Atd : page 542---starts on page 524.Big Ass Spoiler

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net

>Somebody, please tell me if I'm wrong.
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[...]

>Sir Edmund seems to be a connective link to the explosive
>potential held within matter as it turns into the state of light
>itself. He is responsible, along with Einstein, for an introduction
>to Newton's thoughts on light: "Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections,
>Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light", and seems to be a major
>(unwitting) player in the development of The Bomb. That's what strikes
>me as the import of:
>
>"     And what, furthermore, to make of this late rumor, drifting just
>below Woeve's ability to aquire the signal at all clearly---an
>undentifiable noise in the night that sends a sleeper awake with
>hearts pounding and and entrails hollow---intelligence of a
>Quaternionic Wepon, a means to unloose upon the world energies
>hitherto unimangined---hidden, de Decker would say "innocently,"
>inside the w term."
>
>So there's a major connector to GR right there. Along with any
>number of other worlds I may or may not be projecting. And again,
>I point to the stamp on the cover of the book and Kit popping into
>Lord Overlunch's hotel room in Paris on page 1081.
>
>I know this might seem weird/obsessive/trainspotting but I'm
>curious where the exact center of AtD might be located.

Sure, the Bomb is certainly in AtD as well, but not to such an extent that 
I'd say that the novel is *about* the Bomb. Hunting for the "exact center" 
of decentered novels like GR and AtD can often turn out to be something of a 
wild-goose chase. Of course, one can always find words like "pivotal" in the 
center of AtD, and one can discover that the only italicized words on page 
380 in GR are "right in the middle of it" (true!), but a chase for thematic 
'centers' seems doomed, and in fact novels like GR and - perhaps especially 
- Lot 49 are critiques of this very enterprise. Oedipa is so busy chasing 
Holy Centers in Lot 49 that she overlooks what is in fact hidden before her 
very eyes throughout most of the chase: the poor, the rejected, the 
suffering human refuse living invisibly at the margins of American society 
(this same theme is also played out in Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man'). The 
hunt for Grails may often obscure more earthbound realities.

The challenge for me when reading Pynchon is in fact to resist hunting for 
Grails. His novels seem so overdetermined with meaning and hint at so many 
hidden realities that it is very tempting to focus all one's energy to 
discover and decode these hidden realities. And some energy SHOULD go into 
this, but not to such an extent that it obscures all the preterite 
enterprises on the surface of the text. Pynchon's novels are rather like the 
music Kit hears on page 1080: "The was music, mysteriously audible, tonal 
yet deliberately broken into by dissonances - demanding, as if each note 
insisted on being attended to." And for me, at least, if I decide too soon 
what a novel like AtD is *about*, it becomes harder to attend to each note.

Now don't get me wrong: I agree with you that AtD contain references to the 
Bomb, and to Lot 49 as well. The passage with the inverted stamps on pages 
978-79 seems to be a particularly clear reference to that novel, with its 
description of the fight between Ewball and his father as an "Oedipal 
spectacle." And I really appreciate your many great interpretations and 
insights of the novel. In the case of the Tristero, though, I feel you've 
given the organization a centrality in AtD that I can't really find any 
proper evidence for in the novel itself. It might be slyly hinted at once in 
a while, but so far I don't see any evidence to support the idea that it is 
a main, albeit hidden, player in the novel.

Finally, in an aside, this passage:

"a means to unloose upon the world energies
hitherto unimagined---hidden, de Decker would say "innocently,"
inside the w term"

- couldn't this also be read as a sly reference to George W. Bush's (W's) 
destructive term as President?

Best,

Tore

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