AtDtDA(28): For a While after the Event ...

[Dave Monroe]

On 3/16/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I want to argue that the "magic' reintroduced into the world" is shown here
> to be unnatural. damaged, irradiated, contaminated by the
> Event................................(Not the real magic Robin tells us about).....
>
> As Laura wrote, the Event is an archetypal Disaster standing for many such
> in the 20th and 21st Centuries............Destructive,
> awful, destroyer of real magic as well as reality.....
>
> Which is why musquitoes don't act naturally.........
>
> Pynchon with Chernobyl and nuclear/radiation 'accidents is alluding with
> some of these examples to the way even creatures are physically deformed,
> damaged...............................
>
> .The whole of nature is deformed in this section..........
>
> And with Rudolph I suggest he is taking a bit of a swipe at the deformation
> of Christmas---an annual event he seems to like (in his fiction).......
> Christmas Eve 1955, when V. begins. is the first Christmas Eve when "Santa'
> was tracked by NORAD......(Pychon did some work with/for NORAD at
> Boeing...) see my V-wiki post.....

Cf. (?) ...

I propounded my theory of AtD to another Marcher today: embrace the
weird science and science fiction--the hollow-Earth, the Campanile,
the bilocated ships, Tunguska--because they are all means for
examining the effect of physical (and perhaps metaphysical) events on
human character and behavior.

So if you read the book as a character study, it's mediocre--poor
development plus all these irrelevant strangenesses scattered around.
But these extreme and unrealistic people do change over the course of
many pages. Pynchon uses the two ships on Kit the same way that, for
example, Brecht used the loss of a purse of money. The question is the
same in any novel: how does someone change when X happens to them?

Yes, there are still a lot of non sequiturs--Rudolph the reindeer, for
chrissakes! But as we travel geographically "against" the day, we are
connecting a chain of experiments and outcomes. We are saving up data
against the day when we shall understand humans better....

http://cecilvortex.com/swath/2007/05/17/the_against_the_day_deathmarch_week_16.html