ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John:

>I know we're getting way ahead here, but that fairy tale ending obviously 
>has to be taken into account in any consideration of how we're to view the 
>Chums. I don't know that we can say the flight toward grace ending is an 
>unambivalently or unambiguously hopeful note. In some ways it echoes the 
>end of Vineland, both literally - in the ascent of an airborne vehicle - 
>and in the difficulty we have in deciding whether it is or isn't intended 
>to be a 'happy ending'.

You're absolutely right, of course, that the ending of AtD is fiercely 
ambiguous. In a post a couple months back I wrote (in response to Denis 
Scheck's review, in which he called the ending of AtD "perhaps the loveliest 
happy end in modern literature"):

I'm not sure that I would call the ending of AtD a happy one. I think it's
much more ambiguous than that, and I'm not really sure what exactly the
Chums are flying toward. They ascend into the third dimension, to be sure,
but as we're told on p. 1083, this dimension is not only "an avenue of
transcendence" but also a "means for delivering explosions", which becomes
abundantly clear in the first sentence of GR (and throughout that novel). In
other words, something *is* coming to part the sky on p. 1085 of AtD, but it
might just as well be the screaming of a rocket as grace. So I really see
the ending of AtD as leading directly to the beginning of GR, and I'm not
sure I would call it "the loveliest happy end in modern literature."

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114590&sort=author

I'd still argue that the ending does provide a modicum of hope, but that 
hope is surely tinged with dread (or the dread is tinged with hope: you 
decide), and in that sense, AtD's ending does resemble the endings of not 
only Vineland (where Prairie longs for Brock to return and take her, just 
before Desmond enters the scene, wagging his tail, thinking he must be 
home), but also GR and M&D. The latter ends with Doc and William's 
optimistic hopes of going to America ("We'll fish there. And you too."), but 
in light of what we know is coming (summed up by Oedipa's bleak thought in 
Lot 49: "and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good 
for diversity?"), Doc's and William's dreams of America seem more sad than 
hopeful.

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