ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John:

>There's a sense in which the whole [Vormance] 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 a crucial issue you raise here, but also one that's very hard to speak 
of with any confidence, let alone certainty. The novel exhibits, in its own 
words, a "great ambiguity of Time and Space" (444), and there's a strong 
sense that the action takes place in not one, but several worlds. You're 
right that these worlds may not so much be understood as 'parallel' - rather 
they seem to be almost, but not quite congruent, like an image refracted 
through Iceland Spar. This brings us back to that wonderful dustjacket once 
again: On a casual glance the three layers of the title seem to constitute a 
simple shadow effect, but in reality, of course, they are ever so slightly 
different: almost, but not quite congruent, in fact.

I think it makes good sense to think of the multiple worlds/alternate 
realities of AtD in this way. In one of these worlds, a great disaster 
befalls New York, or a city very much like New York, around 1900. In other 
of the novel's worlds, the Vormance expedition never took place, and the 
city won't be hit by disaster until much later (say 2001), if at all. I also 
get the peculiar feeling that the world Lew Basnight wakes up to after being 
dynamited, isn't the same as the one he was dynamited in. He has - like so 
many of the novel's characters - been bilocated, or transported from one 
world to another, and the rest of his story feels slightly out of kilter 
with what has gone before.

The effect of all these almost, but not quite congruent worlds seems quite 
different from Pynchon's previous novels. GR depicts one big, confused, 
fantastically real, and really phantasmogorical textual world where anything 
can happen (and where anything DOES happen), but once gotten used to, the 
reader (this reader, anyway) actually feels at home in this strange world. I 
think it's much harder to get settled in AtD: Once we feel we've gotten to 
know a particular one of its worlds, it changes ever so slightly, and one 
gets the sense that one has somehow been transported into a new one. The 
different worlds exist on the same diegetical level - one world doesn't seem 
more 'real' than the next - but they are not the same world, and one can 
spend a lot of energy trying to find out which world a given section takes 
place in. At one point in the novel, e.g., the Chums ascend/descend to a 
mirror world, but which world did they leave and which one did they enter? 
At first glance it may seem that the world they left - the world we had 
gradually accepted as the 'real' world of AtD - turns out to be the skewed 
mirror image of the one they arrive in - our world - but, wait, that isn't 
exactly right, either.

Subsequent interpretations may draw a proper map of the many worlds of AtD, 
and of their intersection points, but I somehow doubt it. Pynchon's use of 
multiple worlds in AtD is, I think, deliberately and literally unsettling. 
Once we feel we've settled into one textual world, we're transported into 
another world - almost, but not quite congruent. And so it goes....

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