Soon they were gazing back, as if in some way they knew him, and all about his troubles.
* * * * * * * * * *
Maybe they're all from other dimensions too! Maybe they all had a case of the waking swoons themselves!
"Soon they were gazing back"
Maybe they're from the country Byss.
In a small courtyard within a courtyard, he came upon a group of men and women, engaged in slow ritual movement, a country dance, almost—though Lew, pausing to watch, was not sure what country.
* * * * * * * * * *
"a small courtyard within a courtyard"
This is what is called "meta." If you ever want to sound like you totally get the super over-the-top smart piece of media you're consuming, just look around at everybody and go, "That was so meta." If they ask for more just wave your hands around and go, "You know? Cause that thing was that same thing but different? What? You didn't notice?" If they insist on more detail, just bite your lip so hard it draws blood and go, "Oh! Excuse me!" while spraying blood out of your face.
It also might be comedy. Can you imagine a small courtyard inside of another courtyard? That's like a hat on a hat which some people say is too much but is it really? If a hat is funny, why isn't another hat on that hat even funnier? It's also pretty meta.
"Oh! Excuse me!"
"he came upon a group of men and women"
Ew.
"engaged in slow ritual movement"
Ew.
"a country dance"
Ew!
"Lew, pausing to watch, was not sure what country"
Lew! You voyeur, you! I mean, he's obviously a voyeur because he was hired by the Chums of Chance to "observe" people at the Fair.
Anyway, do you think these people are engaged in Tai chi? I know I think that! I thought it the whole time as well unlike other perverts I know who thought Lew had stumbled into an orgy.
Occasionally a street would open up into a small plaza, or a convergence with other streets, where pitches had been set up by puppeteers, music and dance acts, and vendors of everything—divination books, grilled squabs on toast, ocarinas and kazoos, roast ears of corn, summer caps and straw hats, lemonade and lemon ice, something new everyplace he turned to look.
* * * * * * * * * *
I'm not going back on my belief that Pynchon has inserted Lew from outside the novel so that Lew has found himself in a new world but I believe there may be more to it, as described in this passage. Maybe Lew's waking swoon from the previous line literally took him out of Chicago and into this strange carnival-like hidden backstreet. Being prone to waking swoons (as he mentioned), we can extrapolate that Lew had one previously and that's how he came into this Chicago, this America, where he doesn't know the sins of his past. Now another waking swoon has allowed him into this new urban setting, a back alley carnival.
In other words, Lew Basnight has a super power. He's able to shift his perception and see hidden places in reality that others simply pass by without notice. That's probably why he's a valuable observer to Nate Privett's detective agency.
As for discussing the actual text in this line, I think it's just a description of a bunch of things you'd be surprised to find in a back alley in Chicago. Puppets? Divination books? Roast corn? Perhaps in 1893 this was all common but I'm guessing, due to the whole waking swoon bit, it's as uncommon as it would be now.
Not for the first time, he experienced a kind of waking swoon, which not so much propelled as allowed him entry into an urban setting, like the world he had left but differing in particulars which were not slow to reveal themselves.
* * * * * * * * * *
I thought Pugnax was the reader insert in this book but it looks like Lew Basnight is literally a character inserted into the novel from some outside realm. Maybe it makes sense. Pugnax is a reader and, as a dog on the boy's airship, an observer of other characters. He's also a fighter though! Maybe that's how Pynchon thinks of his readers. Unless Pugnax is supposed to represent the critics. That makes sense! Anyway, Lew Basnight is also an observer from outside the novel. He's literally on the Inconvenience to make observations and study his surroundings. He became a detective which the readers of Pynchon's novels must also become, searching for clues and meaning in the text.
In this scene, we're explicitly told that there's a world Lew just left. Yes, that can be taken as metaphorical in that he's left his wife and job and suddenly finds himself living in Chicago proper. But he also points out that things in this world are quite different and often show themselves to those capable of seeing them.
