ATDDTA (3) Aether Dreams, 57-58

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Monte:

>I'm going to take your very sage emphasis on " a new kind of Absolute" and
>run with it. I'm going to float the notion that special relativity is 
>"offstage but central" in AtD . I >mean that in the same sense that the 
>actual devastation of WWII and the Holocaust (just past)... >and the 
>nuclear arms/ICBM race (just about to start)... are "offstage but central" 
>in GR.
>AtD is a book chock-full of light, of aether, of clocks and mirrors and 
>railroads, of Riemann and >Minkowski and space-time... and it has three 
>passing mentions of relativity, and one of Einstein. >Isn't that just a bit 
>odd? Isn't that, in fact, passing strange?

[...]

>I think relativity is offstage in AtD, and Weird Science alternatives are 
>singing and dancing 24/7 >onstage, because that nice young patent clerk 
>locked us into time and history more deeply
>than ever before -- and that is too terrible to contemplate.

Einstein is indeed conspicuous by his absence is AtD, just as the Holocaust 
(and Hiroshima which is only represented through a torn newspaper photo and 
General Wiwern's dance on p. 594) are "offstage but central" in GR, as you 
aptly put it.

I think there are two different, slightly overlapping, ways of considering 
his notable absence:

One of them is the one you suggest: that what he created in his seminal 
papers is simply "too terrible to contemplate." That certainly seems to be 
the reason Pynchon chose to deal with the Holocaust in GR in such an oblique 
way: It is far from absent - and in fact the scenes from the Dora camp come 
close to showing us some of its horrors - but mostly it is present by proxy: 
the extermination of the dodoes, e.g., or Von Trothas Vernichtungsbefehl.
World War I is represented in much the same way in AtD: There is certainly a 
lot of ominous build-up, but when it comes to the central horrible event 
itself, what we get is the Chums' muted perspective from above, or from 
inside neutral Switzerland. The central historical event in AtD - the 
lacking piece of the puzzle whose outline is defined by all the remaining 
pieces - is over and done with in six pages (1022-28), and very deliberately 
so.
In fact this strategy of (non-)representation is presented to us in the 
novel through the description of Hunter Penhallow's paintings on p. 897:

"When his paintings had started to get peculiar, Dally noticed immediately. 
In the compositions appeared deliberate vacancies - a figure could be over 
on one side of the canvas looking at, or gesturing toward, the other side as 
if there were someone there - but there was no one there. Or two subjects 
would be likewise engaged, crowded together on one side while nearby, close 
enough to touch, opened this somehow blazingly luminescent space, as if an 
essential term had been left out. Sometimes in the empty part of the 
composition, even the background would be missing, and it would be the raw 
imprimatura which assumed the quality of a presence, demanding to be 
observed...."

Dally is then told that she could "pose for one of these empty spaces" in 
the guise of the Angel of Death - implying, of course, that the presence in 
perhaps AtD's central deliberate vacancy is the mass death of WWI. The 
terrible implications of Einstein's theories may explain why he is "a 
presence, demanding to be observed" in another of the novel's deliberate 
vacancies.

Another possible explanation for Einstein's absence can be that Pynchon in 
AtD tries to write from within the paradigm of the years he's describing. In 
2007 it is abundantly clear how important a figure Einstein was, but in the 
years before WWI it was not so clear. In M&D Pynchon also wrote more or less 
from within the paradigm of the 18th century, representing all the crackpot 
theories of the era as just as valid as the ones that eventually held up. 
Pynchon of course knows how things turned out, and by sly anachronistic 
references he points to later scientific developments (including chaos 
theory in M&D), but those references are for his readers, not his 
characters, who blunder happily along inside the horizon of knowledge 
defined by their age. In AtD Pynchon includes a couple-three offhand 
references to the theory of special relativity, and we 21st century readers 
immediately recognize their importance, but his characters don't.
Pynchon doesn't render the past *as* past, but as the present that it once 
was, and in that present Einstein wasn't the towering figure he is today, 
which may be another way of explaining his notable absence from AtD.

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