On the authority behind the Chums?; from Democracy in America, Chap 5

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          "If you can't talk about it, point to it."
          Laurie Anderson

First off, let's remember where we are, vis. the Chums—in a sort of 
"body without organs", in the midst of a fiction, notably a particular 
genre of fiction that includes a set of fictions, where narrator, tone
of voice, degree of seriousness to be granted to a given situation, 
all these literary considerations are writhing like worms in a compost
box, all these threads, characters, story lines sinuously moving 
along.

          Mark Kohut:
          'Written laws exist in America, and one sees the daily 
          execution of them; but although everything moves 
          regularly, the mover can nowhere be discovered. The 
          hand which directs the social machine is invisible."

http://tinyurl.com/6gj3bn

          Dave Monroe:
          What clues, if any, do we have as to where their orders come from?
          
These companions are joined by the love of the infinite possibility, of 
Giorando Bruno's Infinite Universe[s], of chance. They are "Living
Proof" [in serialized fictional form] 

[foley, tape echo & slap]

of the Multiverse! ! ! [verse, verse, verse. . . .]

They are explicitly fictional. They are a literary invention, they
are an early serialization and marketing campaign aimed at children. They 
are also and at the same time just a touch autobiograpical, being a
a spectral glimmer of a thousand tales of equally reckless [and pointless]
journeys, echos of the author's family tales off of the coast of New Jersey, 
sailing yachts, slaves to the winds and appearing weekly in the sports 
section of the New York Times, right above the baseball scores, with some
seriously undependable narration going on about the glorious George M. 
Pynchon, family tycoon:

http://tinyurl.com/6zplcs

The Chums of Chance are to Harry Potter what William Pinchin, founder 
of Springfield Mass., is to Thomas Pynchon, author and cultural icon with
a bag on his head.

          DM:
          Those for any of the other airborne crews?  

I'll have to get back to you on that, but let's check out the obvious, OBA 
probably loves everything Jay Ward and Stan Freberg spat out, we've
got an Akim Tamiroff/Boris Baddinoff accented bad guy with a sense of 
humor. There are so many cartoons and echos of cartoons in Pynchon's 
work. I'm sure there's plenty of "Great Game" stuff that's off of my radar.
And as for Penny Black & company, we need a philatelic index to AtD.

And now a probably random insert from Robin's new pet book, 
"Masocritism," by Paul Mann:

          From "Stupid Undergrounds, Zone":

          Nothing will prevent us-indeed nothing can save us-from 
          ransoming ourselves again and again to the exhausted 
          mastery of these arrangements; nothing will keep us from 
          orienting ourselves toward every difference by means of 
          the most tattered maps. But at the same time we must 
          entertain-doubtless the right word-the sheer possibility 
          that what we encounter here is not just one more margin 
          or one more avant-garde, however impossible it will be to 
          avoid all of the orders and terms attendant upon those 
          venerable and ruined cultural edifices. We must remain 
          open to the possibility that the stupid underground poses 
          all of the old questions but a few more as well, that it might 
          suggest another set of cultural arrangements, other 
          topographies and other mappings, however unlikely that 
          might be. In any case, whatever vicarious attractions the 
          stupid underground offers the bored intellectual groping for 
          a way to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought, whatever 
          else we might encounter here, let me promise you that you 
          will not find these maps laid out for your inspection, as if on 
          an intellectual sale table, and rated for accuracy or charm. 
          No claim is being staked here; no one is being championed, 
          no one offered up on the critical auction block as the other of 
          the month. There is nothing here to choose; all of the 
          choices have already been made. One can only hope, in 
          what will surely prove an idle gesture, to complicate cultural 
          space for a moment or two, for a reader or two, to thicken it 
          and slow one's passage through it, and, as always, to render 
          criticism itself as painful and difficult as possible.

          DM:
          And then there are the Visitors, what ultimately of them?  

They're drinking what the last guy had, interlopers from our 
present. Note, however, that there are plenty of time travelling 
interlopers throughout the novel.

          DM:
          What are we still left not knowing at novel's end?  

I'm already having a CoL49 reaction, knowing that following the 
Nookshaft thread, or the Baslight thread, the revolving threads
of Dally and Merle, the interweave of the Kit and Dally threads,
will practically lead to other novels, other tales for the novel to yield.
There's so many potential different story paths, themes, threads
flat out red herrings, a proliferation of clues to G-d knows what, like
all of Pynchon's other books. In particular [for me, at least], the very
open-ended Lot 49. Now I want/need to know more about the
Hermetic Traditions, all that veiled History of the Occult in the 
Western World material that gets extra proportions in Against
the Day.

          DM:
          Such things seem peculiarly to the point in (or,
          perhaps more precsiely, NOT in) those Pynchonian texts ...

I think the whole Thousand & One Nights #—the potential panopoly
of fiction—'s a biggie in AtD, the myriads of potential stories, all these
less likely magical realist punchlines to quantitatively more complex
puns. Before getting too hung up on the frame for all these weird
stories, please remember we are dealing with an author with a 
penchant for really bad puns, a seriously Tourette's-like quality in a 
so-called "Serious" author. And did I mention the "songs"?

I mean, now really.

Like "Mad Dog" Bertie, the boy'll do anything for a laugh.