"waking swoon"
This could be a way of describing reading. Sort of like a daydream. A conscious effort to enter another world, to dream while awake. Reading allows entry into another world, not always like the one the reader lives in—quite often nothing like it. But Lew's new world has both many similarities and differences and his waking swoon allows him to see and sort through these differences. But he's started reading too far into the book to understand his sin and none of the characters want to rehash his tired old plot! So now he's just got to get on the best he can in his new world.
I haven't read any of his novels (only some of his comic books) but a lot of Against the Day so far reminds me of the things I've read describing China Miéville novels. Since I've only really read synopses of China's work (and his comic Dial H), I can't pursue this possible connection. But China would probably support all of the pro-union themes in Against the Day, no?
As he began again to walk, the first thing he noticed was how few of the streets here followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of town—everything was on the skew, narrow lanes radiating starwise from small plazas, tramlines with hairpin turns that carried passengers abruptly back the way they'd been coming, increasing chances for traffic collisions, and not a name he could recognize on any of the street-signs, even those of better-traveled thoroughfares . . . foreign languages, it seemed.
* * * * * * * * * *
I've mentioned how I've read this chapter previously but I barely remember any details. But just now, reading this bit, made me remember a thought I'd had the first time through: Lew Basnight jumped dimensions. Part of the reason he doesn't know what he did is because he isn't from this dimension. He's from another Chicago in another 1893 and he's somehow found himself replacing the Lew Basnight of this dimension. I'll try to remember this theory and see if there's any other evidence for it as I go along.
The first problem with the jumping dimensions deal is his location. If he's in a different Chicago whose grid system seems non-existent then he's not in the Chicago of the real world. Unless there's a specific spot in the city of Chicago that people familiar with the city would think, "A-ha! I know exactly where Lew is! That spot in the city is insane." But the fact that American street-signs seem to be in a foreign language is evidence that Lew has shifted dimensions. Perhaps Lew was in our Chicago and shifted into the Chicago of Thomas Pynchon's novel which has a few oddities within the city layout.
This makes sense because this description of the part of Chicago Lew has just found himself also describes the landscape of the text of a Pynchon novel. Few lines followed the regular grid pattern of other novels. Everything was skewed, digressions radiating from small plot points, story arcs with hairpin turns that carried characters abruptly back the way they'd been coming, increasing chances for character conflict and—the most damning evidence that Pynchon is just describing Lew getting lost in one of his books—"not a name he could recognize." Pynchon and his character names, right?!
So yeah. I think Lew was a real world person who has suddenly found himself transported into the dimension of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. He doesn't know his backstory because he wasn't actually around to live it. And now he's in a carnival funhouse mirror Chicago that he's only slightly acquainted with. And he's got to get on with his new life. Time to finally learn how he became a detective then, right?!
Lew looked around. Was it still Chicago?
* * * * * * * * * *
The reader might suspect, "Yes, of course it is still Chicago." But we've got to perceive things through Lew's eyes. We need to be more philosophical about it. It's definitely not the same place Lew had just tried to escape to with his marriage, abandoned, but intact. A place where he would go to live knowing his coworkers had just accepted his retreat without consequence. No, Lew was now in a Chicago where he has been completely and utterly humiliated and abandoned. How can it be the same place?
Besides, we were told earlier that Lew and Troth were walking through an unmappable and formerly unknown, possibly only newly extant, neighborhood. Was it still Chicago? Was Lew still Lew? How much has to change before any thing becomes another thing entirely? I think there's a philosophical story about a boat that deals with this, although more in the physical and less in the abstract. This is a Ship of Theseus metaphor about the amount of abstract things that can change before a thing becomes completely different.
But she had hailed a hansom-cab, and climbed in without looking back, and was quickly borne away.
* * * * * * * * * *
Good riddance! Who needs Troth anyway?! We're in a Thomas Pynchon novel which takes place in obsessively accurate backdrops of specific times and places but fills all these scenes of exacting detail with whimsical and far-fetched characters with fairly stupid names. Hey Truth! Don't let the hansom-cab's door hit you on your already sore backside on the way out of Chicago! Jerko!
