stuff 
about patterns and repeating shapes, meanings and interpretations, monuments 
to analysis.

And the phrase that really kept ringing in my head was 'lizard imbrication'. 
Leave aside the fact that in this case 'imbrication' is an example of a word 
being used to describe the very thing that represents its etymological 
origin - roof tiles - it just seems such a resonant phrase. In any case, as 
the man said, "words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand 
for."

So I went looking for 'imbrication', and found this, in Mason & Dixon - 
apologies for the long quotation:

"I looked up. He was undeniably there,-I had not been upon the island long 
enough for Rapture of the North to have set in. For a moment I thought 'twas 
Stig, a Shadow of Stig, you recollect our mystickal Axman, with his 
Nostalgia for the North, so in command of him. Yet my Visitor's eyes were 
too strange even for Stig,-his aspect, his speech, were nothing I 
recogniz'd. We descended to the Shore, and went out upon a great Floe of 
Ice, and so one Floe to another, until all had frozen into a continuous 
Plain. In his movement he seem'd as much a Visitor as I in this Country. 
>From his Pack he unfolded a small Sledge of Caribou Hide, stretch'd upon an 
ingeniously hinged framework of Whalebone, and from a curious black Case 
produced a Device of elaborately coil'd Wires, set upon Gimbals, which he 
affix'd to the Prow of the vehicle. 'Hurry!' I had barely climb'd aboard 
when the whole concern spun about, till pointing, as a Needle-man I 
surmis'd, to the North Magnetick Pole, and began to move, faster and ever 
faster, with a rising Whine, over the Ice-Prairie. 'Sir,' I would have 
shouted, had the swiftness of our Travel allowed me breath, 'Sir, not so 
far!' when I'd really meant to say, 'not so fast.' We sped thus northward in 
perpetual sunlight. Night would not come to that Lati tude. The Sun up 
there, from mid-May to late July, does not set. The phantoms, the horrors, 
when they came, would not be those of Night.

"Nor, as things turn'd out, would it be a Journey to the North Pole. The 
Pole itself, to be nice, hung beyond us in empty space,-for as I was soon to 
observe, at the top of the World, somewhere between eighty and ninety 
degrees North, the Earth's Surface, all 'round the Parallel, began to curve 
sharply inward, leaving a great circum-polar Emptiness," as Mason shifts 
uncomfortably and looks about for something to smoke or eat, "directly 
toward which our path was taking us, at first gently, then with some 
insistence, down-hill, ever downward, and thus, gradually, around the great 
Curve of its Rim.- And 'twas so that we enter'd, by its great northern 
Portal, upon the inner Surface of the Earth." A patiently challenging smile.

Mason sits rhythmickally inserting into his Face an assortment of Meg 
Bland's Cookies, Tarts, and Muffins,.. .pretending to be silent by choice, 
lest any phrase emerge too farinaceously inflected.

Dixon continues cheerfully.- "The Ice giving way to Tundra, we proceeded, 
ever downhill, into a not-quite-total darkness, the pressure of the Air 
slowly increasing, each sound soon taking on a whispering after-tone, as 
from a sort of immense compos ite Echo,-until we were well inside, hundreds 
of miles below the Outer Surface, having clung to what we now walked upon 
quite handily all the way, excepting that we arriv'd upside-down as bats in 
a belfry...."

