fictitiousness meets history behind closed doors, and babies are conceived

[Joseph Tracy]

 "the Chicago Fair... possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency."  ATD quoted by Mark K

It's a funny line. Post-modern, wry, provocatively mixing the self aware with historical insight.  

The Chums annoyed some readers on the list, at least for awhile.  You can see why they did. They are an embodiment of a certain kind of eternal innocence, seemingly unable to question the presumption that  they are "the good guys" in every story, thus reeking of the gasbaggery of those who dump shit from a great height in their adventures on behalf of  that vague mix of patriotism, piety, and jovial and seemingly  fair-minded patriarchy( don't read those unpatriotic emails or listen to General Toguba or anyone calling themselves WikiLeaks).  But while Pynchon pulls them out of the pages of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stephenson style adventure novels pulpified for boys magazines and dime novels, he immediately begins to fly them over the stock yards and even some soft core porn silliness on their way to the White City.  
How similar was the mindset of the era that produced  a Chums type mythos to the one that produced the Chicago Fair. How innocent, how idealistic, how realistic, how reflective, how fictitious?  Is this the bright future and glorious achievements of  the city on the hill? To me the effect of this willful fictitiousness is disturbingly similar to the current disconnect between some very real and nasty arial adventures and  the mythic self aggrandizement  of everybody wave your mini-flag  post 9-11 America in which ATD was published. We seem to find ourselves in a  college-educated nation which appears incapable of measured self reflection in the tradition of the great literature and science we inherit. 
It seems like Pynchon may be suggesting that movies for teenagers may say more about how we will think and act as a society  facing important decisions than the latest Pulitzer winners.
And speaking of the latest meeting of fact and fiction, the latest Toguba type report in our military adventures comes from Lt. Col. Daniel Davis first a week ago in the NYT  and now the internal unclassified version from Rolling Stone.  After extensive tours of duty and thorough study of statements by the military he says we are being lied to by military leaders, that the Taliban controls everything beyond eyeshot of our base camps, that safety for Afghans is getting worse, that the Afghan forces are unreliable and often infiltrated. Meanwhile we indulge billion dollar fantasies of global domination via drones and  8 more innocent children are blown to pieces as we drop shit from a great and safe height and talk about new adventures to come. 
   OK, every reason to be annoyed, but there is something else about the chums which is that they are seeing and thinking about the real world they drop into from time to time. Reality can seriously fuck with your fictitiousness.

From: 	David Morris
The Chicago Fair was literally a fantasy city, made of paper mache
with Beaux-Arts designs portraying dreams of an Aristocratic past.  It
was a perfect vehicle for displaying a world teetering on the edge of
Modernity.

When "progress" and a bright future is projected by the captains of the present, it is mostly more of the same.  

And More from Mark
The Chums are fictional, we know from the beginning. Made of authorial air, like
their 'patriotic' airship (at the Fair). Author is omniscient and defines their stories, their
'work'.
 
Chums interact with the 'real world' on their assignments, and by taking some humans
aboard. As we can see and as we said during the online read, they are do-gooders, Bodhisatva-types.
Full of innocence and ideals. Their adventure stories are essentially Romances, in the sense of irreal elements
and 'happy' endings; [happy endings are why we call it Fiction---O. Wilde]

In a similar way there is a romance between our fictitiousness, the stories we tell ourselves, and practicalities of the real world we live in. Sometimes the results are beautiful artful  parts of our lives, and some of these children are dangerous or end in ruin. What is the difference between Webb's dreams of a revolution aided by dynamite and that of the signer's of the declaration apart from perhaps a difference of  inherited wealth and status, a difference of practicality? The founders' fiction was more practical. But is its seeming practicality to be its undoing? What is more impractical than the gas that has us floating above the earth. Attractions have as much to do with fiction as reality. Offspring happen, and  the children of such unions take up their own fictitious and real lives.