ATDTDA: That graceful ending

[Tore Rye Andersen]

I'm sorry to move ahead like this, but I'm currently rereading GR and I 
stumbled across a passage which seems very relevant w/r/t to AtD's ending. 
We've already discussed this ending a number of times of course. What 
exactly are we to make of it? In the closing lines we hear of the Chums 
that:

"They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the 
sky. They fly toward grace."

In his review of AtD, Denis Scheck called this ending "perhaps the loveliest 
happy end in modern literature", and on those closing pages have also been 
called "a fairytale ending." I tend to see the ending as much more ambiguous 
than that, however. In a post a couple months back I wrote (in response to 
Denis Scheck's review) that:

I'm not sure that I would call the ending of AtD a happy one. I think it's
much more ambiguous than that, and I'm not really sure what exactly the
Chums are flying toward. They ascend into the third dimension, to be sure,
but as we're told on p. 1083, this dimension is not only "an avenue of
transcendence" but also a "means for delivering explosives", which becomes
abundantly clear in the first sentence of GR (and throughout that novel). In
other words, something *is* coming to part the sky on p. 1085 of AtD, but it
might just as well be the screaming of a rocket as grace. So I really see
the ending of AtD as leading directly to the beginning of GR, and I'm not
sure I would call it "the loveliest happy end in modern literature."

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114590&sort=author

So what exactly is coming to part the sky on the final page of AtD? What are 
the Chums flying towards? Grace? Or the terrible screaming of a rocket? 
Maybe both, as it turns out. Yesterday evening I ran across a passage in GR 
which IMO throws a significant light on AtD's ending:
In chapter 4 of GR we hear of that terrible September evening in 1944 when 
the V2-rockets first started falling over London. Slothrop immediately gets 
a hardon, and the narrator subsequently informs us that:

"There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a 
peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky." (GR, 26)

This leads to an analepsis where we hear about some of Slothrop's ancestors, 
e.g. Constant Slothrop, on whose tombstone we see an image of "the hand of 
God emerg[ing] from a cloud":

"Constant saw, and not only with his heart, that stone hand pointing out of 
the secular clouds, pointing directly at him, its edges traced in unbearable 
light, above the whispering of his river and slopes of his long blue 
Berkshires, as would his son Variable Slothrop, indeed all of the Slothrop 
blood one way or another" (GR, 27)

The metaphor is elaborated on the next page, where Slothrop remembers the 
Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire of 1931, which once again leads him to an even 
earlier memory of watching the Northern Lights with Pop and Hogan:

"They scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just about to 
swing open? What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to 
show him?" (GR, 29)

Since North and Death are pretty much interchangeable terms in GR (and AtD), 
we can of course make a qualified guess as to the nature of this imminent 
revelation. Jump ahead to the hotel fire again, and then to the fall of the 
first V2-rocket, in a passage which, for me at least, seems extremely 
significant w/r/t AtD's ending (including an ambiguous reference to grace):

"But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the 
next moment, all of it, the complete night, *were* to go out of control and 
curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at....
   6:43:16 BDST - *in the sky right now* here is the same unfolding, just 
about to break through, his face deepening with its light, everything about 
to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside has ever 
proclaimed... slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn 
hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose 
windows taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the 
pulpit defining grace, swearing *this is how it does happen - yes the great 
bright hand reaching out of the cloud....*" (GR, 29)

The passage specifically ties the parting of the sky together with the hand 
of God, and both are tied together with the V2-rockets and their awful 
revelations. As in AtD, there is a lot of light in this passage (and 
Slothrop could certainly have used a pair of smoked goggles), but the light 
is the harbinger of the horrors that are coming to part the sky, and thus 
hardly benign. Finally, grace is significantly mentioned (in connection with 
the light in the church), but those churches are compared to "white rockets 
about to fire."

It's all too clear, then, what is "just about to break through" the sky in 
London, 6:43:16 BDST (and the reference to "a winter no one has guessed at" 
seems to hint at the nuclear winter that may be the eventual result of the 
atomic descendants of the V2s). The awful light in the passage may bring 
grace, but hardly the kind of grace we'd hoped for. It is less clear, 
perhaps, what kind of grace the Chums of Chance are flying towards. Pynchon 
leaves a slender hope open that the end (and the grace) they fly towards is 
a happy one, but in light (as it were) of the passage from GR, I'm afraid 
that hope has just grown even more slender.

/Tore

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