ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[grladams at teleport.com]

Now I had figured somehow that the Chums were receiving instructions from a
force that wanted to send them on tasks that would prevent the world from
noticing that time travellers were infiltrating among us. There is an
underlying a battle to shut down the Tesla type forces by the Vibe forces
or some other controllers (barons) in order to bolster the effect of what a
grid of paying customers would be for them. The chums are the epitome of
off the grid living though, and I've wondered why they get saddled with
these missions. The visitors from time travel think of innocence as a
commodity, and there's some kind of wishful harvesting of this and other
goods that isn't spoken of overtly too much in the novel but seems to be in
there. I think if people 'did' realize that the visitors were here
harvesing innocence (or taking whatever they take), there'd be some guilty
consciences, about how we "know" something bad is going to happen because
we got to see it via the way these visitors (presences) from the future
cherish this stuff that they're coveting that we still have. Like Yahsmeen
and others, they have a power of being able to just peek and see glimmers,
there's this whole underlying thing in the book about how there are people
among us, who have seen glimmers, let's say a current example would be Al
Gore, for example, and unless we want to go around with guilt we have to do
something. 


Original Message:
-----------------
From: Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:01:27 -0700 (PDT)
To: johncarvill at hotmail.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus


I sorta see the Chums as us, as we bourgeois, the bourgeois, yes, really
'doing nothing' but
  trying to work and live a little.......how quickly the Chums get "married
with kids" to live
  out their 'grace-filled' lives BETWEEN the wars......???

Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
  

Tore - among a lot of really great stuff - wrote:

>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. 
>.....


...and what about their fellow baloonists? Penny Black or the crew of the 
Bolshoi Igra? I'm not sure, but I don't think we ever have any defite 
evidence that any of them exist outside of teh Chums' world. We see them 
interact with others, eg the waitresses in the restaurat in Venice, but
that 
scene is viewes through the Chums' eyes so there's nothing there to suggest 
that the Chms' Russian counterparts exist for anyone other than the Chums.

To take a 90 degree tangent, there are two more Big Questions regarding the 
Chums:

1. How does Pynchon intend us to feel towards the Chums? Are we supposed to 
find them charming, or annoying? There has certainly been a lot of 
polarisation among readers, reviewers, and critics on this matter, some 
loving the Chums, some hating them.

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? Do the Chums' actions ever have an 
unambiguously positive effect? And is their tendency to remain simewhat 
aloof - their heads in the clouds - expressing mystification over the 
Champagne shortage and the use of teh word 'trenches', an instance of 'good 
men doing nothing'?

Cheers
JC

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