ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Carvill John]

So, after a lot of prefiguring - and having watched the Chums of Chance 
failing to intercept it, we finally catch up with the ill-fated schooner 
Etienne-Louis Malus, Pynchon taking us right down onto the fantail and 
treating us to a short burst of song. It's interesting and maybe significant 
(you tell me...), that the song contains a hint of the forboding which has 
attended every mention of the Vormance Expedition so far:

For we sail
With no sure returning,
Into winds
That will freeze the soul

[Yes I know, I've skipped the first paragraph of this section, I'll come 
back for it in the next post!]

Ok, that song might be just a reference to a general sense of apprehension 
when sailing "to the coasts of 'Iceland'", but it fits in well with the 
already established sense of doom. Which leads me to my first question, or 
point for disussion, or tedious inanity, you decide:

What are we to make of the fact that the Vormance Expedition, in early 
mentions, is routinely spoken of in terms which suggest that the reader 
already knows what will eventually become of it? It's as if it were a famous 
historical event, of which any reader can reasonably be expected to be 
aware, as would be the case if Pynchon were talking about, say, the Titanic. 
There's a sense of, oh yeah, the Vormance Expedition, we all know what 
happened to that.

And although this assumed foreknowledge may be just a narrative technique, I 
think it might also be linked to the broader question of fictional worlds 
and whether the world of Against the Day is intended to be our own world, 
'with a minor adjustment or two', or an entirely fictional one, or - as 
seems likely - there are a number of coexisting worlds. And this strikes me 
as one of the central puzzles of the book. Of course, for 'worlds' you could 
substitute 'times' or 'dimensions' or 'planes of existence'.

There are any number of instances throughout the book where we might pause 
and wonder about this, and of course the most obvious case is the Chums and 
their balloon, whether the Chums are 'real' people, whose adventures are 
turned into fiction by the narrator who speaks of his 'harmless little 
intraterrestrial scherzo'.  Or are the Chums, within the fictional world of 
the book, fictional? And if they are, then what does that imply about the 
others with whom they interact? It's all a satisfyingly slippery and maybe 
unresolvable tangle of questions. Whichever way you try to look at it it 
dosn't quite stack up. In the 'real' world of Against the Day, are there a 
lot of airships peopled by daring adventurer crews? Is the earth hollow? 
There are plenty of suggestions that the Chums are not quite of 'this' 
world, and have only a glancing acquaintance with it.

Tying this back in to the Vormance episode, there's a sense in which the 
whole expedition and its aftermath seem to exsist in their own, oddly 
discrete little bubble. Certainly such a cataclysmic occurance (with all its 
modern day overtones) would, you'd expect, have some kind of felt effect on 
the rest of the novel's fictional world, but I don't think - please someone 
check! - that the Vormance events are much mentioned anywhere else in the 
book?

So, maybe it occurs within yet another distinct fictional world? And what 
could we say, with or without any certainty, that we know about the 
relationships between these various worlds? Many ATD reviews talk of 
'parallel' worlds but that can't be right. Do they not seem to brush up 
against one another, collide, overlap like Venn diagrams, make incursions 
into one another?

It's worth noting here too that, typically for this book, we're not quite 
sure exacly where or even when we are. And on top of that, the Vormance crew 
themselves don't  seem to know the purpose of the expedition - although we 
soon learn (I think around page 160 or 170) of Fleetwood Vibe's decision to 
join Alden Vormance in "getting up a party to go north and recover a 
meteorite", and on page 148 we're told that the scientists aboard teh Malus 
believe, as they head for the unnamed port city, that 'it ws a meteroite 
they were bringing back'..  The name Vormance seems to be a Pynchon 
invention by the way, I certainly haven't found any mention of it via Google 
except in relation to ATD, and my Shorter Oxford doesn't have any word at 
all beginning with 'vorm'. Begins with a 'V' of course, not that professor 
Vormance seems to be a villian as such.

Finally, throughout this section we see the Chums & the Vormance party 
interact. But unlike many others in the book, who seem to be well aware of 
the Chums' famous adventures, the Vormance people, and Fleetwood Vibe in 
particular, seem never to have heard of them, Vibe refrerring to "the 
airship crew" rather than "the Chums of Chance".

So, to sum up, some points for discussion:

- Do we recognise this 'assumed foreknowldege' or is that just my 
impression?

- In any case, isn't it strongly implied that the Vormance adventure ends in 
a tragedy with far-reaching, even world-changing consequences?

- Why does the fate of the Vormance Expedition seem to loom so large while 
we're approaching it, and as we watch its terrible (though not overly 
specific) aftermath unfold, yet not seem to figure as an 'event which has 
happened and had an effect on the world' elsewhere in the book?

- What can we say at this stage in our reading of the book - if we imagine 
ourselves back into the role of first-time reader - about the 'reality' or 
otherwise of the Chums of Chance?

- What do all of these matters tell us about the fictional world(s) of the 
book and their possible interrelations? Anything?

Cheers
JC

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