AtDTDA: [38] p. 1085 They fly towards grace.

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Great, thought-provoking wrap-up to this section and the entire ATDTDA, Robin.

Some thoughts on the Chums:

They're the Elect, not the preterite.  They have a mysterious higher-up controlling them (at first), they look down (literally, anyway) at the masses, above all, they have a sense of purpose/entitlement that's certainly lacking from the aimless characters below.  We've been used to identifying with Pynchon's preterite, assuming the Elect to be bad guys - from a religious standpoint, they didn't choose to be Elect, it just happened.  From the earthly political standpoint, of course, the bad guys (rich, powerful) made up te concept of the Elect, thereby giving the Elect their bad-guy status.  But the Chums aren't bad guys (though they're not necessarily good guys either).  As the Elect, they naturally fly towards grace.  It's not that they've earned or deserve grace, they merely have it because they're the (amoral) Elect.

What do the Chums represent?

1.  As Robin writes, they're the embodiment of Fiction -- "fictitiousness."  In some ways, they're also a stand-in for We the Readers.  They're the omniscient view of the narrator/reader.  We, like them, travel through space and time.  By virtue of being readers, we can watch Frank in Mexico and Kit in Siberia almost simultaneously.  Like Miles, we're prescient about the future.  We see WWII, Hiroshima, et al.  We see things exactly as they are, putting us in the same state of grace as the Chums.

2.  The Chums could also be seen as a stand-in for America.  They start out at the turn of the century with a gosh-golly naive boys-fiction, can-do enthusiasm, aloof (protectionist) from the rest of the world.  By the end of WWI, the naivete is gone.  They've privatized (they no longer take orders from above), make their own (business)deals, expanded (parks, slums, urban blight - the end of the Small Town era).  The frontiers are closed, they're no longer a means of transit -- they're a Destination (Manifest Destiny).  Was it Robin who pointed out that their relationship to the girl-aetherists has a governmental/CIA/ militarist aspect to it?  As real-politik 20th Century military-industrialist America, they put on their goggles to protect themselves from the thing that parts the sky (and we know what that is, from GR).  They fly towards grace (manifest destiny, global hegemony, seeing things exactly as they intend to shape them).

Laura



-----Original Message-----
>From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net
>Sent: Aug 15, 2008 12:27 PM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: AtDTDA: [38] p. 1085 They fly towards grace.
>
>This is gonna be off the top of my head. A great deal of my 
>postings have featured other people's opinions and no matter how 
>misguided my exegesis might be, it does come out of reading 
>everything publicly available from the author. A linch-pin for 
>Against the Day is "The Secret Integration", a story I read just 
>once, one I resisted for decades in spite of "Slow Learner" being 
>in my collection for decades. "The Secret Integration" concerns
>itself with a small band of young adventuring buddies. It's concerned
>with various degrees of the fictitious.
>
>The Chums of Chance come from the land of pure fiction, their
>fictions are used by that overarching "Them" that kindly offers
>up themselves as the bad guys in all of Pynchon's books. The
>Dues ex mechina actions the Chums provide serve in part to
>offer up the fiction that a "God" is overseeing the Chums
>comings and goings. And in this fiction, he very might well be.
>But again and again and again Against the Day concerns itself
>with fictions—the wonderful phrase "The Exact Degree of 
>Fictitiousness" is very much the point of Against the Day,
>with its constantly shifting tone, multiplicity of narratorial
>and character voices. Even more to the point is the widespread 
>display of "Imaginary" numbers and number relations, the 
>Quartenions in particular. 
>
>Pynchon is tracking and mapping varieties of fiction emergent
>in the era twixt Victoria and the so-called "Modern Age." Lew
>Basnight's narrative moves from Sherlock Holmes to Ross
>McDonald. The Traverse narratives are all over the map. The 
>only narratives that maintain the same Exact Degree of 
>Fictitiousness are the Chums, and why not? These "Swift" 
>adventure stories doubtless point to a life-long love of serials
>and other open-ended narratives. The Chums are as eternal
>[and 'real'] as Bugs Bunny.
>
>"Flying towards grace", like "Imaginary Numbers" is an
>unresolveable paradox, along with being a heresy—a
>particular area of interest for the author, doubtless in 
>part due to family history. Protestant grace is purest
>unobtainium, one cannot reach for grace, works don't 
>count in Calvinist grace, it just happens [but only if you 
>have the right, the true, the only "way".] Buddhist grace
>comes out of compassion, one can steer one's craft in 
>that direction. But Pynchon's first ideas on grace must
>have been shaped by his forebearers, like William 
>Pynchon, founder of Springfield Mass. 
>
>So a fictional craft, run by a fictional crew has a 
>hyper-fictional trajectory, one of those resolutions that
>can only happen in fairy tales and suchlike.
>
>"But wait, there's more!" As someone pointed out, Pynchon
>really does qualify as a Rocket Scientist and a lot of Pynchon's
>writings concern themselves with the sciences of aviation 
>and chemistry and physics. A lot of Gravity's Rainbow
>concerned itself with good old fashioned calculus. Against
>the Day is concerned with scientific thought occupying the 
>fringes of reason, but now in regular, practical use in our 
>quotidian lives. Quartenions, complex combos of complex 
>numbers are all over the book. And the notion of the Multiverse
>pops up regularly in AtD, particularly when the Chums are 
>around. Yesterday, while rummaging around for material
>on string theory and the the multiverses I found a reference
>to Giordano Bruno as one of the first to conceive of an
>"Infinite Universe." He was rewarded for his efforts  with
>a particularly grisly public execution. I noted that Bruno
>was a Dominican Monk. A buzzer went off in my head,
>I turned to The Crying of Lot 49 for the relevant passage
>and noted that the name of that unfortunate soul whose 
>tongue was torn out for his heresies was named Dominico.
>
>The central heresy of the multiverse is that scarcity is a
>fiction. Which brings us back to anarchy.
>
>Perhaps the most important "word" in Pynchon's fictions
>is "&" [probably followed by ","] The Chums Fly Towards
>Grace and they are blinded by the light, wait, no they've
>got goggles on, but they are drawn towards light and certain
>annihilation, no . . . .
>
>          . . . .As the sails of her destiny can be reefed 
>          against too much light, so they may also be spread 
>          to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are 
>          effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity—it 
>          is an acceptance of sky. . . .
>
>All praise to Scheherazade, the Stupendica sails at dawn.
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