I posted these notes on Thomas Pynchon’s 2025 novel Shadow Ticket on Biblioklept in October and November of 2025. They appear here in basically the same form.
Let’s start with the epigraph:
“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not.”
—Bela Lugosi,
in The Black Cat (1934) Continue reading “Notes on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket”
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.
Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.
Notes on Chapters 33-34 | The dead ride fast.
Notes on Chapters 35-36 | Ghost city.
Chapter 37: Shadow Ticket continues its wrap-up. Hicks punches another old ticket, not-exactly-solving the mystery of missing Stuffy Keegan (who disappeared way back in Ch. 8 on a U-13 submarine — a submarine that not everyone can see — into the icy depths of Lake Michigan.)
Hicks meets Stuffy at “the old Whitehead factory, where the torpedo as we have come to know it was invented.” The Whitehead Torpedo Works, based in Fiume/Rijeka invented and developed the self-propelled torpedo in the 1860s. After WWI the company (under different subsidiary names) manufactured motorcycles and then hand grenades — bikes and pineapples, in the parlance of Shadow Ticket. There are a lot of bombs and biwheels in this novel.
The Whitehead Torpedo Works is another of Shadow Ticket’s Gothic spots, “fallen into ruin [and] said to be haunted by the ghosts of submarines long dismantled.” The phantom submarine that Stuffy crews is supernatural, natch, and a totem of the bigger thesis that Pynchon underlines throughout his latest novel: It’s never too late to redeem yourself. A war machine might repurpose itself, friendly ghost, into a rescue ship (or at minimum, a do-no-harm ship).
Stuffy introduces Hicks to the submarine’s skipper, Ernst Hauffnitz a veteran of the Great War responsible for “no casualty count that I know of, idiot’s luck no doubt.” The idiot, the fool, is blessed in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and in Shadow Ticket especially. And the idiot-who-does-no-harm is especially blessed. Let’s consider Hicks’s past as a strikebreaker, which we learn about back in Ch. 4, in a pivotal encounter when the big gorilla goes to whack a “truculent little Bolshevik” with a “lead-filled beavertail sap” that would’ve surely killed the poor fella. Hicks’s blackjack disappears — “asported,” in the novel’s paranormal lingo. It sets him on a non-violent path (whether he sees or chooses this path or not).
For skipper Ernst Hauffnitz, doubts about the merits of war — by which I think we should say, doubts about using technology and innovation in the service of violence and undue death — began when “Max Valentiner torpedoed and sank SS Persia in the Mediterranean, killing 343 civilians in direct violation of Chancellery orders to spare passengers and rescue survivors.”
Those doubts increased when post-WWI orders to bring his submarine “to be broken up pursuant to Article 122 of the Trianon dictate“ led Captain Hauffnitz to suicidal feelings — but he converts that despair into hope, and sets out on a “new career of nonbelligerence.”
That new do-no-harm career includes helping out the Al Capone of Cheez, Bruno Airmont, “Who is about to be taken, as we speak, off on an undersea voyage of uncertain extent.” The International Cheese Syndicate — InChSyn — is after Bruno who’s taken off with their cash and their secrets. The submariners, now in “the search and rescue line” aim to see that “Mr. Airmont is safely relocated where he can neither commit nor incur further harm.”
Captain Hauffnitz continues: “You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time, forever on the move, a patch of Fiume as it once was, immune to time, surviving all these years in the deep refuge of the sea…” On the move is the move of Shadow Ticket, one of its grand themes summed up by Stuffy Keegan back in Ch. 20: “as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free.”
The episode concludes with reference to the “Valdivia Expedition of 1898–99, which brought up into the daylight a pitch-black critter known as the Vampire Squid, by whose name, these days, the U-13 has since come to be known.” More Gothic tinges!
We transition to the parting farewells of Bruno and Daphne; Daphne’s secured her father’s passage with a mariner named Drago. Papa Bruno gives his “li’l midnight pumpkin” a parting gift — “Better than money…It’s information” on the machinations of the InChSyn. Their last moments end with Bruno looking down at his watch, a “Rolex Oyster Perpetual he does not seem to recognize, as if thanks to the psychical ambience he’s been in all evening it has just apported onto his wrist.”
It’s an odd reference, Bruno’s phantom Rolex, but it also fits with the novel’s theme of time as well as the motif of timepieces. Way back in Ch. 1, Skeet Wheeler shows off his new watch to Hicks: “Hamilton, glows in the dark too.” We’ll get a reference to that timepiece in the last paragraphs of the novel.
Bruno doesn’t make it too far on Drago’s escape boat before Hauffnitz’s crew intervenes. He’s on their sub in no time, wondering if he’s imprisoned in his “not uncomfortable cabin” — “Is this the brig I’m in, he wonders. No, submarines don’t have brigs, they are brigs.”
Stuffy starts to explain the situation to Bruno; the Cheez Gangster at first believes that the crew of the Vampire Squid intend to turn him over to the InChSyn. But as we saw earlier in the chapter, their goal is to add to a world of do no harm.
Stuffy tries to hip Bruno to his new life: “See, there’s a difference between the Al Capone of Cheese and the AC of C in Exile. One sooner or later gets the paving-material overcoat. The other goes where he’ll do no harm. Our racket happens to be exile.”
The chapter ends with Stuffy hipping Bruno to the 1933 Wisconsin milk strikes:
Seems revolution has broken out in the U.S., beginning in Wisconsin as a strike over the price per hundredweight that dairy farmers were demanding for milk, spreading across the region and soon the nation. Milk shipments hijacked and dumped at trackside, trees felled across roadways and set aflame to stop motor delivery, all-night sentinels, crossroads pickets, roundups, ambushes, bayonet charges, gunfire, casualties military and civilian.
It’s easy to dismiss Pynchon’s evocation of American zaniness as goofy, silly, unserious — but that would require (the very easy threshold of) not actually really reading Pynchon, a writer whose works stand clearly on the side of organized labor as well as on the peace-anarchy dimension of do no harm. The notion of “milk strikes” and a gangster cheese magnate might seem wacky, but Pynchon’s narrator points us towards the wallet, the stomach, the soul. There’s something comforting in the idea of Midwestern dairy workers going hard as a motherfucker and taking collective action to resist exploitation a century ago.
Chapter 38: Who should Hicks run into on the Korzo but one-time mob-enforcer Dippy Chazz Foditto, recently deported from the USA but nevertheless “just signed on to a scheme hatched and run by U.S. ruling-class elements who are betting that the island of Sicily will be a strategic factor in the next war.” Dippy will help to establish “a local anti-Fascist guerrilla force, trained, armed, and ready to roll.” Again, we’re ramping up to WW2. Dippy Chazz brings news from the West: Hicks’s old flame April is now married to the head crimeboss Milwaukee, and pregnant to boot. Hicks is exiled: “Take the tip, is all, it’s over for you in M’waukee, Hicks, Chicago too.”
The chapter ends on a sad note, with Hicks, “in the dawn hours of the first day of a post-American life…dials a number without thinking much about it till later, when he remembers it’s a TRIangle exchange number in Chicago, same as Al Capone’s mother has.” We can recall from Ch. 4 that Hicks’s mother Grace abandoned him to run away with an elephant trainer. He has a conversation with a person — his mother? Capone’s? just a person? — that ends with the sad image of trying to find “just a glimpse of something blowing away into the night, something it’s already too late to chase in this windbeaten emptiness taking possession of his heart…”
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.
Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork.
Notes on Chapters 33-34 | The dead ride fast.
Chapter 35 commences in “Fiume…a tattered ghost city with a sordid history of secret treaties and sellouts, edging its way through what the Fascist Italian regime calls Year Ten, continuing to collapse in on itself, unlikely to be redeemed.”
There’s a lot there, as in most of Shadow Ticket’s sentences. The Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio marched on Fiume in 1919, claiming it post-WWI in defiance of its “Free City” status. Like the Esperanto that runs through Shadow Ticket, utopian ideals won’t last long.
The spectral language invoking an unredeemed ghost city is a theme Pynchon explored throughout Gravity’s Rainbow, the first section of which, in particular, details a preterite, apocalyptic London. I think what’s notable here is again the sense of a pretender’s “utopian intellectualism” — the fascist force’s Anno X — which tries to stabilize a dehumanizing pursuit of power within the context of the humanities. It’s a ghost town, bound for collapse, bad for the soul.
The narrator notes that Fiume was once “a major port of embarkation for the New World, bright and bustling.” What’s more utopian than a capital-en-capital double-you New World? Shadow Ticket is all about movement, particularly west-east movement, with the bilocated east-west corollary (coreality?) built in. Indeed, Pynchon will end the novel a la Huckleberry Finn with Hicks’ protege Skeet Wheeler following Huck’s move to “light out for the Territory.” But I’m jumping ahead. The bigger Thing to note here, I think is that the New World is not so new anymore. Frontiers are going to be stranger, more combustible, going forward.
I’ve focused too much on setting: Our man in Fiume is Daphne Airmont, hunting Papa Cheez. She picks up a pair of Morčić, “earrings representing a black Moor’s head in a fancy white turban,” as well as a new tune, “Daleko m’ê moj Split,” (“My Split Is Far Away from Me” — here, a reference to the singer’s hometown).
A few nights later Daphne is singing this tune “at a sympathetic room in a roadhouse on the Yugoslavian side of the line, where neighborhood musicians like to get together, tonight a C-melody sax, banjo-uke, trombone, piano, an underlying beat from snare brushes and woodblock” — I let the sentence ride out because just because (lots of ukes in Shadow Ticket, yet not a single snood). In the middle of the song, Daphne’s “joined out of somewhere by a clarinet, all too immediately recognizable as who else but Hop Wingdale.” Before the erstwhile couple retreats to more private environs to catch up, Hop “reaches for a highball glass, where he’s been keeping a couple of reeds soaking in slivovitz, drinks what’s there, pours in more.” I agree with Daphne (“That’s disgusting!”), but maybe the Drunk Pynchon blog will disagree if they ever get around to “clarinet reeds soaked in slivovitz.”
