ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Mark Kohut]

This is great, great on various fictions vs. reality and reading,.
   
  Does anyone else think it is TRP's way of saying: Fiction is (ALMOST) nothing, gives us almost no real insight/feeling into REALITY?.....
  GR had a distinct anti-novel (as inadequate) theme.......

David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
  Thanks, Tore, for a very good answer to the question raised.
Examining levels of reality in fiction and in our own world(s) is
certainly something Pynchon intends for us to do while reading AtD.

On 3/23/07, Tore Rye Andersen wrote:
> 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.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Find dine dokumenter lettere med MSN Toolbar med Windows-pc-søgning:
> http://toolbar.msn.dk
>
>



 	 
---------------------------------
Looking for earth-friendly autos? 
 Browse Top Cars by "Green Rating" at Yahoo! Autos' Green Center.  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070325/52e96714/attachment.html>