The Chums of Chance could have been granted no more appropriate form of "ground-leave" than the Chicago Fair, as the great national celebration possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency.
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Have I gotten to the difficult sections of the book already?! I say "already" as if thirty-six pages in Gravity's Rainbow wasn't already tremendously difficult. I should be saying finally! Even on the most shallow, literal level, this sentence is boggling my mind. Why would the fictitiousness of the Fair permit the boys access and agency?
I suppose "the fictitiousness of the Fair" gives the boys access because they are young white boys in America treading freely among all the various populations and cultures that are presenting exhibits at the Fair. Would they, anywhere else, have easy and safe access to hoochie-coochie dancers, Reindeer Shows, Zulu warriors demonstrating their techniques for defeating the white man, Pygmy tribes partially ruined by missionaries, Wazaris displaying their skills at banditry, and Tarahumara Indians tripping on peyote? Their education on various cultures could be done at their own pace and without fear of intruding on indigenous people in their homes. And while fictitious, they might still be able to learn something of the majesty and pride of other peoples de-centered from American civilization. "Ground-leave" anywhere else in the world would have meant access was conditional, depending on where they were and what people lived there. But the Fair? Everybody was welcome if they merely had fifty extra cents in their pockets.
And what about their agency? Pretty much the same deal, I suppose! They were free in the fictional world of the Fair to go where they wanted at their leisure without fear of stumbling into adult rules and regulations, or local laws and customs. Since Pynchon has already done a number of Star Trek analogies in the series, the Fair was like the Chums visiting the Holodeck. They were ultimately always in control of their environment with almost certain built-in safety protocols within the Fair's walls.
On a less literal level, the boys themselves are fictional. So inserting them into a fictionalized Chicago's Fair that was already literally fictional gives them more freedom than if Pynchon had placed them within the constraints of a fully realized historical event. The Fair was as much fantasy as reality and if Pynchon wants to pretend there was basically a Donkey Show in the middle of the Fair, what harm is there in that?!
Fictional boys in a fictional setting based on a real setting that was filled with exhibits which were inherently fictional. Does literature get any better than this?
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