I can’t help myself: Here’s Pynchon’s mise en scène one-sentence-paragraph for the Daphne-Hop intimate reunion, in which she will find out that he’s actually a spy:
“A busy echoing interior comfortably dim with all-night cigarette and kitchen smoke, young runners who never fall asleep in and out bringing seafood fresh from the Adriatic, a continuous wind outside, down from the high limestone, a theremin of uneasiness, sliding around a narrow band of notes, in which it’s said you may come to hear repeated melodies, themes and variations, which is when you know you’re going bughouse, with only a very short period of grace to try and escape before it no longer matters.”
Pynchon is an underrated prose stylist. The rhythm here might not work for all folks, but it sings to me. There’s obviously a bustling noir quality to the cramped kitchen scene, which Pynchon drapes in mystical paranoia: the Adriatic wind (and “wind” by the by, is a byword in Against the Day, a physical yet invisible force) — the Adriatic wind becomes “a theremin of uneasiness,” a phrase that recalls “the Sombrero of Uneasiness” that makes “a chill creep across Hicks’s scalp” back in Ch. 10, back in Wisconsin, back at the Nazi bowling alley. (There was also a nod to the theremin back in Ch. 24, at the Club Hypotenuse.) The last little bit of the paragraph is a parable for paranoids perhaps — when we “hear repeated melodies, themes and variations,” we know we’re “going bughouse.”
There’s a bit of business at the end of the Daphne-Hop episode that again points to Shadow Ticket’s underinflated bagginess — I’ve pointed out in these riffs that this is a much bigger novel in my imagination, a fat wedge between between Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow. The narrator mentions that Daphne’s supposed-one-time-not-really-fiance “G. Rodney Flaunch has recently published How to Lose a Million and a Half and Bounce Back Smiling,” opening a potential skewering of the kind of self-helpery bullshit that grifters continue to grift on as we breathe, this very minute. It’s a blip of a bit, reminding us that Daphne is far from home (as “Daleko m’ê moj Split” has already underscored), and if it’s underdeveloped, well, William Gaddis took Carnegie to task in The Recognitions (and elsewhere).
The wrapping-things-up-too-quickly motif continues as Hicks and Daphne reunite. Daphne’s headed back home; Hicks is not. She lets him off “that Chippewa hook”; no more life debt for Hicks. Our hero asks her to convey a message to April Randazzo, who is not mentioned by name, but rather alluded to as a “grown woman, married, family to raise” — the kiddie stuff is done. It’s time to grow up. The narrator infuses their stilted, terse parting with a flood of emotion:
“What one of them should have been saying was ‘We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree. If anybody’s around to remember. Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark…'”
The break is of course the moments between the two big wars, situated as the break between Modernity and what comes after — the atom bomb and all that.
Pynchon’s narrator then domesticates the issue in his hypothetical dialogue: “Stay, or go. Two fates beginning to diverge—back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time.” Here again is the novel’s theme of bilocation, of imagining two lives; shadow/form.
It gets darker of course, as the Second World War deserves: “Those you could have saved, could’ve shifted at least somehow onto a safer stretch of track, are one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the unrecoverable.” Hicks won’t go back east, back home to the New World. Can he rise to this challenge? Can he divert some souls to a safer stretch of track and earn a crumb of redemption?
Chapter 36 is a mess.
It is a mess because it attempts to tie up loose ends; that is the wrong metaphor, tie up loose ends — in any case a cavalcade of featured players, guest stars, and even extras show up here (in Fiume, natch), to reconfigure in new teams for the coming war. We get Hicks and Terike and Ace Lomax and Porfirio del Vasto and Zoltán von Kiss and Egon Praediger (“nose merrily aglow,” the fucking cokehead).
Anyway, they’re all in Fiume, convening at Bruno Airmont’s villa, which “dates from just after the War, when d’Annunzio’s republic was young and Fiume had a reputation as a party town, fun-seekers converging from all over, whoopee of many persuasions, wide-open to nudists, vegetarians, coke snorters, tricksters, pirates and runners of contraband, orgy-goers, fighters of after-dark hand-grenade duels, astounders of the bourgeoisie…” Pynchon twins this list with new revelers at the villa, now a scene for “night owls, freeloaders, accidental walk-ins, practitioners of esoteric arts, fearers of the dark, compulsive socializers, secret police, jewel thieves, firefly girls, drug dealers, cigarette-factory workers, tobacco smugglers…” Old boy loves lists! (What is a “firefly girl”?)
The noisy, buzzing chapter ends with Hop Wingdale offering Ace Lomax (along with “that Czechoslovakian robot” Zdeněk) a job “Escorting Jews to safety, one at a time or in truckloads.” Ace was once hired muscle — like Hicks, who started his “career” as a strikebreaker. But in Shadow Ticket we see the possibility for his changing sides. Redemption is possible. As the psychic Zoltán von Kiss suggests in Ch. 22: “even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.”
This novel believes in the promise of redemption.
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.
Notes on Chapters 30-32 | Some occult switchwork
Chapter 33 is the big-budget action sequence of Shadow Ticket, in which the “pocket-size golem Zdeněk” and musician/secret agent Hop Wingdale rescue Ace Lomax from the clutches of the fascist Vladboys in their “Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camp, located right on the borderline.” (Notably–significantly–Hicks is missing from the rescue team.)
The narrator informs us that the camp is “flexibly all-purpose Fascist, quivering in readiness to be deployed anywhere…briefly innocent as Fascism in its ‘springtime of beauty,’ as the old anthem goes, before it descended into paperwork and brutality…” We tend to think, rightly, that fascism is a rejection of progressive values, but it’s worth remembering that much of what we now think of as Modernism was wrapped up in proto-fascist idealizations of energy and action — consider Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism f’r’instance…
The camp where Ace is being held prisoner is a hotbed of action:
“Fascist adventurers have journeyed here from all over, Austrians sporting blue cornflowers and black grouse feathers, secret police, anti-Red goon squads, revolutionary cells, convicts escaped from internal exile and not sure where they are right now or what language they’re supposed to be speaking, colonial stooges in civvies in from as far afield as Indo-China and South America, irredentist aristos from the old Hungarian kingdom adrift in nostalgia, Polish freelancers working on spec for all of the above.”
I love the force of the sentence. For such a breezy novel, Shadow Ticket is dense. We might take it as a sketch of a much larger, thicker, denser novel.
Well so and anyway–
The deal is that Hop’s band shows up to play this fascist gig; he’s informed that they, the fascist paramilitary Vladboys, “are pretending to invade Fiume, which any number of potential clients want back.” The garrulous entertainment liaison who meets with the band opines that such an invasion would be “all over in a day or two. Anasa supo.”
That last phrase, anasa supo, is Esperanto for duck soup, an American idiom referring to a task easily accomplished. Duck Soup is also of course the title of the 1933 Marx Brothers that centers (oh-so-anarchically) around the tiny nation of Freedonia–a bilocation of Fiume? Here’s a bit of bilocation from Duck Soup:
Hop and his band will play their swing tunes in “ruined limestone amphitheater, once dedicated to bloodletting presented as amusement, back when the Fifth Macedonian Legion were busy here invading and occupying.“
The entertainment menu is “A Gay Evening with Vlad Ţepeş,” with riffs including “Vlad’s Vegetarian Chef”…(“Turnip loaf again, remind me to have the chef impaled”) and “Vlad at the Office” (the Count laments that they never call him “Vlad the Spending Reducer.”)
Is this “Vlad Ţepeş” just a performer playing a character in the evening’s festivities, vamping on a riff–or is it, like, the Vlad Ţepeş, son of Vlad Dracul, Voivode of Wallachia, born half a century before the events of Shadow Ticket — like, Dracula man Vlad? A few paragraphs later, we are briefly introduced to the thug guarding Ace, “Csongor…a sort common in these parts, an apprentice vampire doomed never to develop past journeyman.” On one hand, the language here, and the general supernatural bent of Shadow Ticket suggests that these are like real (as in mythological) vampires — but the novel’s themes of bilocation also hedge the bet: vampire here could be a metaphor; the Vlad Ţepeş could be merely an actor playing a part.
Pynchon renders the scene in the kind of sexualized language we’d expect from vampire stories: “Vladboys have been building up, sending them out after prey each time in a more dangerous state of arousal. Trivial disputes are apt at any moment to erupt into violence. Local women go more and more in fear of their safety, cover their hair, stay in groups. The weirdly erotic charge accumulates, until vrrrooom! here’s the Vladboys out on another massive prowl…”
The prowl, as we’ve already learned, scores “Ace…an understandably welcome catch, with the Flathead an unexpected bonus, which the boys keep insisting is a Jewish motorcycle.” (The idiot vladboys reasoning? “Harley. David…Son, this is son of David, no?”)
Standing guard over their “welcome catch,” journeyman vampire Csongor takes interest in Ace’s tattoo: “’Die Todten reiten schnell,’ the Vladboy reads from the Gothic lettering there. ‘Something about the dead ride fast.'”
The phrase “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” appears in the opening chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a phrase recorded in Harker’s journal, which he identifies as the “line from [Gottfried August] Bürger’s ‘Lenore.'”
Csongor wants to know if the dead actually do ride fast. Ace’s answer is philosophical: “Over there, among the dead, time has no meaning anymore, so to get distance per hour you’d have to divide by zero, which even if it was legal would still give you infinite speed.”
But before he can really explain his riff on death-speed paradox though, Ace’s rescuers arrive: “the pocket-size golem Zdeněk [and] Hop Wingdale.” Our mini-golem is a cyborg: “Zdeněk’s left arm turns out to be a modified ZB-26 Czech light machine gun, with the magazine built into his shoulder.” He likens it to “one of many earthly variants of Azrael, the Angel of Death” — yet still spares Csongor.
