The Age of Chums of Chance

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Riot Riot wrote:

>My personal impression after several episodes with the Chums, years passing 
>and all, was that they >are all, like, teenagers. By other characters they 
>are often regarded as 'youngsters', 'boyish' etc. >Plus they don't seem to 
>grow older during the years, what concerns their outward appearance.

I think their age is kept deliberately vague throughout the book. In the 
opening section, they are clearly teenagers of the milk-and-cookies-variety, 
well-known from loads of American commercials and TV shows from the 50'es or 
thereabouts. Darby Suckling's enthusiastic exclamation upon leaving for 
Chicago: "Oh, boy! I can't hardly wait!", sounds pretty much like a number 
of similar exclamations in GR - for instance this exchange between Mr. 
Information and Skippy:

"That would be fun, wouldn't it, Skippy?
"Jeepers, it sure _would_, Mister Information! Wow, I-I can't wait to see 
Happyville!" (GR, 645)

- or the kid who hated kreplach:

"Now," sez Mother, "I'm going to make us a delicious surprise!" "Oh, boy!" 
cries the kid, "that's _keen_, Mom!" "See, now I'm sifting the flour and 
salt into a nice little pile." "What's that, Mom, hamburger? oh, boy!" 
"Hamburger, and _onions_. I'm frying them here, see, in this frying pan." 
"Gee, I can hardly wait! This is exciting! What're ya doin' _now_?" (etc. 
etc., GR, 737)

- o-or Slothrop upon seein' Schnorp's custard pies:

"Wow," cries Slothrop, "holy shit. Surely I hallucinate," and other such 
eager junior sidekick talk. (GR, 333)

Pynchon clearly has a lot of fun imitating this eager junior sidekick talk, 
replete with "Wow"s, "Oh, boy"s, and a generous scattering of exclamation 
marks, and in the beginning of AtD this kind of discourse seems to fit the 
innocent lads like a glove. Soon, however, naughty cuss-words make their 
entrance in the boy's conversation, and some of the innocence and optimism 
of those early pages seems to dissipate. The Chums clearly do change, then, 
and they also age as the novel proceeds. We're told on p. 9 that the lads - 
despite their altitude - have to "live with the constraints of the given 
world", and these constraints include aging, one supposes.
Due to their "dual citizenship in the realms of the quotidian and the 
ghostly" (256) they certainly don't age as fast as we do, but they're not 
immortal either. The boys clearly do grow older over the course of the 
novel: we're told that some of them grow beards, and they also begin to 
consort (and even cavort) with the ladies. There is surely some progression 
from innocence towards experience, then, and during WW1, of course, the boys 
receive more experience than they would ever have wished for.
At the end of the novel, as the Chums fly towards grace, it's pretty clear 
that they aren't the 40- or 50-year-olds one would have expected, had they 
aged like the rest of us, but they aren't exactly boys either, and I think 
the narrator means for us to notice the discrepancy between their experience 
and the narrator's continued insistence to call them boys. What the Chums 
have gone through would be enough to turn any boy into a man, but it seems 
that despite of - or perhaps even because of - all these experiences, the 
'boys' desperately try to cling to their earlier innocence. Events do 
conspire to make them grown-ups - at one point in the novel their invisible 
High Command simply absconds and forces them to take some sort of 
responsibility for their own lives - but it seems to me that the boys on 
some level passionately long for the return of that vanished authority, so 
they can keep on being kids. At a much earlier point in the novel, we are 
told that the boys:

"began to imagine, jointly and severally, some rescuer entering the crew 
spaces, moving among them, weighing, choosing, a creature of fantasy to 
bring them back each to his innocence, to lead him out of his unreliable 
body and his unique loss of courage, so many years in the making" (55)

As I've noted in a previous post, this desire to remain innocent forever 
recalls a passage from Vineland:

"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left
not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was
proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers
were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep - if he'd allowed himself to
feel it, the sometimes touching - need only to stay children forever, safe
inside some extended national Family." (VL, 269)

Pynchon is much less outspoken in AtD, but I think that the same idea is at 
play in his treatment of the Chums. In AtD he doesn't explicitly criticize 
the Chums' longing for innocence, but leaves it to the reader to see the sad 
irony of the narrator's continued insistence to call the Chums "the boys", 
despite the clear loss of innocence they experience throughout the novel. By 
the end of AtD, after having witnessed what they do during World War I, the 
boys are no longer boys, in spite of their fervent wish to remain so, and 
despite the narrator's wishful 'granting' of that wish by the continued use 
of the term 'boys', I think we're meant to realize this.

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