ATDDTA (3) Aether Dreams, 57-58
Monte Davis
monte.davis at verizon.net
Sun Feb 18 08:12:19 CST 2007
Tore Rye Andersen:
> Hiroshima which is only represented through a torn
> newspaper photo and
> General Wiwern's dance on p. 594)
Hmm.... I'd always taken that description as just the Hollywood trope of an
overhead camera on a dance (or Esther Williams swimfest) with radial
symmetry -- flower or kaleidoscope. You could well be right; OTOH sometimes
a stamen is just a stamen.
> 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.
And there were indeed, in war-bond and charity posters and in editorial
cartoons, lots of images of angels (or female-personified "national
spirits") swooping over the battlefields.
> 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.
I would say rather that *sometimes* Pynchon observes the stricter rules of
historical fiction. And sometimes he blithely ignores them and not only
feeds *us* irony or humor via hindsight, but has his characters thinking and
talking in clearly anachronistic ways -- i.e., if it were realistic fiction
those around them should be saying "huh?" (Granted, it's harder with P than
with any other author I know to be sure exactly how far inside/outside a
character's consciousness he is from moment to moment.)
IOW, with history and "had they but known" meta-history and alternate-world
history -- just as with Weird Science and speculative-edge science and
mainstream science -- he plays up and down the scale just as he pleases.
Thanks for engaging with something so half-baked!
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