ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[kelber at mindspring.com]

As a New Yorker, it was impossible for me to read ATD, p. 149-155 as anything but an almost journalistic account of 9-11.  

The Board of Inquiry on p. 149-51, trying, half-assed, to assess narrow blame for the incident. [I've always found the claim of some that I might ordinarily sympathize with politically, that 9-11 would have been preventable had the FBI/CIA/etc. been more vigilant --- ridiculous.  The plot was so incredible, that had we seen in in a movie beforehand, it would have been labelled preposterous.]

p. 151:

"'In the Eskimo view, someone of our party, by failing to perform the due observances, showed deep disrespect, causing the Power to follow its nature, in exacting an appropriate vengeance.'
'Appropriate?  given the loss of property, not to mention innocent life ...appropriate to what, sir?'"

This thoroughly captures the point of the John's posting below:


-----Original Message-----
>From: Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
Not wishing to raise the stink of 9/11 
>controversies but there has of course been teh suggestion - sometimes 
>hysterical, sometimes reasoned - that the events of that day did not spring 
>from teh brow of a lone madman, but were instead, at least to an extent, 
>part of the phenomenon of 'blowback', ie a result of US foreign policy. Ther 
>has of course been a widespread tendency to paint anyone who suggests this 
>as a terrorist's friend or someone who regards the 9/11 atrocities as 
>'justified', but there is a big difference between thinking that 9/11 may 
>hav been 'caused' by foreign policy and thinking it was 'justified' by 
>it

I think Pynchon also alludes to another "cause" of 9/11: the building of the World Trade Center towers as an affront to the character of the city as it had been.  Their building was quite controversial:  the NYC skyline was a world-renowned view, delicate, filagreed, spires, rising up to a point, then gracefully subsiding.  In the midst of this, "they" plunked two giant metal filing cabinets.  A move away from art towards vulgar commerce (specifically the takeover of the city by the rapacious real estate industry).


p. 153:

"So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence -- not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be -- its inhabitants became and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injure, unable to summon the face of the violator."



Pynchon was presumably in the city during 9/11, terrified about the whereabouts of friends and relatives, and his descriptions recall the chaos, the hasty flights across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Hudson River, the posters of the missing festooning the city, the night panorama (p. 154), a light-memorial, two skinny beams of light marking where the towers had been "into which the viewer might read what he chose [ personally, it made me weep]."


One more interesting point that I noticed.  Hunter's wandering through the unfamiliar part of town, with a grid that no longer makes sense, echoes Lew Basnight's wanderings through Chicago.  The advent of the 20th century and its wars comingling with the advent of the 21st century and its wars.