ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John:

>- - more mentions of 90 degree angles, which I am convinced will play a 
>role
>in our eventual 'understanding' of ATD, particularly in grasping the nature
>of the underlying structure(s) that we as readers suspect are there but
>cannot quite perceive at present, which puts us ahead of those reviewers 
>who
>wrote ATD off as a sprawling mess.

The frequent recurrence of those 90 degree angles does indeed seem very 
significant for AtD. The metaphor of the right angle occurs in both GR and 
M&D as well, though, and it seems to carry much of the same import in those 
earlier novels. At a very important juncture in GR, for example, where 
Slothrop has finally fled his pursuers and is on the brink of falling into 
the chaos of the Zone, we get this:

Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop 
the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's 
light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first 
star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right 
angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now." (GR, 
253)

In M&D, Mason meets his wife as she saves him from that gigantic rolling 
cheese. The cheese falls from its wagon as the drag-shoe on one side breaks 
away, "as if ordain'd by some invariance in the Day's Angular Momentum" 
(M&D, 170), and later in the same novel, we hear that Dixon (looking at the 
swinging needle of his compass near one of the ancient mounds) "feels 
himself begin to drift somewhere else, off at an angle to the serial curve 
of his Life...." (M&D, 599).

In GR and M&D, the metaphor "merely" seems to imply some sort of break in 
the linearity of the characters' lives or the narrative itself; some sort of 
resistance to the relentless linearity of cause and effect. And it seems to 
me that the metaphor functions in much the same way in AtD, even though it 
has grown more frequent in that novel. The specificity with which Pynchon 
tells us the angle, as it were (90 degrees; not 85 or 94) does seem 
significant, but 90 degrees is, after all, just another way of saying "right 
angle", and the specificity does seem fitting in a novel with so much 
mathematics in it.
So when we hear that the Vormance expedition is being taken "at right angles 
to the flow of time" (AtD, 132), or that Quaternionists are "able to set out 
at unknown angles from the simple line of Time, upon journeys that no one 
can predict...." (AtD, 533), I mostly see an elaboration of an old Pynchon 
metaphor whereby the author signals that the events so described somehow 
fall outside the ordinary linearity of history/narrative/life, very much 
like Mason's tale in M&D of his adventures in "the missing Eleven Days", 
where he speaks of falling into:

"a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to 
the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it" 
(M&D, 555)

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