ATDDTA (3): Control issues, 54-56

[Mark Kohut]

I am in general agreement with this and am struggling to articulate/understand all (many of) the meanings of the Chums.......they are NOT easily like many other characters in earlier Pynchons....the game has been raised.
   
  1) they are storybook charaters
  2) they are 'controlled" by some They.......which is like Pynchon's other Theys---in another dimension, to a different degree, at another level. etc.  
  3) Yes, they are ignorant....their overarching 'understanding" is ....a fiction?
  4) Is Pynchon partially saying what was said in shards in GR---fiction, words in Stories, even so-called ART, is NO MATCH for the realities we/they are going to encounter.....one modernist trope: HERE, HERE (in the stockyards, say) is Reality, not the "daylit fiction" of the Columbian Exhibition?....
  5) The manipulated Boys of Boys Adventure novels are.............f'in' entertainers!, not reality testers...
   
  Just sayin'...... 

Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
  
> FWIW, I'm not sure that the Chums' commanders are 
> not-identified: I think they are 'They' - that blurry and 
> sinister entity that also plays an important part in GR.

Well, sure -- but I'm challenging you/us/me to pay special attention,
because I think P has raised his game again. He's not just sketching a They
and letting us filigree our own paranoia over his; he's frequently,
actively, insistently 

(1) drawing our attention to the Chums' ignorance -- and as you say, their
off-and-on acquiescence in that ignorance

(2) tossing out all kinds of conflicting -- even mutually exclusive --
claims and clues

(3) And doing it all at a "meta" remove: remember, the sky-ships themselves,
when we're not actively following them, are quasi-invisible near-fictions
--e.g. the Inconvenience shadowing Kit across Central Asia, or the
disputable cause of the fall of the Campanile in Venice:

"...because of the aeronauts' dual citizenship in the realms of the
quotidian and the ghostly, it was to the _lasagnoni_ that the clarity of
sight to witness the engagement was granted. To them alone." (254)

"It was an accident of war," Lindsay insisted. "And I am not so sure we did
it 
anyway." (257)

So it's not just a question of a They who may or may not be be controlling
the action, as simplistic, straightforward books like GR or M&D :-). In AtD
P goes to considerable lengths to raise questions about a They who may or
may not be controlling the Chums, who from moment to moment may or may not
have the "access and agency" to control the action on the ground.

I have no answer to my question -- but for me, none of the answers that
half-worked for P's earlier books comes even close for this one.

Just sayin...




 
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