ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Tore Rye Andersen]

David Morris wrote:

>The evidence that the CoC exist in the "real" world of AtD is in their
>interaction with characters on the ground in Chicago and elsewhere
>(Merle, Dahly, Lew, etc.).

And Monte replied:

>This needs to be qualified with that line on p. 36:"...the great national
>celebration possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit
>the boys access and agency.  The harsh nonfictional world waited outside 
>the White City's limits..."

>So yes, there's interaction, but only under (un)certain circumstances.

It's really fascinating to see how expertly Pynchon keeps the Chums on the 
knife-edge between fiction and reality: On p. 9 Lindsay instructs Chick: "Do 
not imagine that in coming aboard Inconvenience you have escaped into any 
realm of the counterfactual. There may not be mangrove swamps or lynch law 
up here, but we must nonetheless live with the constraints of the given 
world", but on p. 35 we hear of the boys' "usual unworldliness". On p. 256, 
the narrator mentions their "dual citizenship in the realms of the quotidian 
and the ghostly", and their ontological status is summed up pretty nicely in 
this exchange between Lew and Randolph:

"But you boys -- you're not storybook characters." He had a thought. "Are 
you?"
"No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly," Randolph supposed. "Although the 
longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell 
fiction from non-fiction." (37)

The Chums constantly flicker in and out of reality, or - perhaps more 
precisely - slide back and forth along a scale where 'reality' constitutes 
one pole and 'fiction' the other. It seems fitting that their first 
touchdown in 'our' world should be at the World's Fair, which - as Monte 
points out above - is as much a fiction as reality. Later, of course, they 
come into contact, more or less, with the harsh reality of WW1, but this 
can't exactly be construed as a steady progression by the Chums from fiction 
to reality - just think of that fairytale ending to the whole novel, whcih 
once again situates them squarely in the land of makebelieve.
Interestingly, the Chums' "dual citizenship in the realms of the quotidian 
and the ghostly" also applies to the readers of the Chums' adventures. At 
one point in the novel, Reed is reading one of the stories about them, and 
as he's reading, we hear that:

"for the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in 
Socorro and at the Pole" (215).

The act of reading itself, then, allows us to exist simultaneously in 
reality and the world of fiction, just like the Chums' themselves. Reading 
itself is depicted as a sort of bilocation, then, less supernatural perhaps 
than the other instances shown in the book, but hardly less magical.

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