"Then I'll look for a place here in town, good suggestion Troth, thank you. . . ."
* * * * * * * * * *
Lew's being way too kind. But I suppose, what else should he do? He's realized his impotence in this situation. He lost before he even knew there was a competition happening. How do you defend yourself against this kind of a societal force aggressively bearing down on you for no comprehensible reason? Lew is caught up in the wave of history and he can do nothing but submit, go under, and drown. He can't even expect the truth to save him because he doesn't know the truth and the truth could be as condemning as everybody seems to think it is. The truth convinced Troth and now Troth and truth aren't on Lew's side. He cannot defend himself so why not just look for a place in Chicago and start over?
Oh, that's why he's all, "Good suggestion, Troth!" Because that's what he was going to do anyway. Maybe he's being a little bit sarcastic here!
By now he could not bear her woundedness—the tears, through some desperate magic, kept gelid at her lower lids, because she would not let them fall, not till he had left her sight.
* * * * * * * * * *
This entire Lew Basnight section feels like when Dave Sim decided to go on his Oscar Wilde or Ernest Hemingway tangents and write long sections of Cerebus in the style of the writer with which he was currently obsessed. These descriptions of their loss of love and the terrible destruction of Lew's reputation feel straight out of Middlemarch, Bleak House, or The Age of Innocence (although written later, placed in Wharton's childhood days of the 1870s). These are just such great Victorian romance drama lines: "He could not bear her woundedness," and "she would not let the tears fall, not till he had left her sight." There's more florid descriptions of this heartbreaking interaction than I'm used to in Pynchon. But then I've only ever read three other books by Pynchon, so maybe this is something he loves to do?! How should I know? Re-read the description of my blog where I outright state I don't know enough about anything to be attempting this kind of project!
In an ignorance black as night, he understood only that he had struck at her grievously, and that neither his understanding nor his contrition would save them.
* * * * * * * * * *
Lew knows not what he did so he can't apologize for it. But even if he did know what he did, an apology wouldn't be enough. Whatever sin Lew committed cannot be rectified. He is a sinner without hope of repentance. He is lost even to Jesus.
Isn't that what Judas's sin was? Believing he had sinned so greatly that he was beyond repentance? Which is why his suicide may have been ironic depending on if I understand the definition of irony. But, as we know, nobody is beyond repentance! That's why Jesus said that thing about letting the person without sin throw rocks at the person with sin. What Jesus meant was that the death penalty was wrong because it denies a person a chance at repentance. And so he's basically saying, "Look. We're all sinners. And if you're still around to throw a stone to kill a guy, it's because you were allowed to live and repent for whatever sin you committed. Wouldn't you give every sinner the same chance?" By killing somebody, you take away their chance at redemption. And since Jesus's whole thing was dying for people's redemption, he really frowned on people killing people without giving them the chance to repent. Unless that was Gandalf talking to Frodo about Gollum? Sometimes I get my religious texts confused.
"Stay here in Chicago if you like, it's all the same to me. This neighborhood we're in right now might suit you perfectly, and I know I'll never come here again."
* * * * * * * * * *
"This unimaginable space in Chicago that may never have existed before this moment is the perfect place for you, a hallucination," says his wife Truth. Sodomy looks around judging how he might fit in. "I'll never come here again," finishes Truth, rubbing her backside and flinching at the memory of her husband's sins.
Chicago, especially this place neither spouse has seen before, will become the home of a person who doesn't know who he is anymore, maybe never have known at all. And his wife is fine to never see him again, all based on rumor and speculation. Is this tragic? Is this pop culture reality daytime talk show drama? Or is this a re-imagined version of The Age of Innocence? Except instead of May accepting Archer's childish crush on her cousin, Troth has decided she doesn't want to live with a man who is actually in love with Wensleydale.
Is the idea of a neighborhood in Chicago nobody knew existed—or denied existed, more probably—a metaphor for Lew's homosexuality? And the reason Troth will never trod that neighborhood again? She doesn't want to believe it exists and so she'll deny it from this day forward, and her husband as well.
