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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