ATDTDA (3) Dynamitic mania, 80-86

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Mike Bailey wrote:

>Well, maybe...what if the novel is like the Globe theatre, and there's
>sort of a tiered effect, whereby the Chums are in the balcony,
>representing those for whom life is a comedy because they think?
>
>Then down on stage you have the family drama taking place; a-and
>Lew Baswell's working security, and that Cyprian is up in one of the
>boxes with dowagers and pearl necklaces...

I loved your description of AtD as a vast theatre - an idea that really 
resonates for Pynchon readers in general and GR fans in particular. As we 
learn on the very first page of that novel: "The Evacuation still proceeds, 
but it's all theatre." And GR of course ends with the Rocket reaching "its 
last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre". Most of all, 
though, your description reminds me of GR's eerie description of a vast 
amphitheatre and its countless spectators:

"For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4 and the 
Father-conspiracy do not entirely fill their world. Their struggle is not 
the only, or even the ultimate one. Indeed, not only are there many *other* 
struggles, but there are also *spectators*, watching, as spectators will do, 
hundreds of thousands of them, sitting around this dingy yellow 
amphitheatre, seat after seat plunging down in rows and tiers endless miles, 
down to the great arena, brown-yellow lights, food scattered on the stone 
slopes up higher, broken buns, peanut shells, bones, bottles half-filled 
with green or orange sweet, fires in small wind-refuges, set in angles whose 
seats have been chiseled away [...] while beside other fires the women 
gossip, one craning over now and then to look miles downward at the stage, 
to see if a new episode's come on yet - crowds of students running by dark 
as ravens, coats draped around shoulders, back out into a murky scetor of 
seats which traditionally are never entered (being reserved for the 
Ancestors), their voices fading still very intense" [and on and on this 
superb passage goes, pp. 679-80 of GR]

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