ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John probed:

>1. How does Pynchon intend us to feel towards the Chums? Are we supposed to 
>find them charming, or annoying?
>
>2. Are the Chums the 'good guys'? Do *they* think they are on the side of 
>teh angels? Clearly they do. BUt are they? Or are they dupes, agents 
>through which technology is bent to malign ends?

I'm sure the Chums weren't created to annoy the reader, but I wouldn't 
necessarily say they're meant to charm us, either. The Chums are goofy, and 
they have a deliberately ridiculous name, but so are and so do many of 
Pynchon's previous creations ("The Ghastly Fop", anyone?). Goofiness 
notwithstanding, I still think we're meant to like the Chums, and even to 
identify with them to a certain extent. Despite their obvious 
cartoonishness, the Chums are also quite human on some level. They're flawed 
in ways none of their 'colleagues' from the boys' adventure literature 
they're modelled after are, and they are faced with moral problems that are 
absent from that more innocent literature:

For one thing, their aloofness - the way historical events below seem muted 
to them - is problematized throughout the novel. And so is their blind 
obedience to their nameless and faceless Commanders. Just like Mason and 
Dixon, the Chums are given certain tasks, and even though they often have 
doubts as to the moral implications of these tasks - and even though they 
discuss some of these implications amongst themselves - in the end they 
submit themselves to the invisible High Command and carry out their assigned 
mission, very much like Mason and Dixon, and very much like Pökler in GR, 
who despite several moral qualms ended up continuing the Line/the work on 
the Rocket.
I don't think we're meant to condemn the Chums (or Mason, Dixon, and Pökler) 
because of this obedience. Sometimes it does take a huge act of courage to 
quit the game, as Pökler does towards the end if his chapter in GR, and most 
of us would probably have done (and are probably doing) just what they did: 
carried out our assigned mission despite our doubts. I do think, however, 
that we're meant to recognize the general psychological mechanism that 
allows otherwise decent human beings to commit deeply questionable acts just 
because we're told to do so by some - often faceless - authority. On the 
dustjacket of M&D we're told that Mason and Dixon are "unreflectively 
entangled in crimes of demarcation", and I'm sure that the Chums (and Mason, 
Dixon, Pökler, et.al.) are Pynchon's attempt at making us reflect a bit on 
our own 'unreflective entanglement' in various 'crimes'. I think we're meant 
to recognize the Chums in ourselves. So I see the Chums as the continuance 
of this old Pynchon theme, and a very effective continuance at that, since 
the supposed 'innocence' of the boys makes their moral culpability stand out 
in stark relief.

The 'innocence' of the boys also forms a strong contrast to the historical 
events depicted in AtD. Pynchon's description of WW1 - the novel's 
indisputable centre of gravity - is a curious one, in that the bloody 
atrocities of that war are mostly absent. In the group reading we've 
previously discussed this notable omission in the light of previous 
"deliberate vacancies" in Pynchon's novels (The Holocaust and Hiroshima in 
GR, for instance), but the vacancy this time around is slightly different, 
in that it is filtered through the muted perspectives of the Chums. It's not 
that the narrator simply looks in a different direction, since the central 
truth itself seems too horrible to bear: In AtD he does look at the war, but 
through the eyes of the Chums, who mostly experience the horrors from above, 
or from inside neutral Switzerland, and who subsequently don't really have a 
clue about what's really going on in the mud of Flanders. We readers do, of 
course - it's in the history books, after all - and the contrast between our 
knowledge and the Chums' lack of knowledge makes for a very poignant 
(non-)representation of WW1. After what's transpired below, that fairytale 
ending to the whole novel only adds to the poignance: we're told by two 
different characters that the world descended into hell in 1914, and in 
light of those bleak pronouncements it becomes painfully obvious that the 
Chums' flight toward grace is indeed a fairytale - a soothing fairytale, 
perhaps, a touch of comfort that mirrors that from the ending of GR:

"There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or 
to reach between your own cold legs .... or, if song must find you, here's 
one They never taught anyone to sing, a hymn by William Slothrop..." (GR, 
760)

The Chums' flight toward grace, as I see it, is the equivalent of William 
Slothrop's hymn (or of touching between your own cold legs): It ends the 
novel on a note of hope and provides the reader a little bit of comfort, but 
the comfort is a slender and even a cold one, and it won't stop those 
rockets from falling.

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