The chapter ends with our heroic trio escaping the fascist camp, fleeing their captors with the aid of a “pocket-size model” of a “a Bangalore torpedo” that Zdeněk has improvised from “a few sticks of dynamite thoughtfully borrowed last week in Transylvania off of a freelance firefighting crew passing through en route to a Romanian oil-well fire everybody could see from fifty miles away.”
The massive fire Pynchon’s narrator refers to here is, with most everything in Shadow Ticket, an historical event. The “torch of Moreni” burned for almost two and a half years, from September 1929 to November 1932.
Chapter 34 opens with a sentence that lays out the situation for us: “Daphne looking for Hop has blundered out into a territory she thought she knew, which in fact the political situation has changed to something unrecognizable and poisonous.”
The Weimar days are over; “Hamburg, once the Swing Kid metropol” is now a Nazi hotbed, where “Blues licks have largely given way to major triads.” Conformity reigns; difference is punished. Daphne finds this out the hard way when she “wanders into a beer garden [Hop’s band] the Klezmopolitans once played at, formerly named the Midnight Mouse after a poem by Christian Morgenstern, now converted to a Sturmlokal” — she’s stumbled into a Nazi bar, and immediately finds herself imperiled by the not-so-subtle sexual predations of fascist goons (“Looking for me, Schätzchen?”)
But before our “Cheez Princess…become[s] fondue” she’s by Glow Tripforth del Vasto in her autogyro-cum-deus-ex-machina. They alight to a tavern; on the way Glow complains that because gyros “are forgiving ships…there’s the danger [of] The idiot appeal…romance on the cheap.” Modern convenience will puncture Gothic adventures of flight. Any idiot can fly.
Glow, headed to “some kind of anarchist sainthood” in Spain, drops Daphne in Fiume, but first delivers another one of several hey-we’re-about-to-be-in-some-bigger-mess-than-we-thought-we-were-going-to-be-in proclamations: “Whatever it is that’s just about to happen, once it’s over we’ll say, oh well, it’s history, should have seen it coming, and right now it’s all I can do to get on with my life.”
Glow adds, “I don’t care to know more than I need to about the mysteries of time…You’re expecting spiritual wisdom from little G. T. del V.? you’ll be waiting a long time, sucker.”
The dead might ride fast–but they’re still dead.
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Notes on Chapters 27-29 | We’re in for some dark ages, kid.
Chapter 30 opens in “The Vienna branch of MI3b, daytime, a modest-size office decorated with a movie poster of Lilian Harvey waltzing with Willy Fritsch in Der Kongreß tanzt and an ancient map of the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy.”
Der Kongreß tanzt (The Congress Dances) is a 1931 UFA production set in Vienna, 1815 — if you want to go down the rabbit hole, maybe start with this contemporary New York Times review of the film. The Congress Dances was Weimar UFA’s tentpole shot at competing with Hollywood; later the production company would be subsumed by the Nazis. A current throughout Pynchon’s works has been something like, resist the military-industrial-entertainment complex. It’s worth noting the emphasis on dancing here, a motif in Shadow Ticket. Is dancing a form of transcendent resistance? Or is it a narcotizing agent?
The Habsburg Dual Monarchy, formed in 1867 after the Austro-Prussian War, joined two distinct nations under one emperor — a kind of bilocation — leaving ethnic and nationalist tensions unresolved. These divisions weakened the empire, contributing to the instability that helped spark World War I and, after its collapse, left a fragmented Central Europe whose resentments helped set the stage for World War II.
We are in that stage-setting right now, in that fragmented, fragmenting Central Europe, in the office of British Military Intelligence Section 3 where secret agent couple Alf and Pip Quarrender have been called before “Station chief Arvo Thorp.” Thorp informs the Quarrenders that their asset Vassily Midoff is “seeking to join a motorcycle rally in progress at the moment” — the Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed that everyone’s set out on — and “that someone must be sent round” to cut off that loose end posthaste. The Quarrenders are upset — “But he was ours, Thorp…Our bloke” — but orders are orders. They do question the rationale of the orders though, wondering if it was simply “too much effort to keep all [Vassily’s] allegiances straight.” Here we have a neat little summary of how some readers may feel sussing motives and plot points from Shadow Ticket.
Codebreaker Alf gets something proximal to an “answer” when he intercepts an encrypted message floating around various intelligence agencies: Vassily “has apparently been promoted to deputy operations officer of an unacknowledged narkomat, a Blavatskian brotherhood of psychical masters and adepts located someplace out in the wild Far East.” Pynchon further underlines Shadow Ticket’s haunted themes, bringing up Stalin’s “chief crypto genius Gleb Bokii [who] is also running a secret lab specializing in the paranormal.”
But Alf can’t fully crack the code (natch), receiving “only glimpses behind a cloak of dark intention at something on a scale far beyond trivialities of known politics or history, which one fears if ever correctly deciphered will yield a secret so grave, so countersacramental, that more than one government will go to any lengths to obtain and with luck to suppress it.” In a chilly series of sentences, Alf, pushed by “some invisible power,” continues chipping at the encryption against his better judgment. But the encryption is, well, cryptic, even as it portends a future yet to come (including the ominous not that Stalin, “threatened by supernatural forces [would] probably go after Jews first.”
Alf concludes that Vassily “may have gone mad, he may in fact have crossed a line forbidden or invisible to the likes of us, thrown by some occult switchwork over onto an alternate branch line of history.” The “alternative branch line” again evokes the novel’s themes of bilocation (which I’ve tried to enumerate in previous riffs).
(The bigger Pynchonian bilocation is frequently visible/invisible, in the spiritualist-materialist sense — which perhaps finds a moral corollary in convenient/inconvenient.)
So well and anyway–the Quarrenders track down the Russian Trans-Trianon caravan and locate Vassily, but he manages to escape on a Rio-bound zeppelin painted like a watermelon, to their relief.
“Hicks, Slide, and Zdeněk come rolling into a parts depot deep in the Transylvanian forest,” at the beginning of Chapter 31. (Slide is an American journalist; Zdeněk is a non-gigantic golem, if you need help keeping track.) They are on the Trans-Trianon 2000 motorcycle route, presumably tracking Hop Wingdale. Or Daphne Airmont. Or Bruno Airmont. Or…?
Here in “actual Transylvania, the vampire motherland itself,” the trio drives through “hairpin turns frequented by vengeful spirits, passages cursed by some local shaman, marsh life you wouldn’t want swarming around you after dark…And the bats of course.” According to Zdeněk these vampire bats “are the Unbreathing, who go about their business in a silence not even broken by pulsebeats.”
Slide’s brought along his Leica camera to “cover the supernatural angle,” but the pictures all end up blank: “a vampire’s allergy to silver, an ambivalence as to light itself…” I’ve foregrounded Shadow Ticket’s Gothic motifs and impulses throughout my notes. I don’t really know what I could add to, like, golems and vampires in Transylvania.
Noting that the Trans-Trianon 2000 motorcycle route allows for “impulses disallowed in normal society” to be acted upon, the narration then gives over to one of my favorite little bits in Shadow Ticket, a self-contained episode of “spontaneous pig rescue.” The pig in question is “a Mangalica, a popular breed in Hungary at the moment, curly-coated as a sheep, black upper half, blonde lower. And that face! One of the more lovable pig faces, surrounded by ringlets and curls.”
Pynchon’s porcophilia is well-documented, with pigs showing favorably throughout his work–particularly in Mason & Dixon and in Gravity’s Rainbow, where Tyrone Slothrop takes on the role (and costume) of Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero, and then later wanders through the Zone with a sweet pig as his companion-guide, while the narrator sings:
“A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt–
A pig is a pal, who’ll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.”
Back to Hicks: “wandering the compound one day hears a piano in the distance, recognizes the tune as ‘Star of the County Down,’ a longtime favorite of Irish drinkers he’s known.” It turns out that none other than Pip Quarrender is singing and playing the song — which she identifies as “Dives and Lazarus,” a traditional English folk song that that adapts a riff from the Gospel of Luke. Pips notes that it’s “technically it’s a Christmas carol, though uncomfortable for the average churchgoer given its rather keen element of class hostility.” We have here another bilocation, a song with two separate but real co-existing lives. (Throw in a little class warfare, too.)
Hicks then runs into Terike, who’s concerned that Ace Lomax is missing, on the run from she-knows-not-what (it’s Bruno). The chapter ends with “Zdeněk the golem [locating] Hop Wingdale en route to a Croatian guerrilla training camp near the Hungarian border.” He decides to go check it out.
The band pulls in to a “towering wooden cylinder set in a clearing, filled with the snarling of low-displacement bike engines.” Their gig is at a Wall of Death motor cycle stunt show.
Pynchon invokes the image of a wall of death late in Gravity’s Rainbow: “somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone.” The metaphor here of course is the wall between the living and the dead.
It turns out that Ace Lomax has been stunt riding on the Wall of Death for tips. Prompted by the band, he sings a Western tune: “Things were so jake, at the O.K. Corral— / Till those Earps and Clantons came along—.” The fantasy here is of an unspoiled West which eventually succumbs to the violence of competing agencies.
Ace recognizes Hop and congratulates his being “still vertical.” He proceeds to tell the musician that Bruno Airmont had tried to get Ace to assassinate Hop, but he decided that wasn’t his gig and hit the road: “By nightfall he’s in Bratislava and slipping unnoticed in among a convoy of Trans-Trianon machinery.” In their discussion about the Wall of Death, Hop brings up motordrome physics: “Somebody said it’s safe long as you keep moving fast enough, something about centrifugal force.” We get here a repetition of one of Shadow Ticket’s major themes, neatly summed up by Stuffy Keegan back in Ch. 20: “as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free.”
Ace then hits the road. He fails to check in back at the Trans-Trianon base camp, causing Terike’s cryptic road-adventuress face…to drift into disarray. She decides to light out looking for him.
