MDMD(5) Chap 16----Questions, Angular

[Doug Millison]

At 7:11 PM 8/11/97, barleydog at earthlink.net wrote:
>[...]The passage has an emotional depth
>that seemed to come more from Pynchon's heart

Amen. So much for the theory that Pynchon can't express the emotional
dimensions of his characters. Mason's pain for Rebekah does cut very deep;
it's difficult not to wonder where in Pynchon's experience that comes from,
although it's certainly not necessary to appreciate it in the novel.
Mason's reconciliation with his son towards the end of the novel struck me
as deeply, and it's equally difficult not to wonder about Pynchon and his
own father, and Pynchon as a father, lurking behind that part of M&D; it's
interesting that in M&D, Dixon, the one that several of us on pynchon-l
have said they'd prefer to have a drink with, is the surveyor, and Mason
the astronomer has cut himself off from his children, while in real life
Pynchon's father was a surveyor.  Mason may be the most fully human of
Pynchon's characters, multi-faceted, contradictory, by turns endearing and
creepy (I forget who on the p-list used that to describe him first) and
ultimately mysterious; tormented by the most common of human experiences:
the snares of ambition, work, and patronage; the loss of a spouse; a father
and children he doesn't understand and can never escape; the cipher of
death and the world to come.

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