MDDM Ch. 45: Monsters and "Angels"

[jbor]

John wrote:

" ... This imaginary Duck ... "

I got the impression that the duck was real insofar as the text is
concerned. That's the whole point of the thing with Mason's hat, isn't it?
(449.16-21) Isn't the "angel" thing with the drinking and smoking and
gambling - and the condescending "I thought ev'ryone knew that" - a bit of a
furphy, brought up by Wicks to muddy the men's minds again with his silly
universal theories of the world and humanity. In fact, in Pynchon's texts
it's the "heavenly" angels which are, always, "imaginary", or tentatively
apparent to one or more characters only.

The way I read it, Dixon's one question about "sin" (451.17) thoroughly
rattles Wicks. His tone changes completely after that: he gets all defensive
and stroppy, won't address the issue at all, and then he disappears off up
his own asshole again.

I don't think the Duck is meant to be or represent any sort of heavenly
angel or religious being at all. She's more a type of Frankenstein's
Monster, in fact, "transform'd by Love" (451.5). Mason suggests that the
reason Vaucanson turned to Astronomy in the years after his early
fascination with making automatons was that he was seeking his missing Duck
among the planets and stars. Dixon realises that Mason's speculations about
Vaucanson are a type of projection of or self-justification for his own
obsession with Rebekah, "another gowkish expression of grieving for his
Wife." (450.1-32)

Eddins: "the onto-epistemological cruxes that have fascinated critics"

What? There's no difference between ontology and epistemology? I thought
that ontology deals with the wider question "what is there?" while
epistemology considers the way knowledge constitutes itself within a
particular ontological system? I guess to a narrow-minded Christian there
isn't a difference between the two, because all non-Christian ontologies are
"wrong" ... "utter nonsense" ... "too silly for words" etc.

"These considerations constitute the parameters that generate the complex
RELIGIOUS DIALECTIC (my caps) of Pynchon's fiction: a fluctuating tension
between nostalgia for cosmic harmony and commitment to amoral power worship,
superimposed upon the fluctuating tension between the notion of a neutral,
structureless universe and that of a universe infiltrated by insidious
structures of Control."

Labelling it a "religious dialectic" (Eddins' lower case) is arbitrary, and
it's a much too one-dimensional grid to place onto Pynchon's fictional
vision in my opinion. It only becomes "religious" in the Christian sense
which Eddins means by virtue of an act of interpretation. But there's so
much else in the texts which defies a Christian ontology, such as the
physical existence of this miraculous duck, to refute such a narrow
diagnosis.

best


> But think of what leads to this discussion on Angels: the Duck, or more
> specifically the imaginary figure of the duck in the folk mind. This
> imaginary Duck thus jumps up alongside Angels, who already occupy this
> sphere of fantastic celebrity, and the 'up' metaphor is being examined
> closely here. The question being debated isn't 'what can angels do?' but
> 'what do angels do?' What do they do for us? Why wouldn't we want them to do
> certain things? What does that say about us?
>