The chapter ends with the narrator telling us that it turns “out that in some walled-in maze of a mountain town Ace has missed a turn…and ends up running on fumes.” He’s pursued by not only wolves but also the fascist Vladboys, “who also run this terrain in packs.” The fascist gang are on what I take to be dirt bikes, faster than Ace’s Harley. The last line, “Ace finds himself in the hands of the Vladboys,” sets up a nice opportunity for a big dramatic climactic rescue scene.
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Notes on Chapters 21-23 | Phantom gearbox.
Chapter 24: Another fairly long chapter for Shadow Ticket. I’ve been over-summarizing in these notes, and maybe I’ll keep over-summarizing — at this point doing these notes has been my second reading of Shadow Ticket. I would say though, that we’ve reached a point well beyond the novel’s quick change glamour, its bilocative split — or its bait n’ switch, if you feel that way. The novel initially presents as a hardboiled noir send-up in the dark American Heartland only to pivot (or bilocate, to misapporpriate a term from Against the Day) to Central Europe where there’s preparation for a war on (moron). Hero Hicks fades, just a little, in the background; a larger cast steps up.
But Hicks is still the heart of Ch. 24, which begins at Egon Praediger’s office in Budapest, where the ICPC detective is snorting soup spoonfuls of cocaine while ranting about his inability to catch Bruno Airmont. Egon fears he’s wasting his talent “not on an evil genius but on an evil moron, dangerous not for his intellect, what there may be of it, but for the power that his ill-deserved wealth allows him to exert, which his admirers pretend is will, though it never amounts to more than the stubbornness of a child.” Oh man–wonder if that sounds like any evil moron of recent vintage? Egon would rather face off against a worthy villain, a “Dr. Mabuse or Fu Manchu,” references again underlining Shadow Ticket’s lurid pop Goth bona fides.
Hicks then runs into Terike, “just emerging from her latest run-in with the authorities over her motorcycle, a 500 cc Guzzi Sport 15″ — which more on this transport later. On the way to the bike, Hicks finds that he has somehow “percolated through“ Terike, who has performed some kind of metaphysical quick change. He apports, I guess.
For Terike, the Guzzista “is a metaphysical critter. We know, the way you’d say a cowboy knows, that there’s a fierce living soul here that we have to deal with.” As we should expect now in Ole Central Europe, this bike is spooky, and Terike is a superhero on it: “she can go straight up the sides of walls, pass through walls, ride upside down on the overheads, cross moving water, jump ditches, barricades, urban chasms one rooftop to the next, office-building corridors to native-quarter alleyways quicker than a wink.”
Hicks rides along in the sidecar. (A bit later we’ll see a charming pig, a spirit animal, really, riding sidecar–perhaps there’s a link between Hicks and Pynchon’s other pigmen, like Seaman Bodine or Tyrone Slothrop (or the unfortunate Major Marvy.) Their mission: deliver a batch of experimental vacuum tubes “specially designed for the theremin” to “Club Hypotenuse,” a “cheerfully neon-lit” venue featuring a rotating dance floor and “not just one soloist on theremin but a half dozen, each expensively gowned tomato with more or less identical platinum bobs, waving their hands at these units and pulling music out of some deep invisibility, swooping one note to the next, hitting each one with pitch as perfect, Terike assures him, as the instrument’s reigning queen, Clara Rockmore. The joint effect of these six virtuoso cuties all going at once in close harmony is strangely symphonic.”
(Forgive me if I let the quote linger too long, the image is just too lovely.)
At Club Hypotenuse we get a bit of background on Terike, her rejection of her bourgeoisie upbringing, and recent Hungarian political struggles, before meeting yet another character, freelance foreign correspondent Slide Gearheart (he uses the alias “Judge Crater” at the bar. We last heard the name back in Ch. 18, but Crater, icon of the disappearing act, will pop up again). Slide lets Hicks in on a lead he has to cheese heiress Daphne Airmont’s whereabouts; he also gives our P.I. some advice about (not) fitting in to Hungary: “…best stick to English and there’s a chance they’ll take you for an idiot and leave you alone. It might help if you could also pretend now and then to hear voices they don’t. Idiots get respect out here, they’re believed to be in touch with invisible forces.”
But Slide’s bigger note for Hicks is a soft warning to prepare him for the reality that you can never really go home.
Chapter 25: “Things pick up a day or two later when Slide reports that Daphne has been sighted at the Tropikus nightclub, in Nagymező utca, the Broadway of Budapest.” (This is I suppose the inspiration for the use of the photograph of Nagymező Street used on the cover of the first edition of Shadow Ticket.)
Daphne sings a song and then she and Hicks dance together.
So–I have really neglected Shadow Ticket as a song and dance routine. I think if you’ve read Pynchon you’d expect it; it’s a bit more prevalent here, the singing and dancing, in Shadow Ticket I mean, then in some of the other novels, but it’s certainly what you’d expect. The songs probably deserve their own whole blog or something to deal with (which I will never do); the dancing — well the dancing — I think something I should’ve highlighted much earlier is that Hicks is a really good dancer. Like fucking excellent. He’s a magician who goes into “one of those hoofer’s trances” in the previous chapter while dancing with Terike to the theremin orchestra. That notation — of the trance state — is given for various characters in Shadow Ticket who achieve a kind of short-term perfection outside the physical realm. (It’s the drummer Pancho Caramba (and like, Pynchon, c’mon man, that’s too much, name wise) — it’s the drummer Pancho Caramba in Ch. 25 who goes “into this kind of trance” at his drum kit, enchanting his audience.)
Most of the chapter is the dance and the dance-within-the-dance between Hicks and Daphne. There are Gothic-tinged allusions to their past in Wisconsin–his saving her from the “North Shore Zombie Two-Step” of forced psychiatric hospitalization, incurring a “Chippewa hoodoo” debt as her caretaker in perpetual.
We also start to get Daphne’s backstory with Hop Wingdale, the jazz clarinetist she left home for. She’s followed Hop and his band the Klezmopolitans around Europe, but is worried that the ill-fated lovers “need to relocate before it’s all Storm Trooper chorales and three-note harmony.” Daphne again underlines Shadow Ticket’s departure point — a big ugly change is gonna come. Hop is (rightfully) worried about Papa “Bruno’s invisible hand…” though. “Awkwardly enough,” he tells Daphne, “it turns out more of your life than you think is being run on the Q.T. by none other” but her pops.
The phrase “on the Q.T.” — meaning quiet (or “on the quiet tip,” as I thought way back as a teen encountering it) — shows up a few times in Shadow Ticket. It’s phonetically doubled in the word cutie, which shows up more than a few times in Shadow Ticket.
Chapter 26: Another longish section by Shadow Ticket standards, and less breezy than the novel as a whole.
There’s a lot of Daphne-Hicks and Daphne-Hop stuff here — more bilocations, maybe? — in any case, our boy Hicks gets himself more wrapped up than he intended to. After Daphne urges him to help hunt down Hop, who’s kinda sorta left her, he reminds himself of his mantra “No More Matrimonials! Ever!”
By the end of the chapter our American idiot is wondering if “wouldn’t it be a nice turnaround to bring some couple back together again, put the matrimony back in ‘matrimonial’ for a change, instead of divorce lawyers into speedsters and limousines.” Here, I couldn’t help but think of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film revision to Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice; PTA ties a neater bow on the narrative by letting its lead P.I. Doc Sportello restore the marriage of musician Coy Harlingen.
Anyway, we get Daphne and Hop’s origin story: “Talk about meeting cute. You’d think she’d have known better by then. It was in Chicago a few years back, still deep in her teen playgirl phase.” General gunplay shatters Daphne’s double aviation cocktail. She’s smitten with his woodwind serenades.
This chapter is chocked full of motifs and mottoes we’d expect from Shadow Ticket in particular at this point and Pynchon in general: invisibility, inconvenience, Judge Crater, “Who killed vaudeville?,” etc. It’s also pretty horny, with Hicks and Daphne finally consummating their meet cute from years gone by. Sorry if I’m breezing through.
I’m more interested in a specific exchange.
Daphne hips Hicks to something she saw “once, in one of these mental fix-it shops I kept getting sent to, up on the office wall was a motto of Carl Jung—Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. I said what’s this my Latin’s a little rusty, he sez that’s called or not called, the god will come.”
The end of Ch. 23, at least in my guess, seemed to obliquely reference Jung’s Answer to Job, with the narrator suggesting that a trinity can only truly operate as a whole in the form of a stealth quatro — it’s phantom fourth piece balancing out the visible trio in the foreground. The reference to Jung here is not oblique but direct and maybe I will do something more direct with it down the line.
Of course the thing that comes to save Daphne isn’t “the god” but that Big Gorilla Hicks. He notes that, “Your old pals from the rez think it’s spoze to be a critter” who shows up to save the day. In a moment of vulnerability that I take to be sincere, Daphne asks Hicks if he didn’t think that she might actually be insane and should be returned to the hospital and not set free. His reply is a repetition of one of the novel’s several theses: “You were on the run, that was enough.”
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Chapter 21:
We move from trans-Atlantic passage to Central Europe pretty quickly. Hicks’s spy handlers Alf and Pip (and like at this point I don’t think he fully realizes Alf and Pip are his handlers on whatever shadow ticket he’s picked up) — Hicks’s spy handlers Alf and Pip leave Hicks on the train while they depart into Belgrade, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.
In the Quarrenders’ place emerges Egon Praediger, claiming to be of ICPC — the International Criminal Police Commission (not the Insane Clown Posse Crew), progenitor of Interpol (not the dour 2000s band, but the ICPO). Egon produces “a jarful of cocaine crystals” and grinds up some fat lines — “a routine known around Chicago as ‘hitching up the reindeer,'” the narrator informs us. While ingesting the coke, Egon eventually discloses the shadow ticket Hicks is working: “as you pursue the elusive Miss Airmont, we keep the shadow on you day and night, hoping that Bruno at a moment of diminished attention will make some fateful lunge.” (In another nod to Shadow Ticket’s Gothic motif, the narrator tells us that Egon pronounces the name Bruno Airmont “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”).
