ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John Carvill wrote:

>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:

[...]

>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?

Yesterday's apologetic intro notwithstanding, you're off to a flying start 
here, John! Your post opens up a whole bundle of interesting avenues, and I 
hope we'll get to discuss them all during the next couple of weeks. For 
starters, though, I'd like to zoom in on that ominous sense of foreboding 
you describe above.
I see this foreboding as a microcosmic enactment of that larger foreboding 
that runs through most of AtD: the general idea that an apocalypse (WW1) 
looms in the horizon. Most of the characters seem convinced of the 
inevitability of this war, to such an extent that WW1 is established as a 
historical fact before its actual occurence.
In his reply to your post, Mark Kohut wrote:

>I think there is something not figured out yet--by us--regarding the 
>foreknowledge of the >Vormance Expedition. I think the offered reading by 
>John is right....it does seem as he writes, and >why? My first attempt at 
>some explanation is to say that maybe Pynchon is saying/showing
>the inevitablity of historical events, events that cannot be changed as 
>time travel fiction always >plays with but in "Reality" never could.

I rather tend to think that Pynchon's treatment of 'the inevitability of 
historical events' aims to dispute that very 'inevitability'. All the 
characters in AtD act as if WW1 truly is inevitable, and in that way they 
help bring about its very inevitability. By having no doubts whatsoever 
about the coming disaster, they submit themselves to the abstract force of 
History and by doing so they deprive themselves of the opportunity to change 
the course of events. Of course, the actions of a single individual will 
hardly be enough to change the course of history, but if we all think that 
way (and most of the characters in AtD do so); if we all try to evade 
responsibility by pointing to the inevitability of coming disasters, then 
these disasters will surely come about.
I think Pynchon is very critical of this idea of the inevitabilty of 
historical events, and I think he has been so at least since GR, where the 
discussion between Wimpe and Tchitcherine on pp. 700-06 raises a number of 
the same issues (Wimpe takes Tchitcherine to task for submitting himself to 
Marxist dialectics; for being willing to die to "help History grow to its 
predestined shape" (GR, 701)). And the same points are more or less made in 
Pökler's story in that book, where Pökler submits himself to an 'inevitable' 
Destiny, before he finally quits the game in an act of courage. A-and in 
M&D, where Mason and Dixon continually discuss whether they should stop 
drawing their line, but in the end do as they've been told.
The sense of foreboding is stronger than ever in AtD, and I think it is 
clearer than ever in that novel that the characters' many prophecies of doom 
in some sense constitute a form of passivity, a relegation of 
responsibility: If all these characters were so sure of the coming disaster, 
why the hell didn't they try to avert it, before it really did become too 
late? Individually they might not do much, but collectively perhaps they 
could have made a difference.

_________________________________________________________________
Få de bedste søgeresultater med MSN Search:  http://search.msn.dk