ATDDTA (6) 180-182.10

[Tore Rye Andersen]

bekah:

>182:9 "Little by little the place filled up and turned into a hoedown of 
>sorts, and the Kid, or >whoever he was, sort of faded into the mobility, 
>and Lew didn't see him again for awhile."
>
>** faded into the mobility "Mobility" also appears in Mason & Dixon.

- and not only does it appear, it appears at a very significant juncture - 
more specifically, the beginning of the final chapter, when the children are 
safely tucked into the beds, and all the preterite waste of Philadelphia 
begins to percolate through the house:

"When the Hook of Night is well set, and when all the Children are at last 
irretrievably detain'd within their Dreams, slowly into the Room begin to 
walk the Black servants, the Indian poor, the Irish runaways, the Chinese 
Sailors, the overflow'd from the mad Hospital, all unchosen Philadelphia,-- 
as if something outside, beyond the cold Wind, has driven them to this 
extreme of seeking refuge. They bring their Scars, their Pox-pitted Cheeks, 
their Burdens and Losses, their feverish Eyes, their proud fellowship in a 
Mobility that is to be, whose shape none inside this House may know." (M&D, 
759)

There was no w.a.s.t.e. in America in the 18th century, and there were no 
cars, but we can be sure that it is the descendants of this Mobility who'll 
communicate through w.a.s.t.e. in Lot 49, and that it is the refuse on the 
floors of their sorry, battered cars that will move Mucho so.
This Mobility is also invoked a couple-three times in GR, notably in the 
description of those malfunctioning pinball machines:

"....have players forever strangers brought about, separately, alone, each 
of these bum machines? believe it: they've sweated, kicked, cried, smashed, 
lost their balance forever - a single Mobility you never heard, a unity 
unaware of itself, a silence the encyclopedia histories have blandly filled 
up with agencies, initials, spokesmen and deficits enough to keep us from 
finding them again..." (GR, 586)

Pynchon's preterite characters (and his preterite readers) may feel 
separate, may feel alone, and not surprisingly. As Pynchon tells us in GR, 
it is in the interest of those in power that we do feel alone:

"The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War 
needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will 
always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to 
want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, 
ein Volk ein Führer - it wants a machine of many separate parts, not a 
oneness, but a complexity...." (GR, 131)

....and so it continues to pull us part, as it tries to pull apart Roger and 
Jessica:

"the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, 
to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required 
pain, bitter death." (GR, 41)

But despite those forces that try to pull us apart, we are really, Pynchon 
has been trying to tell us throughout his career, "a single Mobility", "a 
unity unaware of itself" (and this latter description of the Mobility 
mirrors the description on p. 38 of Roger and Jessica as "a joint creature 
unaware of itself").

In "Heart of Darkness", Conrad wrote: "We live as we dream - alone". None of 
that bleak shit from Pynchon. Like Rebecca from GR, Pynchon knows that 
"there's coming together" (GR, 155), and his frequent references to the 
Mobility are attempts to make this unity aware of itself.

Now everybody--

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