ATDTDA (11): Chance meetings

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Laura:

>The current flat section contains the original sample blurb that was
>released pre-publication.  Was this truly a random, flip-the-page-and-point
>selection, or is there some deeper significance to this passage? (p.
>309-310) starting with "Back in 1899"  Don't remeber where it ends.

Read on its own, the passage does seem to be a rather strange choice for the 
Penguin catalogue. Ya Sam is probably right in speculating that this was 
simply one of the shortest set pieces in the novel, with an added touch of 
light humour. Still, taken in isolation the piece seems strangely 
insignificant and not particularly funny, and I would think it possible to 
find several other, more typically pynchonesque (whatever that means), 
excerpts.

Read in the context of the whole novel, though, the passage suddenly gains 
in significance. Half a page after the excerpt, after Jimmy Drop has advised 
Willis to become a "Circuit ridin' osteo-whatever-it-is," we're told that:

"Which is how life then took a turn for young Willis Turnstone. [...] one 
chance meeting with the notorious Jimmy Drop gang among the mind-poisoning 
vetches and creosote of a dusty high plain was all it took to steer him in a 
whole 'nother direction." (AtD, 311)

So the excerpt from the Penguin catalogue actually embodies a very important 
and recurring theme in AtD: How chance meetings can turn a life completely 
around, lead to new forks in the road, other trails, etc. This is for 
instance what happens to Kit after his chance encounter with the Tunguska 
explosion:

"Since the visitation at the Stony Tunguska, he had noticed that the angle 
of his vision was wider and the narrow track of his life branching now and 
then into unsuspected side trails." (AtD, 785)

There are numerous of these "chance meetings" in AtD. On one level, of 
course, they illustrate how much chance really plays into everything, cf. 
this old bit from V. where Fausto Maijstral learns:

"life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever 
admit to in a lifetime and stay sane." (V., 320-21)

On the other hand, of course, most of these so-called "chance meetings" in 
AtD are anything but random. The meeting between Jimmy Drop and Willis 
Turnstone does seem genuinely random (within the logic of the book, that 
is), but the majority of the chance meetings in AtD would seem to fall under 
the heading "extremely and deliberately unlikely coincidences." The 
characters keep running into into each other "by chance" in the remotest 
corners of the planet, usually prefigured with a phrase like "One day Reef 
happened to run into his old buddy..." or "...when who should appear 
but...". Pynchon perversely seems to foreground the very unlikelihood of 
these chance encounters with the recurrence of these phrases: He clearly 
wants us to pay attention to them and to the fact that the world of AtD is a 
Small World (my suggestion for an alternative title to AtD).

So what does it all mean? Don't really know. Pynchon may just be having a 
spot of fun with what was more or less a literary convention in the 19th 
century: In Dickens or Thackeray, for instance, characters do indeed run 
into each other all the time and in the strangest places: Before the advent 
of the telephone, if an author wanted two characters to talk together, he 
often had to resort to such violations of probability (today characters just 
grab their cell-phones -- interesting thought experiment: imagine Jack Bauer 
and '24' without all the cell-phones). So all the chance meetings in AtD may 
just be Pynchon's gentle mockery of this more or less necessary 19th century 
convention.

Another way of seeing all these "chance encounters" is as a way for Pynchon 
deliberately to foreground the fictionality of what goes on in AtD. Many 
passages of the novel seem almost realistic, but this realism tends to be 
undermined by yet another chance meeting in remote Siberia, or in a small, 
godforsaken railway shack in the middle of America. The sheer density of 
descriptive details in some of the novel's passages occasionally makes AtD 
seem more 'realistic' than the average Saul Bellow novel, but the blatant 
and foregrounded improbability of the novel's countless chance meetings 
remind us - if we needed reminding - that we are indeed reading a work of 
fiction, and that somewhere someone is pulling the novelistic strings.

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