Fwd: ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

John Carvill wrote:

> 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.

What it (the city scene) reminds me of is several sci-fi movies where they show the crates arriving at the museum, and then the mummy or whatever creates a reign of terror -- but we're not there quite yet...never mind...

> 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?

they denied it in Chapter one, but then they would, wouldn't they?

> In the 'real' world of Against the Day, are there a
> lot of airships peopled by daring adventurer crews?

mos' def'! And this I think ties in with the -syndicalist view of organizing on the neighborhood level or affinity group, "we all live in a yellow submarine", er, mutatis mutandis "we all fly in an airship Inconvenience"
(and how about that name? Vide Burroughs quoting St Paul, "that which is inconvenient" - is it meant to connote homoerotic bonding?) those who don't mourn but organize?

>Is the earth hollow?

by the bye, I loved the way the contraction of the earth's nether hole is related to a basic biological reaction (vide "Anus-Clenching Adventure with Harold Hedd" UG comic from Rand Holmes - RIP)

>
> 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?
>

doesn't it sort of segue into Fleetwood Vibe's personal adventures, which in turn are relegated - along with Fleetwood himself - to a dusty wing of the Vibe manse like the notion of the hollow earth is relegated to the category of things that were once thought possible, which in turn relates to the obliviation of many such notions worked with in M&D?


>
> 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 referring to "the
> airship crew" rather than "the Chums of Chance".
>

maybe it's a class-related thing. The Chums being not of the upper crust, certainly, nor their readership

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

I didn't...nor did I grasp exactly when in the plot the Chums actually did grasp after anything they weren't supposed to, as the narrator indicated they were going to...do they? (unless it be the band camp: 'zo Meatman's gone AWOL; grounded they were for a while there, hence out of their element - but we're not there yet...never mind)

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

and some indications of how it changed the City, anyway, not for better

> - 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?
>

there are just so many of those (in the book and in the real world) - I have a tendency to see it as a lot of disasters rolled into one: the Chicago Fire, 9-11, both World Wars (and how contrasting a picture the Vormance Expedition is to European colonialism in the Southern Hemisphere: the adventurers blend into society rather than take it over - the painter and his aunt note them in passing but their lives go on, unlike, say, Enzian's - they purchase Meat Olaf, they use the library, they interact with a frozen landscape (instead of the prolific life of the jungle) yet the artifact they bring back from the North does to their city what European colonials did to Southern societies...)

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

Umm, that the interference patterns across AtD emanating from the Vormance expedition are as subliminal as the references to the Holocaust in GR?
(quack, quack, paddle, paddle)