MDMD(5)---Chap 15 Opening Comments

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

Chapter 15


Madness and Reason in the Colonial Pre-Romantic World 

     Once upon a time a dozen years or more ago Eric Weinstein 
was quite young and even  rather thin I think and sitting in Perry
Meisel's class listening to a very interesting lecture about Thomas 
Hardy, which turned into an even more interesting lecture about 
Thomas Pynchon. I can recall some of this verbatim because 
it was included later in a very fine book called The Myth of The 
Modern (Yale UP 1987). He said----

"The history of the Novel as a whole is in fact the history of a search 
for organization at the level of plot or story itself. Its enduring quest-motif
in particular persists (as in Pynchon) well after any possible reality 
can any longer be said to come of it. The representative movement from 
picaresque to Bildungsroman in the novel's brief history itself reflects 
an incremental movement toward the kind of progressively organized
structure whose immanent formalization finds its thematic counterpart
in the growing institutionally in which the desires of its heroes must
be played out."

 Though an ambivalent case can be made for Oeidipa's journey in 
CL49, No one will ever accuse Pynchon  of writing a pure 
Bildungsroman.  Certainly he does not write the kind of novel which 
FR Leavis or  Henry James would have approved of.  But the hugely 
developed, and  often over-determined cultural,  political, military 
and economic systems  in which our human desires are played out,  
has been the  central dynamic of all Pynchon's previous fiction, 
from V to Vineland. Indeed, I would argue that  the complex 
detailing of  limit, possibility, and human quests played out within 
this  brutally systematised world in Gravity's Rainbow is simply the 
most that post-war fiction in English has achieved. 

    In at least one respect then, Pynchon many years ago took the 
prize for doing some things in literature more comprehensively, 
persuasively and terrifyingly than anyone else. Though some 
of Pynchon's literary children, like Martin Amis, continue to plow 
in the fields which he first sowed, the Master has moved on.

     Mason & Dixon is an attempt to look back towards the 
structural and philosophic roots of modern society, to 
examine the soils in which they grew.  

     Because we have become familiar with the characters 
before us and grow used to seeing them portrayed at the 
human scale in which they lived there lives, we are almost 
apt to forget that  those before us, Charlie, Jere, and Nevil,
are in fact "heroic" figures of the Age of Reason, with fairly
grand accomplishments to their credit. It was them, and others
like them, who  applied science and reason usefully to 
make the world, or anyway a large part of it, more manageable, 
thus more stable, predictable, and more profitable (for some).

    Yet, during the time of the novel, while some of the Age of Reason's
discoveries have taken place, many of its applications are still to be
worked through. The Industrial Revolution is still in swaddling clothes.
And the world, while hotly disputed over and guessed at,  is not yet fully 
mapped. 

    Here in chapter 15, we have two of the most Reason-ed and seasoned
men of the world in 1763, educated cosmopolitan scientists, who both 
see and experience Ghosts. Forty years later, Shelly and Byron may have
written about them, but there Angles were the airy infant cherubs of 
Italian Renaissance painters, the fully literary and rather heroic Satan of
Milton, their God largely a troupe to be played upon. For Wordsworth
and Keats and other Romantics, the open land allowed for the enchantment
of the imagination to thrive; but the land was tamed---they felt safe enough
to idealise their countryside. 

      In St Helena, In Cape Town, in America, and even in Northern Britain 
during the 1760's, the land was still mysterious,  dangerous, beyond the
control 
of Forces. Indeed, forces were trying to make the world safer from "irrational" 
fear by observation and demarcation.
While looking at the birth of our modern world, all those years ago, we
find that Age of Reason's mother may have been the Renaissance,
but its handmadien was The Age of Miracles. The Miracle of Mason & Dixon
---and it is such--- is that Thomas Pynchon is the first great American author 
to invite us into the Birthing Room with  its' whooping, crying, messy fluids, 
bloody hands, and even smiling faces. 


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