ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

              Tore:
              When Pynchon in GR speaks of "the path you must create by 
              yourself alone in the dark" (136), I think he speaks of both the 
              characters' trajectory through the text, the act of reading that 
              text, and of our life outside that text. The structure of the text 
              is a formal reenactment of the world described in that text, 
              and that world mirrors our own. Reading a novel by 
              Pynchon thus becomes not an act of consumption, where a 
              more or less passive reader is 'drawn into' the text, but an 
              act of active participation in its textual world. It's perhaps 
              not so much a matter of engaging with the characters, as you 
              rightly point out, Paul, as of engaging with the problems they 
              have to engage with. In that sense, however, I DO think it is 
              perfectly possible to identify with the characters, and I DO 
              wish that Frank hadn't blown up that damn train.

With the Webb Traverse material, were are given an insoluble paradox.
Here in the early 21st century, we are reading about "Terrorism" during 
the time and place where the myth of the western outlaw (along with the 
development of the labor movement, and of anarchism) first appeared.
Here's that mainstay of early pulp fiction and obvious proulgator of various
myths of Empire, the Western, and somehow Pynchon ties this varient
on the John Westley Harding tale (a variation on Robin Hood and other, 
early, anarchist beacons) to present day tales of bombings. We are 
lasso-ed into the traditional - deeply artificial - linear and classically rigid 
formula of the dime western, we are practically required by plot convention 
to root for the anti-hero, the storm at the center of the stories, even though 
we already know (in the backs of our minds) that our anti-hero is inevitably 
doomed. The Hayes Code requires it. And as Scarsdale Vibe walks out of a 
classic melodrama from the early silent movie era, we are required (by 
convention) to hiss upon his entrance. And it's not as if Pynchon isn't
encouraging us:

                   "On the way into the lobby, an elderly woman, respectably 
              though not sumptuously dressed, approached him, crying, 
              "If I were your mother I would have strangled you in your cradle." 
              Calmly Scarsdale Vibe nodded, raised his ebony air-cane, cocked 
              it, and pressed the trigger. The old woman tilted, swayed, and went 
              down like a tree.

              "Tell the house physician the bullet is only in her leg," said Scarsdale 
              Vibe helpfully. AtD, 31

Even before we meet up with Webb, we have already taken up sides.