AtD - Anarchy vs Terror

[John BAILEY]

The episode to which I was referring is the final section of AtD's first
part - pp.114-118. Don't have M&D handy for a page reference, but
briefly, it's the...


SPOOOOILER















...part where Dixon recounts his (possibly fictitious) intra-planetary
Hollow Earth adventures. When the Chums travel through the Hollow Earth,
it seemed to *single up* M&D and AtD. More interesting to me was the way
P describes the polar entry points to the Telluric interior as freezing
over, sealing up, and the interior itself as being a far darker, more
dismal place than it was in M&D. It's easy to infer that soon enough
those icecaps will be solid, and the interior will be inaccessible.

It does a nice job of extending that M&D theme of modernity
rationalising away the possibility of magic, of wonder, of the
impossible. Which of course is something that runs through every one of
P's novels.

On the other hand, by establishing spokes between AtD and the other
novels, doesn't that perform a kind of rationalisation of its own? If
AtD *does* create a kind of coherent cosmology which unites the novels
and allows them all to be situated in a consistent history and space
(even if they are about internal inconsistencies and alterations of that
history and space), is there some kind of paradox going on here? Ie, if
we can say with any certainty "there used to be magic and stuff, then
people like Mason and Dixon made it no more", isn't that itself a kind
of line-drawing, dichotomy establishing, whatever? Just pondering, and
probably not expressing a thought very well.

Also, I'm interested in the new novel's repeated evocation of
namelessness - things which haven't been named, things which have lost
their names, things which must not be named. Plenty of instances in the
first few hundred pages, and power is usually ascribed to the nameless.
Compare and contrast Cherrycoke's discussion of the 'crime of anonymity'
early in M&D.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of kelber at mindspring.com
Sent: Friday, 1 December 2006 4:58 AM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: AtD - Anarchy vs Terror

I loved M&D, but it's been a while since I've read it.  It would be
interesting to know which episodes (in both books) you're referring to.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au>

 I'd always thought one particular episode near the end of M&D felt out
of joint, not fully
>worked through, but it's given a satisfying recap not too far into AtD 
>which allows it (and much of M&D) to be resituated in vaguely the same 
>cosmology of GR and the rest.