AtDTdA (9): 245

[mikebailey]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>   I think we cannot forget the basic: there is an author of the Chums adventures (all analogies
>   to an Author of the Universe might hold), and one thing Pynchon is saying is that writers
>   cannot really interfere with "reality"........
>
>   History happens, it is deadly to many, many,  while daylit
>fictions engage us.
>

right on; the thing that I would expect Pynchon to have, most of all,
would be a well-developed rationale and sense of his own place in
the scheme of things as author; an awareness of the place of the
artifact of his books in the real world, their possible influence,
their limitations...

w/r/t the limitations part, that seems to be what our group mind
is jointly ascribing to the Chums - a certain blitheness that is almost
offensive to those who take life more seriously
I'm not differing from that viewpoint, but suggesting that the vast
majority of people - myself most definitely included - take things
as the Chums do...forces beyond our control send us messages;
we trade our time and lend our shoulders to efforts by corporations
we may not totally approve; we undertake tasks which sometimes fail
or are completely misunderstood - like writing "A Journey
Into the Mind of Watts" and having it cited as an example of the
purblind liberal press, and at that only as a minor side point -
but whether one's Chums chapter is Richard, Joan, Mimi and Tom,
having adventures like confronting Birchers at a fair; or
Rachel, Joey, Ross, Monica, Phoebe and Chandler having adventures
like, well, whatever they did for 10 seasons; in any case, the
attempt to find a happy, Goldilocks-sized paradigm within which to live
(living as one of Them, shaping the dialectic of history without
regard to individual suffering, is TOO BIG; living as one of the
preterite, grubbing in the dark under the mountain with no recourse
save the insufficient one of dynamite, is TOO SMALL;
but living in the Inconvenience, with the rest of its crew, is JUST RIGHT)
is fraught with difficulty - though still worth undertaking;
there's the Counterforce in GR, the Whole Sick Crew in V.,
the surveying party in M&D, and the family reunion (finest
of all, imho, though the Chums are growing on me) in Vineland;
Oedipa is spared the heartaches of the
insufficiencies of these arrangements but maybe that's what she's
really looking for...