ATDTDA: That graceful ending

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I agree that to call the end of ATD "the loveliest happy end in modern literature" is to take the surface meaning of the words at face value -- never a good idea with TRP.

The Slothrop family history sequence in GR is one of my favorite passages in the book: the neat tying of God's hand from above with the death from the sky that the rockets threaten.  In terms of "parting the sky," Slothrop's well-known final moment in the book also seems relevant:

GR, p. 626:

"...and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural ..."

He lies there, in crucifixion position, while something sexual [sex=death, liebstod, etc.] comes down out of the sky, creating in him a state akin to the state of grace Lew finds himself in ATD where things were exactly what they were [paraphrased, I don't have the book handy].  Slothrop isn't dying; he's changing course, giving up, accepting, as in the Hanged Man tarot:

http://www.learntarot.com/maj12.htm 

letting go
having an emotional release
accepting what is
surrendering to experience
ending the struggle
being vulnerable and open
giving up control
accepting God's will

Reading it this way, the Chums are heading towards acceptance of the inevitable, their smoked glasses protecting them against the impending glare of WWII rockets and atomic bombs.  Not so happy an ending.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>

>
>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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