It turns out that the Al Capone of cheese is the ICPC’s “most sought-after public enemy,” wanted for “criminal activities including murder, tax evasion in a number of countries, [and] Cheese Fraud.” For the terrible crime of counterfeiting cheese, “the International Cheese Syndicate,” or “InChSyn,” want to lock up Bruno. In a cocaine thrall, Egon riffs a bit at the sinister implications behind the scenes: “Cheese Fraud being a metaphor of course, a screen, a front for something more geopolitical, some grand face-off between the cheese-based or colonialist powers, basically northwest Europe, and the vast teeming cheeselessness of Asia.” Egon’s ranting here echoes the academic discussions of cheese back at the Airmont compound in Ch. 13, when discussion turns to breaking into the Asian markets: “How the heck do we create a market for dairy products in Japan short of invading and occupying the country outright? Taking away their tea or sake or whatever it is they drink and forcing them to drink milk like normal human beings?”
(Going back to Ch. 13 to find these lines, I realized that I’d neglected to include a Gothic reference in my riff on that chapter, where cheese is described as “a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein”).
Egon’s coked-up rant culminates in another of Shadow Ticket’s prophetic warnings of the Next Big War to Come. A glistening, entranced Egon declares:
“This is the ball bearing on which everything since 1919 has gone pivoting, this year is when it all begins to come apart. Europe trembles, not only with fear but with desire. Desire for what has almost arrived, deepening over us, a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna, rapidly and without limit in every direction, and so across the continents, trackless forests and unvisited lakes, plaintext suburbs and cryptic native quarters, battlefields historic and potential, prairie drifted over the horizon with enough edible prey to solve the Meat Question forever…”
To repeat a claim I made in my last riff: Shadow Ticket is a bridge novel between two of Pynchon’s masterpieces, Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow.
And, to repeat another claim I’ve been making throughout these notes, as Hicks moves eastward, Shadow Ticket’s supernatural elements come closer to the foreground. He’s en route to Budapest, where, according to Egon, there “carouses a psychical Mardi Gras in every shade of the supernatural no matter how lurid.” We learn that “Budapest just at the moment is the metropolis and beating heart of asport/apport activities, where objects precious and ordinary, exquisite and kitsch, big and small, have been mysteriously vanishing on the order of dozens per day.” The “asport/apport” motif was first announced back in Ch. 4, via ex-vaudeville psychic Thessalie Wayward. Whereas folks back in Wisconsin were far more skeptical about — or at least reticent to openly speak about — the spooky stuff, Central Europe doesn’t try to deny it.
The chapter ends with Egon giving Hicks a present: a brand new type of pistol called the “Walther PPK.”
Chapter 22 begins in the Oktogon, a major intersection in Pest. Here, Hicks (and the readers) meet two new characters: Zoltán von Kiss, “once an echt working apportist, lately more of a psychic celebrity detective,” and motorcycle courier Terike who downplays her role as Zoltán’s “Glamorous Assistant.” Hicks is intrigued by Terike, and when she departs with “Szia!” — Hungarian for hello/goodbye, he responds with a “Hope so.” The pun is low hanging fruit but our boy Pynchon loves to eat from that tree.
Zoltán, or “Zoli,” as he prefers to be called has a mission for Hicks. But before getting into that (and a demonstration of his psychic and telekinetic powers), he distinguishes metaphysical Central Europe from concrete America:
“You are a practical people, Americans, everyone is either some kind of inventor or at least a gifted repairman. I myself have grown to rely too much on the passionate mindlessness which creeps over me just as an apport is about to arrive or depart. I am painfully aware of how much more exposure I need to the secular, material world.”
The phrase “passionate mindlessness” recalls Mindless Pleasures — a working title Pynchon used for what would become Gravity’s Rainbow.
But onto that mission: Hicks will assist in the recovery and return of “the crown jewel of tasteless lamps… known in underworld Esperanto as La Lampo Plej Malbongusto.” (Zoli’s ever-inflating description of the lamp’s tastelessness is pure Pynchon.) Again, we get an echo of the Airmont compound back in Ch. 13, where Hicks stumbled into “an excessive number of electric lamps… Some are unusual-looking, to say the least, and few if any in what you’d consider good taste.”
While the tasteless-lamp bit is, on the surface very goofy, it nevertheless highlights the novel’s concern with what can be seen and what remains unseen; with what casts a shadow, and with what is immaterial. Zolti posits the lamp’s recovery in language that approaches a holy restoration: “even the most hopelessly ill-imagined lamp deserves to belong somewhere, to have been awaited, to enact some return, to stand watch on some table, in some corner, as a place-keeper, a marker, a promise of redemption.” I think the notion here is beautiful answer to a rhetorical question posed in the opening nightmare of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, ‘You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you…‘ Pynchon is for the preterite; even the ugliest light-bearer is poised for redemption.
Hicks and Zoli eventually make their way to “a neighborhood of warehouses, corner taverns, cafés and hashish bars, metallic shadows, sounds of mostly invisible train traffic” and into speakeasyish spot “turbulent with kleptos conferring in Esperanto, featuring a lot of words ending in u (‘Volitive mood,’ comments Zoltán, ‘used for yearnings, regrets, if-onlys…’)” (When I was young my mother had a friend who was a member of an Esperanto society. The notion of an invented language fascinated me; I also recognized, even as a child, that it was a doomed project. I love that Pynchon includes a few nods to L. L. Zamenhof’s utopian linguistic project, and highlights the “yearning” behind the invented grammar.) After some funny business by a vaudevillian magic act trio called Drei Im Weggla (secret agents themselves, we’re assured parenthetically) and a nonviolent showdown with “Bruno Airmont’s deputy Ace Lomax,” Hicks fulfills his mission with Zoli.
Chapter 23 sees Hicks reunite with the Quarrenders. Pips has performed a quick change glamour, to Hicks’s admiration. She tells him it’s, All part of the craft, give whoever’s watching something blonde and shiny to fix their attention, then should one need to disappear, simply get rid of it and fade into the mobility.” Like Terike and the other sleight-of-hand artists of Shadow Ticket, Pips understands the value of posing as the “Glamorous Assistant.” Later in this chapter we’ll meet another spy, Vassily Midoff, of whom we’re told “Impressions of what he looks like also vary widely. Not that he’s invisible, exactly, people see him all the time, but they don’t remember that they saw him.”
Alf soon (literally) materializes and complains of an exhausting morning at the “Crossword Suicide Café.” Alf then goes on to detail how “an unemployed waiter named Antal Gyula steps in to what was then known as the Emke Café,” committed suicide, and left a “farewell note in the form of a crossword puzzle he designed himself, whose solution will reveal the reasons he did the deed, along with the names of other people involved.” The puzzle remained unsolved, a “crypto bonanza potentially and yet just as easily somebody’s idea of a practical joke.” The note is zany and sinister, silly and sad, utterly Pynchonian but also, like, totally real.
The chapter ends with the “nightclub apport trio Schnucki, Dieter, and Heinz, seated one behind another on a Böhmerland Long Touring motorcycle, ten and a half foot wheelbase, red and yellow paint job, riding patrol…” The spectacle upsets Vassily Midoff, who senses a fourth “invisible rider” at the motorcycle’s stern. He hits the high road, “spooked…back into invisibility,” the narrator noting that “for a trinity to be effective, and not just a set which happens to contain three members, there must be a fourth element, silent, withheld. A fourth rider, say, working a phantom gearbox…”
Perhaps the invisible fourth rider alludes to Carl Jung’s Answer to Job, which argues for a unified, reconciled quaternity, and not a trinity; a symbolic totality that acknowledges the shadow (ticket?) suppressed by the idealized triad. In Jung’s schema, the fourth element completes the cycle by restoring what has been excluded, granting wholeness rather than perfection. The phantom rider becomes an embodiment of that hidden completion, an invisible force that trails behind the spectacle of the three visible figures, suggesting that beneath their exuberant surface rides the unacknowledged presence that makes the whole thing work. (Or perhaps threatens to undo it.)
Notes on Chapters 1-7 | Glows in the dark.
Notes on Chapters 8-14 | Halloween all the time.
Notes on Chapters 15-18 | Ghostly crawl.
Chapter 19:
Last time we checked on hero Hicks McTaggart, our P.I. was in NYC, unwillingly sent there by his intelligence agency, U-Ops. A “a needle full of something in the chloral hydrate family” sends Hicks out on the Atlantic, on the “ocean liner Stupendica.“ The Stupendica is presumably the same ship, or a version of the ship, from Pynchon’s opus Against the Day. In the “Bilocations” section, the Stupendica bifurcates (or doubles?), engendering a second ship, the Emperor Maximilian, which departs on its own timeline to other bellicose adventures.
Aboard this particularStupendica, Shanghaied Hicks revives to a “seagoing-type tomato” named “Glow Tripforth del Vasto…here on assignment for Hep Debutante magazine, sending in a series of articles on how to be a Jazz Age adventuress on a Depression budget.”
Glow’s name immediately recalls Shadow Ticket’s motif of “glow in the dark” images and monster movie irradiation. The name “Glow Tripforth” (she married into the del Vasto name) also echoes “Geli Tripping,” the beautiful young witch who takes up with Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow.
Indeed, much in seafaring Chapter 19 seems to echo some of Gravity’s Rainbow’s nautical (and casino) episodes. The Stupendica isn’t the Anubis of GR, but, with its “grinning stewards, uniformed juveniles years corrupted, American sorority girls, [and] exiled royalty” it offers another version of Pynchon’s ship of foolish fun.
And just as Pynchon delighted in Gravity’s Rainbow giving his totem Slothrop costume changes, so too does Hicks get a new suit, a garish “‘Midnight aubergine and electric kumquat…not perhaps as understated a look as one might wish.’ Though in fact, as the Gumshoe’s Manual points out, quite useful if you want eyewitnesses to be focused more on the suit than the mug happens to be in it.” Glamour, as in magic, is a recurring theme in Shadow Ticket, and this theme only intensifies as Hicks heads east to Ole Europe, where we meet more characters who disguise themselves via peacocking distractions.
Pynchon renders the Stupendica as a drunken anarchic playground where “different classes of passenger all … shuffle together” fueled by “Champagne Cocktails, Sidecars, French 75s, Jack Roses, and Ward Eights [that] flow without interruption.” Lotta spirits on this ship!
In this carnivalesque atmosphere, Hicks is approached by Alf and Philippa Quarrender; he claims to be a retired Lt. Commander in the British Royal Navy, but Hicks, brighter than these spies (yeah, spoiler) realize, detects “an air of international monkey business, maybe even some kind of espionage racket, hard at work” in the story they’re selling. The Quarrenders test Hicks a bit on his susceptibility to fascist/Nazi tendencies, and in one of the novel’s least subtle gags, Alf feigns shock to learn from Hicks that U.S. political operatives have ties to the mob in America: “But Al Capone, I say— Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?” (Pynchon’s stand-in “Hicks blinks once, maybe twice” at this reaction.)
The chapter ends with some more monkey business with people who may not be what they seem, sweet Glow and her “ex- or possibly current husband, Porfirio del Vasto,” an autogyro dealer who may or may not have a murderous streak and who may or may not be a jewel thief. But he does share with Hicks that the word on the street is that folks believe Hicks is “an American gangster, being deported to somewhere in Eastern Europe. Traveling in the custody of Lieutenant-Commander and Mrs. Quarrender, of the British Intelligence, currently under contract to forces unnamed.”
Chapter 20:
So Hicks confronts the Quarrenders: “Seems Alf and Pips have been out on a worldwide scouting expedition to find recruits for the Secret Intelligence” and have likely picked up a “number of code breakers [who] have recently found themselves at loose ends after the Black Chamber was shut down, on Halloween of 1929, just after the stock market crashed.”
There’s a lot I could riff on here — the reference to cryptoanalytics; the will to mill meaning from chaos, finding the visible in the invisible; the rise of national intelligence agencies — but it’s really Pynchon’s reference to Halloween I most want to foreground here. Shadow Ticket is a stealth Gothic novel. Or not really a Gothic novel, per se, but maybe a novel about Gothicism in relation to technology, or, more specifically, communication technology — ways of knowing, ways of sending, ways of communicating. Pynchon chooses to highlight a Gothic aesthetic in the lines above, pinning them to the economic-political historicity of the U.S. at the end of the 1920s. This Gothicism intensifies over the next few chapters, as our hero P.I. heads East into Old Europe. Is Hicks a U.S. Modern? A hayseed hick? Something else?
Either way, the sophisticated, aristocratic Quarrenders do condescend to Hicks’s midwestern naivete. Our P.I. hopes aloud that things will get back to “normal” soon, to which Pips replies: “Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’” Alf is even more frank: “Take up shooting.” Later in the chapter, Alf delivers one of several theses dispersed in Shadow Ticket:
“It’s a strange time we’re in just now…one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved.'”
The next war is coming.
Again, I want to situate Shadow Ticket as a bridge novel between two of Pynchon’s masterpieces. Read it after Against the Day and before Gravity’s Rainbow. (Or read it however you like.)
Alf’s concern with “so many wrongs still unresolved” finds psychical manifestation on the decadent Stupendica, where “Passageways long after hours clamor with what sounds like an immense unsleeping crowd, not to be explained away by corridor acoustics or the unceasing friction of the sea.” It’s a ghost ship, baby: “‘Not too many of them exactly visible,’ Alf speculates, ‘yet still wandering the ship at will, in and out of spaces both authorized and forbidden.'” Alf suggests these spirits haunt from “a hope no longer quite sure and certain that injustices would be addressed and all come right in the end.”
The seagoing chapters of Shadow Ticket continue to echo Gravity’s Rainbow; prompted by Alf’s ghost talk, Hicks remembers “séances and so forth going on all the time” at a “spiritualist camp” he visited in summers at his “mother’s side of the family…Hicks and his friends used to hang around…hoping to see ghosts or other supernatural visitors.” The immediate recall here is to the séance scene early in Gravity’s Rainbow, but the bigger pull is to Pynchon’s overall concern with how we know what we know and how we don’t know what we don’t know — a concern that can fit neatly into a term like “paranoia,” but also manifests in attention to the paranormal or supernatural or the metaphysical.
Or, in terms Pynchon repeats in his novels, the visible and the invisible—what glows in the dark? Consider the epigraph to Shadow Ticket (from Bela Lugosi’s character in The Black Cat): “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not.” Now compare it to the epigraph Pynchon gives for Against the Day (attributed to Thelonious Monk: “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.” And then, far messier in its layered levels of irony, Pynchon’s epigraph to Gravity’s Rainbow, from Nazi-to-NASA rocketmensch Wernher von Braun: “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.” But how can you know?
Pip is skeptical of all of Alf’s intuitions — “a sighting of uncertain luminosity, or a wordless voice that might be more than wind strumming the guy wires of the radio masts,” for example. The skepticism is doubled in the crew and passengers of the Stupendica, some of whom give over to “paranoid suspicions the liner is being tracked by a mysterious submarine.” Like Alf’s ghosts, “Some see it, some don’t.”
Hicks doesn’t ever see the submarine — presumably the same U-13 he didn’t see back in Chapter 8, when it picked up Stuffy Keegan. Hicks does, however, communicate with Stuffy, or someone claiming to be Stuffy (“Don’t sound like you”) over the radio. Throughout the novel, different characters warn Hicks about a variety of wonderful dangers: bombs and guns and dames and gangsters and an impending world war — but Stuffy gives the gumshoe a warning that he feels in his flat feet:
“‘…back in Milwaukee, freedom, nobody thought much about it, we just figured hey, a free country ain’t it and left it at that. But—’ this being about the point Hicks begins to feel warning signs from his feet—’the real thing, what if that’s only when they’re comin after you for somethin? But they haven’t caught you yet. So for a while, as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free?'”
Is that freedom though?
I’m quite a bit further into the novel than where I’m going to have to leave off in these notes, but there will not be any so-called spoilers/discussion of material past Chapter 14
My general take on Shadow Ticket though: This is probably Pynchon’s most accessible novel. It’s fun, funny, and breezy, but it also kinda sorta bridges Against the Day to Gravity’s Rainbow — and not just in a timeline sense, but also thematically.
Chapter 8:
Hicks’s protege Skeet brings Hicks down to the “clubhouse” under the Holton Street Viaduct. Pynchon continues to develop the glow-in-the dark horror film motif, describing, “Cobwebs of purple light from radio tubes with imperfect vacuums inside…A dozen speakers going at once…Pieces of electrical gear blinking and chirping at each other, like a lab in a movie belonging to a scientist not entirely in his right mind.”
The mad scientist monitoring all these wild signals is pretty harmless though. It’s “a kid named Drover in a set of earphones.” Drover shows off the amplified ukulele he’s crafted: “Kid out in Waukesha showed me…You want the real Tom Swift, it’s this Lester kid, calls himself Red, playing hillbilly guitar up and down Bluemound Road for nickels and dimes, drive-ins, roadhouse parking lots, gets to where he needs to be heard over the traffic, so he figured this out.”
This Lester aka Rhubarb Red is, of course, Les Paul, whose artistic and technological contributions and innovations to 20th-century popular music cannot be overstated. I think his licks sound fresh today.
Pynchon has long been concerned with the intersection of art and technology; of how a signal can cut through noise.
Skeet has brought Hicks to the “clubhouse” under the viaduct to connect with Stuffy Keegan, whose REO Speed Wagon was exploded by unknown entities in Shadow Ticket’s opening chapter. Things get very, very Pynchonian here—a U-13 submarine is prowling the depths of Lake Michigan, apparently there to pick up Stuffy. Hicks is in disbelief. Drover has a hard time picking up a human voice from the sub, and declares that, “everybody must be down below at the bowling alley.” Hicks is even more incredulous: “Bowling alley on a submarine, Drover?” — setting up an execrable/wonderful Pynchonian joke that pivots on a Jules Verne novel’s title.
The episode ends with Stuffy disappearing somewhere, although Hicks is loath to believe he left on a submarine. Chapter 8 concludes with a less-skeptical Skeet pointing out that Stuffy “Kept saying things like ‘Maybe I’m a ghost now and I’m haunting you,’” again underscoring the novel’s horror-film motif.
Chapter 9 might be summarized by its opening line: “Skeet shows up at the office next day with an out-of-town tomato who causes a certain commotion.”
This fair lady is one “Fancy Vivid” (geez Thomas); no one in the detective agency can quite believe that she wants to hire them to find disappeared Stuffy, whom she loves dearly. She’s hip to the submarine thing too: “He ever say anything to you about a submarine? …Kept wanting to know if I’d ever been on one, if I’d like to go for a ride on one. At first I thought it was some kind of sex talk.”
Like the previous chapter, this one ends with a Gothic note. Hicks goes into a reverie while looking through old files, dreams he’s “in Chicago, or something calling itself that, up North Clark, across the suicides’ bridge, deep in that part of the North Side known as The Shadows.” In this space that is “haunted to saturation by the unquiet spirits of hanged men and women, white, Negro, and American Indian,” he encounters too the spirit of Stuffy who pleads for his help. “Only a dream,” Hicks tells himself.
Chapter 10:
When we first met Hicks’s Uncle Lefty back in Ch. 4, he espoused his sympathies for Adolf Hitler; in Ch. 10, after a casserole dinner, he takes his nephew to a Nazi bar, the New Nuremberg Lanes. Hicks, as yet unaware of the bar’s fascist sympathies, nevertheless picks up on the weird vibes:
“All normal as club soda, yet somehow…too normal, yes something is making a chill creep across Hicks’s scalp, the Sombrero of Uneasiness, as it’s known in the racket. Something here is off. A bowling alley is supposed to be an oasis of beer and sociability, busy with cheerful keglers, popcorn by the bucketful, crosscurrents of flirtation, now and then somebody actually doing some bowling. But this crowd here, no, these customers are only pretending to bowl…”
These people are all American Nazis.
Hicks runs into Ooly Schaufl (“Going by Ulrich these days”), an old associate from his strike-breaking day. The scene underlines a theme developing in the novel: Hicks slowly starting to realize which side of the line he belongs on. The reunion is broken up by the Feds though — prohis, dry agents, in the novel’s parlance.
Hicks makes his escape. At the next casserole night, Uncle Lefty gives Hicks the plot-moving-forward tip that Pynchon has frequently deployed thus far in Shadow Ticket, telling him to check out the under-radar as-yet-unopened FBI office in Milwaukee.
Chapter 11 begins with more Gothic intentions; Hicks approaches local the local FBI headquarters, which appears something closer to a haunted house:
“On days of low winter light the federal courthouse can take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against pale light reflected off the Lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long.”
In Shadow Ticket, the goofy Gothicism of glaring gargoyles butts up against the realer, deeper horror of encroaching fascism abroad and a burgeoning police state at home — and worse, the twisting, bundling of these forces. Hicks gets twisted into it; the feds want him to be their agent too.
Chapter 12 begins with Hicks’s boss Boynt going full tilt paranoid, Pynchonian style:
“The federals who had you in are likely just a front, OK? It’s the outfit that’s behind them, a nationwide syndicate of financial tycoons, all organized in constant touch against the forces of evil, namely everything to the left of Herbert Hoover. Worried about the next election, worried this latest Roosevelt if he gets in might decide to step out on his own, and even if he does revert to type after all, it might not be in time to stop the Red apocalypse that’s got them spooked out of what they think of as their wits.”
The outfit, the syndicate–Boynt ties the forces of right-wing capitalism to outright fascist gangsterism. He redirects his detective’s attention to the cheese heiress case, and the pair take off to the Airmont’s lawyers’ office. There, Hicks is asked if he’s “aware of the American Indian belief, referenced in depositions filed on Miss Airmont’s behalf, that once you save somebody’s life, you’re responsible for them in perpetuity?” (This routine gets brought up again and again.)
Chapter 13:
Hicks heads out to the Airmont mansion to do some recon on missing heiress Daphne. There, he picks up on chatter about “the recent Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, ‘Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?'”
The philosophical riffing gives way to a brief overview of the Airmont cheese fortune, which was built in no small part upon the brief success of a product called “Radio-Cheez…designed to stay fresh forever, in or out of the icebox, thanks to a secret, indeed obsessionally proprietary, radioactive ingredient.”
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The narrator reminds us that this was “radium’s grand hour of popularity, when it’s still medical wisdom to seek as many ways as possible to introduce radiation into the human body—radioactive mineral water, patent radium elixirs and aphrodisiacs, radium suppositories,” before bringing up the “Radium Girls” of “nearby Ottawa, Illinois [who] were employed in painting numbers on glow-in-the-dark clock dials, licking their brushes every so often to keep them finely pointed.”
The sad story of the Radium Girls has been well documented. It is another case of real-life horror in Shadow Ticket butting up against Pynchon’s zanier play-acting theatrical horrors. The Radium Girls’ case eventually led to expanded labor protections in the United States, making them ideal Pynchonian heroes.
Cheese conspiracies develop in this chapter; we learn that “The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business.” Bruno Airmont, the “Al Capone of Cheese” befriends the Al Capone (“And what is it you’re the Al Capone of again?”).
At the Airmont compound we also meet G. Rodney Flaunch, “a onetime male flapper” and fiancé to departed Daphne and mom, Mrs. Vivacia Airmont.
And in Chapter 14 we finally get the backstory of Hicks and Daphne’s meet-cute. Daphne’s in disguise and on the run from “Winnetka Shores Psychopathic, a ritzy banana plantation in the neighborhood, overseen by a Dr. Swampscott Vobe, M.D. Known for a susceptibility to anything newfangled, Dr. Vobe has somehow gotten it into his head that the patients at WSP are all available to him as lab material to try out his therapy ideas on, free of charge. Drugs, electricity, rays. Dr. Vobe is specially interested in rays.”
More mad scientist Halloween-all-the-time shit. They escape via rumrunner–the boat, not the drink–and Hicks drops the heiress at an Ojibwe reservation (she claims it was her finishing school). There are more horror notes — references to werewolves and windigos — and again the note that if you save a person’s life you are forever responsible for it:
“And if I say thanks but no thanks, what happens, I get an arrow through my head?”
“You don’t have to be all that way about it either, white man.”
I’ve left out noting all the drinks in Shadow Ticket thus far — I leave that task for Drunk Pynchon! — but I have to bring up two from this chapter. The first is Hicks’s Old Log Cabin Presbyterian, which sounds fucking delicious. The second is Dippy Chazz’s Wisconsin Old Fashioned: “Korbel brandy, 7UP lithiated lemon soda, and, sharing the toothpick with a cherry, a pickled Brussels sprout.” Initially, I thought this had to be a Pynchonian invention — but it’s not. From Toby Cecchini’s case study of the cocktail in The New York Times:
It’s more a family of drinks, revolving around a central theme. There are four main ways to order it: sweet, with 7 Up; sour (which is not), with sour mix or Squirt; “press” with half 7 Up and half seltzer; or seltzer only. There are regional garnish customizations using pickled vegetables — including mushrooms, asparagus, cucumbers, tomatoes, brussels sprouts and olives — that seem counterintuitive until you taste the salty, vinegar tang playing off of the spice of the bitters and the sweet thrum of the brandy. By God, our great-grandparents were on to something.
Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling 1. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways 2. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world 3. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus 4 to just ordinary folks, little fellows 5, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets 6. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” 7 by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars. Jews also carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals. 8
From page 105 of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
1 Gravity’s Rainbow is often (unjustly and unfairly) maligned as a messy, even pointless affair—but here’s our author speaking through the narrator, offering up one of the novel’s points—clearly, without equivocation.
2 Our narrator digs irony though…
3 Entropy is all—but entropy doesn’t make for good capitalism, by which our sly narrator means, Their Capitalism. The adult world needs to be organized, systematized, caused and effected.
Cf. Jack Gibbs’s rant to his erstwhile young students, early in William Gaddis’s 1975 novel of capitalism, J R:
Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from the outside. In fact it’s the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .
4 Note the not-so-oblique reference to GR’s theme of stimulus-response (and upending that response).
Not too much earlier in the narrative, dedicated Pavlovian Dr. Edward W.A. Pointsman worries about the end of cause and effect, the rise of entropy:
Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events,’ newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?
5…the preterite?
6 Pynchon reiterates his thesis.
7 Note that organic (entropic?) markets fall outside of Their System—y’know, Them—the Professionals—these organic (chaotic, necessary) markets must be labeled “black” (preterite?).
Here’s another Dutch propaganda poster:
Page 105 of Gravity’s Rainbow “happens,” more or less, in 1944, in the middle of an extended introduction of Katje Borgesius, a Dutch double agent. (Or is that double Dutch agent?). The propaganda poster above strikes me as overtly racist, but also seems to nod to King Kong (1933, dir. Cooper and Schoedsack). Gravity’s Rainbow is larded with references to King Kong, a sympathetic but powerful force of entropy, a force against the Professionals.
From the invaluable annotations at Pynchon Wiki’s Gravity’s Rainbow site (there is no annotation for page 105 at Pynchon Wiki, by the way, and no notes on the passage I’ve cited above either in Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion):
King Kong & the Like
Fay Wray look, 57; Fay Wray, 57, 179, 275; “You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,” 179; “headlights burning like the eyes of” 247; “the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer,” 275; Mitchell Prettyplace book about, 275; “Giant ape” 276; “the Fist of the Ape,” 277; “orangutan on wheels,” 282; taking a shit, 368; “The figures darkened and deformed, resembling apes” 483; “a troupe of performing chimpanzees” 496; “on the tit with no motor skills,” 578; “Negroid apes,” 586; “that sacrificial ape,” 664; “a gigantic black ape,” 688; Carl Denham, 689; poem based on King Kong, 689; See also: actors/directors film/cinema references;
The Kong-figure in the Dutch propaganda poster seems to wear the petasos (winged hat) and wield the caduceus of Hermes or Mercury—god of thieves. But also god of the market, of commerce, merchandise, all things mercenary.
From Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origin of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (1984):
8 The passage as a whole, which emphasizes war as a conduit for the techne of the market (or do I have that backwards? should I note the market of techne?) echoes an earlier passage. From page 81:
It was widely believed in those days that behind the War—all the death, savagery, and destruction—lay the Führer-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma.
All signs seem to point to No.
I’m a big fan of writers’ note-books (and maxims and aphorisms in general), and I’ve been enjoying Rainer J. Hashe’s new translation of Charles Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, which also collects Baudelaire’s “Flares” and “Consoling Maxims on Love,” and other fragments and notes and even illustrations—like this self-portrait:
From publisher Contra Mundum’s blurb:
In My Heart Laid Bare, an apodictic work of aphorism, maxim, note, and extended reflection, we encounter a fierce dandy who revolts against utilitarianism: to be useful, Baudelaire gibes, is to be hideous. Yet, contrarily, it is not dissolution that this poète maudit praises or celebrates. Although he rejects Progress, he prizes what he calls true progress, for him moral, the work of the individual alone. The dandy is not disaffected, but a rigorous spectator that burrows into the heart of reality itself; situated at the center of the world, yet hidden from it, this incognito figure tears back the flesh of humanity like a devilish surgeon. Through this act of absorption, observation, and analysis, like Rimbaud’s Supreme Scientist, Baudelaire’s dandy acquires “a subtle understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world.” Here we have the poet as philosopher king and transvaluator of values; here we have the disciplined flâneur. Baudelaire the keen symptomatologist who escapes “the nightmare of Time” via Pleasure or Work. If Pleasure is consumptive for him, Work is fortifying, that is, not the work of a profession, — curséd thing, — but the work of poiesis. A kind of poetic Marcus Aurelius forging his inner citadel, Baudelaire’s dandy-flâneur does not retreat into a monastic cell,but situates himself amidst society: poet as vast mirror, poet as thinking kaleidoscope. To Nietzsche, My Heart Laid Bare contains “invaluable psychological observations relating to decadence of the kind in which Schopenhauer’s and Byron’s case has been burned.”
Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling 1. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways 2. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world 3. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus 4 to just ordinary folks, little fellows 5, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets 6. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” 7 by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars. Jews also carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals. 8
From page 105 of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
1 Gravity’s Rainbow is often (unjustly and unfairly) maligned as a messy, even pointless affair—but here’s our author speaking through the narrator, offering up one of the novel’s points—clearly, without equivocation.
2 Our narrator digs irony though…
3 Entropy is all—but entropy doesn’t make for good capitalism, by which our sly narrator means, Their Capitalism. The adult world needs to be organized, systematized, caused and effected.
Cf. Jack Gibbs’s rant to his erstwhile young students, early in William Gaddis’s 1975 novel of capitalism, J R:
Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from the outside. In fact it’s the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . .
4 Note the not-so-oblique reference to GR’s theme of stimulus-response (and upending that response).
Not too much earlier in the narrative, dedicated Pavlovian Dr. Edward W.A. Pointsman worries about the end of cause and effect, the rise of entropy:
Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events,’ newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?
5…the preterite?
6 Pynchon reiterates his thesis.
7 Note that organic (entropic?) markets fall outside of Their System—y’know, Them—the Professionals—these organic (chaotic, necessary) markets must be labeled “black” (preterite?).
Here’s another Dutch propaganda poster:
Page 105 of Gravity’s Rainbow “happens,” more or less, in 1944, in the middle of an extended introduction of Katje Borgesius, a Dutch double agent. (Or is that double Dutch agent?). The propaganda poster above strikes me as overtly racist, but also seems to nod to King Kong (1933, dir. Cooper and Schoedsack). Gravity’s Rainbow is larded with references to King Kong, a sympathetic but powerful force of entropy, a force against the Professionals.
From the invaluable annotations at Pynchon Wiki’s Gravity’s Rainbow site (there is no annotation for page 105 at Pynchon Wiki, by the way, and no notes on the passage I’ve cited above either in Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion):
King Kong & the Like
Fay Wray look, 57; Fay Wray, 57, 179, 275; “You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,” 179; “headlights burning like the eyes of” 247; “the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer,” 275; Mitchell Prettyplace book about, 275; “Giant ape” 276; “the Fist of the Ape,” 277; “orangutan on wheels,” 282; taking a shit, 368; “The figures darkened and deformed, resembling apes” 483; “a troupe of performing chimpanzees” 496; “on the tit with no motor skills,” 578; “Negroid apes,” 586; “that sacrificial ape,” 664; “a gigantic black ape,” 688; Carl Denham, 689; poem based on King Kong, 689; See also: actors/directors film/cinema references;
The Kong-figure in the Dutch propaganda poster seems to wear the petasos (winged hat) and wield the caduceus of Hermes or Mercury—god of thieves. But also god of the market, of commerce, merchandise, all things mercenary.
From Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origin of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (1984):
8 The passage as a whole, which emphasizes war as a conduit for the techne of the market (or do I have that backwards? should I note the market of techne?) echoes an earlier passage. From page 81:
It was widely believed in those days that behind the War—all the death, savagery, and destruction—lay the Führer-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma.
All signs seem to point to No.
I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie’s, and it makes me very angry if anyone gives me one for my private library. I once heard two ladies disputing in a railway carriage as to whether one of them had or had not been wasting money. “I spent it in books,” said the accused, “and it’s not wasting money to buy books.” “Indeed, my dear, I think it is,” was the rejoinder, and in practice I agree with it. Webster’s Dictionary, Whitaker’s Almanack, and Bradshaw’s Railway Guide should be sufficient for any ordinary library; it will be time enough to go beyond these when the mass of useful and entertaining matter which they provide has been mastered. Nevertheless, I admit that sometimes, if not particularly busy, I stop at a second-hand bookstall and turn over a book or two from mere force of habit.
I know not what made me pick up a copy of Æschylus—of course in an English version—or rather I know not what made Æschylus take up with me, for he took me rather than I him; but no sooner had he got me than he began puzzling me, as he has done any time this forty years, to know wherein his transcendent merit can be supposed to lie. To me he is, like the greater number of classics in all ages and countries, a literary Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal. There are true immortals, but they are few and far between; most classics are as great impostors dead as they were when living, and while posing as gods are, five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs. It comforts me to remember that Aristophanes liked Æschylus no better than I do. True, he praises him by comparison with Sophocles and Euripides, but he only does so that he may run down these last more effectively. Aristophanes is a safe man to follow, nor do I see why it should not be as correct to laugh with him as to pull a long face with the Greek Professors; but this is neither here nor there, for no one really cares about Æschylus; the more interesting question is how he contrived to make so many people for so many years pretend to care about him.
Perhaps he married somebody’s daughter. If a man would get hold of the public ear, he must pay, marry, or fight. I have never understood that Æschylus was a man of means, and the fighters do not write poetry, so I suppose he must have married a theatrical manager’s daughter, and got his plays brought out that way. The ear of any age or country is like its land, air, and water; it seems limitless but is really limited, and is already in the keeping of those who naturally enough will have no squatting on such valuable property. It is written and talked up to as closely as the means of subsistence are bred up to by a teeming population. There is not a square inch of it but is in private hands, and he who would freehold any part of it must do so by purchase, marriage, or fighting, in the usual way—and fighting gives the longest, safest tenure. The public itself has hardly more voice in the question who shall have its ear, than the land has in choosing its owners. It is farmed as those who own it think most profitable to themselves, and small blame to them; nevertheless, it has a residuum of mulishness which the land has not, and does sometimes dispossess its tenants. It is in this residuum that those who fight place their hope and trust.
Or perhaps Æschylus squared the leading critics of his time. When one comes to think of it, he must have done so, for how is it conceivable that such plays should have had such runs if he had not? I met a lady one year in Switzerland who had some parrots that always travelled with her and were the idols of her life. These parrots would not let anyone read aloud in their presence, unless they heard their own names introduced from time to time. If these were freely interpolated into the text they would remain as still as stones, for they thought the reading was about themselves. If it was not about them it could not be allowed. The leaders of literature are like these parrots; they do not look at what a man writes, nor if they did would they understand it much better than the parrots do; but they like the sound of their own names, and if these are freely interpolated in a tone they take as friendly, they may even give ear to an outsider. Otherwise they will scream him off if they can.
From Samuel Butler’s “Ramblings in Cheapside.”
* * * * *
Goethe says somewhere that man is not without a vein of veneration. To satisfy this impulse to venerate, even in those who have no sense for what is really worthy, substitutes are provided in the shape of princes and princely families, nobles, titles, orders, and money-bags.
* * * * *
Vague longing and boredom are close akin.
* * * * *
When a man is dead, we envy him no more; and we only half envy him when he is old.
* * * * *
Misanthropy and love of solitude are convertible ideas.
* * * * *
In chess, the object of the game, namely, to checkmate one’s opponent, is of arbitrary adoption; of the possible means of attaining it, there is a great number; and according as we make a prudent use of them, we arrive at our goal. We enter on the game of our own choice.
Nor is it otherwise with human life, only that here the entrance is not of our choosing, but is forced on us; and the object, which is to live and exist, seems, indeed, at times as though it were of arbitrary adoption, and that we could, if necessary, relinquish it. Nevertheless it is, in the strict sense of the word, a natural object; that is to say, we cannot relinquish it without giving up existence itself. If we regard our existence as the work of some arbitrary power outside us, we must, indeed, admire the cunning by which that creative mind has succeeded in making us place so much value on an object which is only momentary and must of necessity be laid aside very soon, and which we see, moreover, on reflection, to be altogether vanity—in making, I say, this object so dear to us that we eagerly exert all our strength in working at it; although we knew that as soon as the game is over, the object will exist for us no longer, and that, on the whole, we cannot say what it is that makes it so attractive. Nay, it seems to be an object as arbitrarily adopted as that of checkmating our opponent’s king; and, nevertheless, we are always intent on the means of attaining it, and think and brood over nothing else. It is clear that the reason of it is that our intellect is only capable of looking outside, and has no power at all of looking within; and, since this is so, we have come to the conclusion that we must make the best of it.
Notes from “Psychological Observations.”
From the “Epigrams, Wise Cracks and Jokes” section ofd F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Noteboooks:
Suicide and wife arrive in Cuba.
Let’s all live together.
Debut—the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.
He repeated to himself an old French proverb he had made up that morning.
A sleeping porch is a back room with no pictures on the walls. It should contain at least one window.
Kill the scrub sire is our slogan.
Why can’t you be square? Well, when I was young I used to play with old automobile tires.
Forgotten is forgiven.
If all your clothes are worn to the same state it means you go out too much.
American actresses now use European convents as a sort of female Muldoon’s.
You must stoop a little in order to jump.
For a car—Excuse my lust.
Andre Gide lifted himself by his own jockstrap so to speak—and one would like to see him hoisted on his own pedarasty.
Creditors’ jokes
This page is from the same notebook where Joyce headed a page he titled “Rhetoric”; the notes in the books seem to suggest the notebook is part of the preparatory material for Ulysses. From the National Library of Ireland, which probably doesn’t want me posting their material like this.
Biblioklept 