As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared increasingly likely, to help promote.
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After the first line of the book, this was the next line that suggested to me that I needed to carefully explore every line.
Some of you might be thinking, "Is this how you do that? Do you think the definition of 'explicate' is to digress continuously and then say something obvious about each line?" And to that, I refuse to dignify it with a coherent response! Instead, you just get a raspberry.
"Thbpbpbpbpbpbpbpbpt!"
After I read this line, I read it again. And again. And at least fifteen more times. Then I headed over to Twitter to say, "It's not a Pynchon novel if you can understand every single sentence." But guess what? I think I have a much better handle on it now than when I first read it!
The first half is easy and uncomfortable. The Chums have made it to Chicago and the proof is the famous stockyards where so many cows are butchered every day that nobody can avoid the smell and what that smell means: delicious hamburgers. And we all know delicious hamburgers make us think of death when we'll never again get to have one. That's what's meant by "flesh learning its mortality."
But the second half had me stumped. What the hell does "the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction" mean?! But now that I'm a little more familiar with the Chums of Chance because I read each sentence so closely, I think I got it!
They're in town to promote some big government lie, a lie which will hide some "dark conjugate" which compares to the killing fields of the Chicago stockyard. The daylit fiction is the government lie. The terrible thing being covered up is the dark conjugate. And they've come to promote the lie. The first half of the sentence is there both to show they've arrived in Chicago and to be an example of the terrible thing they're supposed to help hide from the public.
I don't know what that is even though I've already read this chapter once. Maybe I was too dumb to catch it the first time; maybe it isn't revealed yet (or ever will be! I mean, have you read Gravity's Rainbow?). Or maybe the dark secret, if we're comparing it to killing fields, has to do with H. H. Holmes!
I know I'm being overly whimsical and facetious but I'm trying really hard not to let the line "the uproar of flesh learning its mortality" turn me back into a vegetarian. I'm not much of a meat eater now (probably a holdover from having been vegetarian through most of my thirties because I saw one of those PBS documentaries about the Japanese village that massacres dolphins and I finally couldn't be a part of it anymore (I'd been having a tough time for years before that justifying any kind of meat eating or, even, killing of bugs. Just the thought of the creature's existence suddenly ending, and me being the cause, was causing me great strife and anxiety)). But eventually the grinding of the years and a general apathy toward everything and the slow erosion of one's sense of wonder and, ultimately, just being a lazy asshole filed off any feelings of guilt or remorse I had and I went back to, occasionally, eating meat.
Welcome back, tacos!
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Postscript: Oh! Duh! The "daylit fiction" is the Fair! A celebration of the exact opposite of the horror of The Stockyards. The Fair is supposedly mankind at its best! A promotion of all that man can achieve! And just a few blocks away is the horror of what mankind actually does! Wholesale slaughter and terrible working conditions and poor pay to the people who have been hired to do that slaughtering!
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