AtDTDA: 18 Stupendica 505

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

This part of the journey will be rocky. Time and narrative flow will become 
discontinuous, threading in multiple directions. I've come to the point in my 
reading where I'm looking for regions of connection in the narrative threads.
Most have been explosions of some sort which might be part of a subfusc 
O.T.O. thread spread across the novel, buried in the "T.W.I.T." term. [*]
More to the point, I've come to the point where I'm reading AtD like I read 
GR or Vineland, leaping from section to section, trying to figure out how it all
connects while enjoying the local scenery—I suppose you could call it the 
condition of the Tourist. Hunter Penhallow has a few to say on that 
subject. The "Traverse" aspect aligns with the "Tourist" aspect—travelers 
all, with a few who are on a pilgrimage or crusade. In a way, what makes 
this era different is traversal, the simple means of getting about in cars, 
trains, hydrogen skyships. There's a lovely quote of Proust's [°] concerning
the sudden alteration of the landscape when the automobile arrived, what 
with being able to make as many as six visits with one's friends and relations 
in one day, where in the past one would walk from villa to mansion and see 
at the most, two households. Pynchon makes as much as he possibly can 
out of this difference in the early modern era, noting the use of one of these 
technological innovations as soon as it appears on the market: Syntonic 
Wireless, Sand Screws, Time Machines, Skyships, Ocean Liners. . . .

          The tall black hull rose above them like a monument to the 
          perils of the sea, no obvious connection to the waves of gaiety 
          washing beneath it.

Katie and Dally have some pre-departure chatter, Katie having received a 
callback from R. Wilshire Vibe who seems to be the good—or at least the 
not really all that bad— Vibe. Katie, scrying the pier, contemplates the
future:

          Her parents had sailed out of Cobh [1] like everybody else, but she'd 
          been born later, and had never been to sea. If they had been sailing 
          into the future, toward some unknowable form of the afterlife, what 
          was this journey of Dally's the other way? [2] A kind of release from 
          death and judgment back into childhood?

Again speaking of Bardo states:

          And as if reincarnated from some intermediate or Bardo state, one 
          night of no moon the civilian passengers, including Kit, slipped one 
          by one from an opening in the side of the Emperor Maximillian. . . . 
          521

1. From the AtD Pynchonwiki:

          plug hats
          a plug hat may be a top hat or a bowler hat.

          Cobh
          the historic port town of Cobh Ireland. Many ocean liners sailed 
          from there, including the Titanic... the port of Queenstown (now 
          known as Cobh.

http://tinyurl.com/2ewcx5

. . . .and the Stupendica/Titanic connections ought to be clear, what with 
the Kit/Dally social situation being a reversal of the Rose DeWitt Bukater 
and Jack Dawson coupling, but being a bit more confused as neither of 
this pair comes from blue-blood, but both were touched by the Vibes. . . . 

. . . .many, many demonstrations of class difference afforded onboard 
the Stupendica, class difference and class struggle figuring prominantly 
in upcoming scenes at the Grand Digue.

2. Or maybe even somewhere else, perhaps into another person's 
history. . . .

          "Oh, then call them 'traces of consciousness.' Psychical 
          Research is beginning to open these matters up a bit. 
          Ghosts can be . . . well, actually, look at them all." He 
          waved an arm up and down the Zattere. "Every tourist 
          you see here streaming by, everyone who plans to sleep 
          tonight in a strange bed, is potentially that kind of ghost. 
          Transsient beds for some reason are able to catch and 
          hold these subtle vibrational impulses of the soul. Haven't 
          you noticed, in hotels, the way your dreams are often, 
          alarmingly, not your own?" 578

°. Can't help but re-post Proust's thought's on how the 
Automobile altered the local space/time continuum:

          Marcel Proust, Sodom et Gomorrhe 
          Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
          eBook No.:  0300491.txt

          Distances are only the relation of space to 
          time and vary with that relation. We 
          express the difficulty that we have in 
          getting to a place in a system of miles or 
          kilometres which becomes false as soon 
          as that difficulty decreases. Art is modified 
          by it also, when a village which seemed to 
          be in a different world from some other 
          village becomes its neighbour in a landscape 
          whose dimensions are altered. In any case 
          the information that there may perhaps exist 
          a universe in which two and two make five 
          and the straight line is not the shortest way 
          between two points would have astonished 
          Albertine far less than to hear the driver say 
          that it was easy to go in a single afternoon 
          to Saint-Jeanand la Raspelière, Douville and 
          Quetteholme, Saint-Mars le Vieux and 
          Saint-Mars le Vêtu, Gourville and Old Balbec, 
          Tourville and Féterne, prisoners hitherto as 
          hermetically confined in the cells of distinct
          days as long ago were Méséglise and 
          Guermantes, upon which the same eyes could 
          not gaze in the course of one afternoon, 
          delivered now by the giant with the 
          seven-league boots, came and clustered 
          about our tea-time their towers and steeples, 
          their old gardens which the encroaching 
          wood sprang back to reveal.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300491.txt

*: Must ask "Thelma", she told me once that explosions were the primary 
metaphor for spiritual awakening in the O.T.O. . . .