MDMD(5)---Chap 14 Questions

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

MDMD(5)----QUESTIONS

Chapter 14

146.4  "Our lives to distant Stars attuned"   Perfectly reasonable
 between a pair of Astronomers---but is  it a quote or near quote?
 see notes

147.1  Mason, thinking of Dixon, but at least as much of himself,
invokes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Sure, the myth has 
immediate application in the paragraph , but reading Mason’s 
admission that he is not "Orpheus enough to carry a Tune in a 
Bucket"---can the myth be read in a sense which sheds a broader 
beam of light upon themes of the Novel.

147.10  "The great worm of slavery" We also get a worm in the Volcano
in chapter 13---more doubling, as I suggest in my opening comments.
Would anyone like to investigate the mythology of the Worm as 
Demon Monster?  Or go further than I have with the pairing of chapters?

147.24  "
within the Brass-bound mercilessness of Sunday,
these multiple acts of sisterhood will continue
" Not sisterly
empowerment in any ordinary sense, but a more complex, gossipy, 
one would think backbiting environment. It would be interesting
to discuss the female dynamics between the Vrooms and other
females represented in M&D. Also, why is Johanna only now (!)
included in the adult life of the town? 

147.28  "
Dixon finds this unstable butter-box up the wrong end
of some Elephant Gun swivelling ever in Dixon’s direction" 
I ‘ve said I see this as a cartoon or slapstick influenced episode,
hardly the first in Pynchon’s works, but in M&D they are
handled with increasing assurance and maturity. Would anyone
like to discuss  M&D’s  cartoon or slapstick episodes with
relation to his earlier work?

148.21  "this running amok business"---as in the notes, I’m
interested in finding out   more about the Malaysian 
traditions around this.

149.35  "the scene before them has begun to break up
into small swarming Bits of Colour" Didn’t the Greeks
get high to disorientate themselves before Dionysian
ritual? I am interested in this scene as a kind of passage
around rather than through the Labyrinth, for the Minatour
(of Capital? Power? Or eternal longing and Sadness?)
remains hidden beneath a door we never open, do not even
see, but only hear about second hand. Any thoughts?

150.1-9  "Barometer in the ebony case"---any thoughts
on the strange instrument without Mercury? The Adept?
Or what lurks in the shadows, "all but painter over,--"?
Strange passage, indeed.

150.18----"this slavery within Slavery". This whole section,
as I suggested, calls out for readings in light of  De Sade,
Sartre, M.Foucault, maybe Levinas. Any takers? See also below.

151.29  "Perhaps miracles are still possible,--both evil miracles,
such as occur when excesses of Ill Treatment are 
transformed to Joy,--quite common in this Era,--and the reverse,
when excess of Well-being at length bring an Anguish no
less painful for being metaphysical,--Good Miracles."
As above.

P152.1-16 "Sometimes, for their amusement, the Herren
with escort a particularly disobedient employee to a madmen’s cell,
push her inside, and lock the door."
Anyone know of some well-presented histories of the treatment 
of mental illness? Quite a lot of debauch and abuse common,
beyond merely nice Victorians going to gawk at the mad
for an afternoon? How about a good history of Prostitution
or more specifically the Brothel, still in print?

152.35 "If one did not wish to suffer Horror directly"---
a pretty down and dirty passage for a Rev.’s Day-book, no?
And how much do we know of the tragic history of, and following,
the Black Hole of Calcutta?

155.15  "The Vroom girls and their counterparts all over town are
Daughters of the End of the World
" Esp. to those 18th and 19th
C.  fiction readers/scholars amongst us---how do the Vroom girls 
compare, in their Gothical and Romantic disposition, to representations
of adolescent femininity, especially colonial adolescent dispositions? 

156.25  "Soon, during an interrogation, someone will wish to note the
precise time that each question is ask’d, or action taken, by a clock
with two hands,---" Clearly, the measurement of time and location
in precise figures goes a long way to turning the pursuits of the
Enlightenment into the power of Industrial capitalism. Time is money.
But I also read Pynchon’s uses of Time as being in the service of Being—
i.e. a la Heidegger. Remember the clocks that wanted, in a physical 
way, to chime in with the Ocean, even though they did not know
what the Ocean was? Any to stir up or comment on the possible 
dialectic?




  



Eric Alan Weinstein
University of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk