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

[Seb Thirlway]

--- Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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. [snip] 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.
[snip] 
> 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.
 
Thank you for your thoughts - got me thinking as well.

Another example of TRP's deflation of the "search for the centre" idea is Slothrop's
anti-climactic arrival at Peenemunde: a place of ducks, vegetation, musical hi-jinks, a camp
Russian soldier and a farting Springer - and not much else.

But in GR the reader is encouraged to throw themselves wholeheartedly into Slothrop's Search for
the Holy Centre (as TRP does himself) - until the whole thing gets deflated.  Whereas in AtD the
SfTHC seems to be compromised right from the start - or at least, obsessive characters (about
Shambhala, quaternions or whatever) don't rise to such lyrical heights about them as in GR.  And
so in GR the deflation feels angsty, angry and disappointed (or at least that's what I pick up). 
In contrast, AtD has a much gentler tone, and
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the "let-down" is serene:

Major Halfcourt, p. 975
"For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence.  Not the discovery of a
place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was".

Here's an old man, not young Tyrone Slothrop.  But none of the characters take the Search for the
Holy Centre that passionately in the first place.  It's in the background, but "real life" keeps
blotting it out.  (A state Slothrop only arrives at relatively late in the Zone in GR).

"Real life" has a very different role in AtD from GR, a role which maybe I'll figure out more on
2nd or 3rd reading.  It's presented much more richly.  In GR Jessica Swanlake is an utter traitor,
a back-slider into bourgeois security with her vile self-satisfied Beaver; and Roger is at his
very best when he turns his back on her at the Utgartholoki dinner.  In AtD there's what looks
like a parellel situation: Dally going back to Clive Crouchmas in preference to Kit.  But it's
presented much more ambiguously, not at all like Jessica and Beaver.  Something like "this just
happens".  Much darker, by omission, than the more strident Roger-Jessica-Beaver triangle.


seb


		
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