ATDTDA (5.3) - Word Power

[Monte Davis]

John C:

> This would of course fit with the classic Pynchon theme of pivotal 
> moments in history, forks in the road, etc. And this fits in with the 
> already-discussed question of inevitability.

Tore:

 > 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...

Big YES to both. In V, Stencil keeps looking backward to find THE moment 
when a fatal illness infected European civilization, when virtu' became 
automatism. In GR, the Zone is a playground/battleground where it seems 
for a few months that all the arrangements of power are up for grabs. In 
M&D, offstage events between the narrative and the tale-telling (the War 
of Independence, a national government, and the Constitution's fatal 
finesse on slavery) "collapse" the possibilities of the frontier into a 
single narrative Line.

AtD insists on both/and, or better yet both/and/furthermore. Multiple 
might-have-beens -- in everything from family life to big-picture 
history -- don't go away, but keep dipping down out of the clouds, 
speaking up in seances, shimmering in mirrors and the empty spaces of 
paintings. (Heh... he said "empty."  Try looking through this crystal.)

I'm enjoying my/our difficulty in "getting settled," and I'm pretty sure 
it isn't going to go away on the third or thirtieth reading. We pride 
ouselves on being Certified Modernist/Postmodernist Explicators, wise in 
the ways of metanarrative and questionably-privileged viewpoints, 
familiar with every tune in the Deleuze and Guattari fakebook. But I 
can't think of another work where we get all that AND, at the same time, 
such a heaping helping of so many comfortable, culturally ingrained 
genres that trigger all our pre-modern expectations: Western, detective, 
spy, romance, utopia/dystopia, Poe/Lovecraft, a Theorem of One's Own, 
high bildungsroman and Horatio Alger wish-fulfillment, and more. Are you 
meta-ironically distanced from all of them? I'm not.

This isn't cool, challenging Schonberg and Webern VERSUS yummy 
peanut-buttery Rossini melodies. It's both at the same time, left and 
right hand trading places within pages, paragraphs, sentences.

I think they call it  "jass."