ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Carvill John]

John Bailey:

<< I'd just been trying to remember if Dr Vormance's first name is 
mentioned, and then thanks to the pynchon wiki realised it's Alden. >>

Yeah, I think 'Alden' only gets mentioned once, by Fleetwood Vibe when he's 
recalling how he'd decided to join Vormance's quest of 'a meteroite'.

<< Also, did we get anywhere with what happens to the American "city" in the 
rest of the novel? If it's NY (and come on, there are no other cities it 
might refer to, though I'm not taking away from the deliberate ambiguity) 
then plenty of characters will be wandering round New York in a few scant 
chapters with no, er, fallout.>>


No, don't think we got anywhere, not that I'm complaining, it's a mystery 
and there's probably no easy answer. It's very possible that more clues will 
emerge and in time, as the book gets the close study it deserves, some day 
we may be able to make sense of why the disaster which befalls a city - 
which may or may not be NY - never seems to get mentioned again.

<< Is it NY Hunter first resurfaces later? Can't recall. If so, you could 
see his Escape from New York not as a literal movement but of shifting 
realities, from a post-apocalyptic one to...something else. An imaginative 
relocation. >>

Imaginative relocation, yes. Certainly that's what Hunter does, imagines 
himself somewhere else, and physically gets out by stowing away on the 
Vormance boat, as does this otherworldly 'Figure' which brings fire and 
blood to (probably) New York. There's also the less literal sense, possibly 
involving bilocation. We're told that sometimes the land and ice shifts 
itself into such a pattern that it becomes a double for venice - in 
'painstaking' detail, and that on those nights it's possible for one to pass 
from Iceland to Venice, and it has to be significant that Hunter does indeed 
travel to Venice. So does he travel physically, via Vormance and London etc. 
- or does he bilocate along with all of his Icelandic home - or does he do 
both?

All in all, the more you re-read these passages, the more the layers pile up 
and the interconnections multiply, and I more and more tend to think of ATD 
as being possibly Pynchon's most densely interconnected book.

Cheers
JC

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