ATD...had forgotten...narrator on the Chums later ...getting free.

[Mark Kohut]

Well....
well said. I too like this foreshadowing because, I meant, so often the scene transitions
are as whimsical.....'and there was Prof Vanderjuice, their old, etc." 
This foreshadowing sets a 
frame that signals another thematic meaning.

Here's more of my reasoning: we never learn anything about who gives the Chums their
orders and their major metaphysical change, so to speak, is to break from this mysterious
source of orders. Cryptic orders found in pearls. etc. 

Might the Chums be taking orders from the heavens? Their tacit acceptance of a religious
background---the residue of the Age of Belief, the time of Adams' Mont-Saint Michel, etc.--which
they purposely break from later?  Move into what one philosopher has written a whole
tome on: The Secular Age. 

Or, Pynchon places Nietzsche's societal death of God right after WW1? 




________________________________
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, April 28, 2010 11:47:55 PM
Subject: Re: ATD...had forgotten...narrator on the Chums later ...getting free.


the reason I linger over the question is because it's one of those passages that
give me the feeling I'm in much much more than good hands, narratively, 
specifically because of some extra little touch or touches

another place early in the book that took me that way was
the narrator going on about the wily Orientals and messages in pearls

blithering, almost, not in a mean-spirited parody
but in a sort of inevitable "nutty kind of wonderful" (as Paul Shaffer used to say
about David Letterman) way 

I don't think it's ragged or bad at all, quite the contrary:
it's synesthetically pleasing that
in addition to the fictional fictive Chums and the fictional real characters, 
there's a fictional narrator who is a Pynchon character as well
and he is funny, and his interjections are both reflective and distortive
of what I imagine Pynchon to be thinking and of the auctorial hallmarks
and interventions of various and sundry other authors over the years
without (at least for me, who am no scholar) evoking or imitating or parodying
or satirizing any particular individual precursor author or authors,
but ringing unique and timely changes on "author putting his oar in,
without disrupting the semblance of a projected world, in fact heightening it...
or so he or she thinks, but we who now read and the actual, refined out of existence,
paring-his-fingernails author of the current work
are aware of his tricks and..."  --- well, you know what I mean...

it wouldn't surprise me to eventually be able to discern some kind of 
resolution to the "suspended chord" feeling in the Chums' very next activities...
but the idea of doing a foreshadowing and leaving the "chord" suspended
for the whole rest of the book is amusing too

I'm not inventing these explanations because I'm a fan...
I'm a fan because passages like this are so pleasurable to read,
literally in almost a tactile way...maybe not even "almost" but actually tactilely invigorating --
definitely physically pleasurable!!!  

that trying to detail the feeling is part of the fun



On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

Worry about that but "shortly" seems pretty flexible for the Chums.............this read I felt
>Pynchon ended with that as a way of linking the indie move since his transitions are so....
>
>uh, um, ragged?  Or just not good, that is bad???
>
>Dunno, of course. 
>
>
>
>
>----- Original Message ----
>From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Cc: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Sent: Wed, April 28, 2010 2:56:42 PM
>Subject: Re: ATD...had forgotten...narrator on the Chums later ...getting free.
>
>
>Mark Kohut wrote:
>> it refers to when they became independent much further along in the book
>
>Doesn't fit easily with:
>
>> "as it did shortly"
>
>a phrase which asks the reader to pay attention to a short time period
>following the immediate
>
>
>
>
>



      
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