AtDTDA: 18 Distinct versions of the Stupendica [514/515]

[John BAILEY]

Oh yes, I love that bit too.

And it's interesting that Kit sees confinement and a limiting of
possibility on a seabound voyage, where others see escape and movement
towards something more hopeful (or, perhaps - a returning to something
important).

Maybe that's part of their shift onto two distinct vessels. In
experiencing, or interpreting their voyage so differently, they come to
inhabit different spaces, set on alternate vectors which move away from
one another.

Luckily this is AtD, and there are few lines which don't eventually,
cross one another again.

Also: on the Stupendica split...

The ship's split personality is very strangely described. At first, Kit
notices that the luxury liner has the capacity to become something else
(a battleship), but merely in a kind of vintage Transformers way. It's
just more than meets the eye.

Then we have the description of two ships built independently, the
Stupendica and the Maximillian, which somehow mysteriously became one
when nobody was looking. 

Then we have the transformation that seems to suggest that there are two
ships occupying the same space and time but in alternate dimensions, so
that you're not in fact on both at once, but are in one or the other.
And that it's transformation is less about the ship changing than about
the voyager leaping from one of its realities to another. Kind of like
how Lew leaps into a different reality when he gets himself all blown up
by the dynamite.

I haven't gone back to the rest of this chapter yet but I seem to
remember that after the transformation, Kit and Dally appear ambiguously
to have arrived in Europe and Morocco on two separate vessels or
something.

Confounding stuff.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
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Sent: Wednesday, 3 October 2007 12:04 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: AtDTDA: 18 Distinct versions of the Stupendica [514/515]


          It had begun to seem as if she and Kit were on separate
vessels, 
          distinct versions of the Stupendica, pulling away slowly on
separate 
          courses, each bound to a different destiny.

Foreshadowing of the division/duplication of the Stupendica/Maximillian.

          He lapsed into silence, torpor, for scaleless moments seized
by 
          memories of desert plateau, mountain peaks, medows fill of 
          Indian paintbrush and wild primrose, some unexpected river 
          two steps off the trail-then released back into this
twenty-knot 
          push into the uncreated. He was not sure what it was he felt.
If 
          anyone had said desperation, he'd've shrugged and rolled a 
          cigarette, shaking his head. Not it. Not it exactly.

Not much I can can say. What poetry.

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