ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Makes me wonder where that "Civil War Novel" is lurking 
(them reb Traverses, that'll be a P.C. Shitstorm, eh?)

                 Mark Kohut:
                  Yes to both...to incredible interconnection.....another reason 
                 I think he has been working on this book all of his adult life
                 ......GR Might Have been "cut out" of a larger projected 
                 historical novel...(very speculative and probably wrong)
                 ...but ATD is deeply related to ATD, i suspect.

There's travelers in time we encounter much further along in the book, 
talking about some major breach in the future, and I suspect what they're 
talking about is a breach in the linearity of time, perhaps a computer 
related glitch.  AtD has all these colorful demonstrations of really weird 
re-alignments of various time axes and I suspect what Pynchon is really 
putting on display here are concepts demonstrating a multiplicity of 
co-incident universes, all in different time fields, some rather close to 
ours, a bit like stumbling onto this underlieing font of fiction, this potential 
for infinite recursiveness with slight variations in each of these worlds.  
"Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it's what 
the world might be." He's going for Goethe's Faust, part two, Kit climbing 
up to the various Everests of Math in the hope of redemption. Hope 
someone really mathy out there can hand us some oxygen masks, 
the air gets might thin 'round these here parts sometimes. 

 
                 Mark Kohut:
                 Iceland---evil North.......Venice--a human city TRP seems
                 to love.......is this doubling, maybe bi-location a working 
                 example of the "co-consciousness" theme?

A-A-a-and don't forget the motor city: Trieste. All these trails in AtD for us 
true Tr-----o paranoids, they either lead to Shambhala or a dead end.

                 John Bailey:
                 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. 

                 John Carville:
                 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?

Whatzhitzname:
Isn't Hunter a Time Traveller, one of the ones whose temporal excursions lie
far outside of the ostensible time period (1893-1920ish) of AtD?

                 John Carville:
                 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.