ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John:

>Now, I assumed on first reading that whatever the Odalisque of the Snows 
>was, it was something which was indigenous to Iceland (or Greenland or 
>wherever we are), and either was, or was connected with, some sort of 
>nunatak spirit. And it's clear that the Vormance party not only don't know 
>what it is they're bringing back, but they don't even know what they 
>*think* it is, someone says something along the lines of: "Vibe will sell 
>it, whatever it is" (I don't have the book with me, sorry). But there's 
>also mention of meteors and Fleetwood Vibe recalls joining up with Dr Alden 
>Vormance and his quest to recover a meteroite.
>
>Further, as Tore quoted:
>
>"But who could have foreseen that the far-fallen object would prove
>to harbor not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well, and a 
>plan for carrying it out?"
>
>So, that 'far-fallen', that would fit with the object being a meteorite, 
>but not so well with the 'Figure' being a spirit that's indigenous to the 
>region it was found in. So this is yet anotehr layer of confusion. Where is 
>the 'far' which the figure has fallen from?
>
>Where to look for answers to these riddles?

Good questions. I'm not sure there's a clear answer to them, though. I 
suspect that the confusion in this instance is intentional: The Creature 
would somehow be less scary if it were specified that it was a meteorite 
which landed on Iceland in the year 378 B.C., or that it was the top of a 
nunatak (2,3 meters long, weighing appr. 430 kilos) which had broken off 
during a storm and roved across the countryside every full moon. Even those 
witnessing The Thing on first hand, though, don't agree as to what they see 
or hear (some hear the hisses of a snake, others hear dead languages). By 
surrounding the odalisque with an aura of vagueness, Pynchon succeeds in 
making his tale both more scary and more universal. In GR, Pynchon did the 
same with Imipolex G - giving us vague and even contradictory informations 
about its colour (black? grey? white?), and its origin (supposedly developed 
by Lazlo Jamf in 1939 (249), but also somehow present when Slothrop was an 
infant back around 1915 (286)).
The odalisque of the snows is somehow both a creature of the ice, a force of 
nature, an indigenous spirit, and a living meteorite. As a creature of the 
ice, it calls to mind such literary predecessors as the similarly vague 
figure from the very ending of Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym":

"And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw 
itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human 
figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And 
the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow."

And as a living meteorite it calls to mind much later works, e.g. Peter 
Høeg's "Smilla's Sense of Snow", where an expedition to Greenland also 
discovers an ancient, and possibly living, meteorite buried in the ice, and 
where those same themes of scientific rationality meeting nature are played 
out, c.f. this passage from the end of Høeg's novel:

"Suddenly whether the stone is alive or not is so longer important to me, 
either. Suddenly it has become a symbol. At this moment it becomes the 
crystallization of the attitude of Western science toward the world. 
Calculation, hatred, hope, fear, the attempt to measure everything. And 
above all else, stronger than any empathy for living things: the desire for 
money."

Not as eloquent as Pynchon, but surely in the same conceptual ballpark.
Also, uh, a friend of mine read Dan Brown's rip-roaring "Deception Point", 
and he, um, told me that Brown's novel is also about a meteorite buried deep 
in the Arctic ice: NASA digs it up, finds signs of life, and mayhem ensues. 
With his recent successes in the courtroom, maybe Dan Brown should consider 
sueing Pynchon....

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