The Interior had remain'd less studied philosophickally, than endur'd 
anxiously, by those who might choose to travel Diametrickally across it,-
means of Flight having been develop'd early in the History of the Inner Sur 
face. "Their God, like that of the Iroquois, lives at their Horizon,-here 
'tis their North or South Horizon, each a more and less dim Ellipse of 
Sky-light. The Curve of the Rim is illuminated, depending on the position of 
the Sun, in greater or lesser Relievo,-chains of mountains, thin strokes of 
towers, the eternally spilling lives of thousands dwelling in the long 
Estuarial Towns wrapping from Outside to Inside as the water rushes away in 
uncom monly long waterfalls, downward for hours, unbrak'd, till at last 
debouching into an interior Lake of great size, upside-down but perfectly 
secured to its Lake-bed by Gravity as well as Centrifugal Force, and in 
which upside-down swimmers glide at perfect ease, hanging over an Abyss 
thousands of miles deep. From wherever one is, to raise one's Eyes is to see 
the land and Water rise ahead of one and behind as well, higher and higher 
till lost in the Thickening of the Atmosphere.... In the larger sense, then, 
to journey any where, in this Terra Concava, is ever to ascend. With its 
Corollary,-Out side, here upon the Convexity,-to go anywhere is ever to 
descend."

With great Cordiality and respect upon all sides, Dixon was taken to the 
local Academy of Sciences, and introduc'd to the Fellows.

"Nothing to do with your actual Appearance," Dixon said, "but all of thee 
have such a familiar look,-up above, we hear many Tales of Gnomes, Elves, 
smaller folk, who live underground and possess what are, to huz, magickal 
Powers? Who've min'd their ways to the borders of our world, following 
streams, spying upon us from the Fells when the light of the Day's tricky 
enough. Is this where they come from, then?"

"They are we." One of the inner-surface Philosophers removing his Hat and 
sweeping into a Bow, the others, in Echelon, following identic-kally, 
Hat-Brims all ending up in a single, perfectly imbricated Line.

"Your servant, Sirs."

"You receive Messages from us, by way of your Magnetic Compasses. What you 
call the 'Secular Change of Declination' is whatever dimm'd and muffl'd 
remnant may reach you above, of all the lives of us Below,-being less liv'd 
than waged, at a level of Passion that would seem, to you, quite intense. We 
have learn'd to use the Tellurick Forces, including that of Magnetism,-which 
you oddly seem to consider the only one."

"There are others?" Mason perking up.

"That's what he said. All most effective and what we'd style 'miracu lous,' 
down there,-tho' perhaps not as much so, up here.


---- Ok, not much in that 'imbricated', connection-wise, I admit, but look 
at all the resonances in the passage which looking for 'imbrication' took me 
to - the tundra, the polar exploration,  the hollow earth (that telluric 
interior), the magnetism, the Visitors, the axman form the North, etc. But 
also, right at the beginning, the 'Rapture of the North', which is a phrase 
Fleetwood Vibe will use in just a few pages.

What really surprised me about all this is that for once I was wrong when I 
assumed, on first reading Fleetwood Vibe's opening words - "It wasn't any 
Rapture of the North…" - that the capitalised phrase Rapture of the North 
was a well-known one and only my own ignorance kept me from getting the 
reference. But I could find nothing about it in books or on Google, and had 
given up hope and pretty much forgotten about it, until I serendipitously 
found it in that M&D 'imbrication' passage.

Just for completion's sake, lets also note here that the Pynchon wiki 
reminds us there's a mention much later in the book, of a 'Rapture of the 
Sands'.


What does this all add up to? You're asking me? Well, I suppose I could boil 
this down a few basic questions, for pondering and discussion:

- Anyone care to venture an attempt to shed some light on the 'meaning' of 
that peculiar paragraph?

- What does it tell us about the interconnections between ATD and Pynchon's 
other books?

- Do we think Pynchon intends us to go looking for, and find, these 
connections?

- What does it all add up to in terms of considering Pynchon's novels as one 
big interconnected work? And does this link in with the circularity - 
already noticed by one unusually astute p-lister (you know who you are) - in 
the time periods covered from  'V.' through to 'Against the Day'?  Full 
fuckin' circle indeed.


One final note - an earlier mention of 'rapture' in Mason & Dixon:

"Others told of Rapture by creatures not precisely Angels, nor yet 
Demons,-styl'd 'Agents of Altitude.'"

Agents of Altitude eh? Balloon-boy rapture, for sure.....

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