MDMD(2): Deflation and Friendship flip-flop

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

    Following from Monte Davis' nice post about the 
flip-flop nature of relationship with regards Mason and Dixon---

 One of the comic effects Pynchon is fondest of is deflation, and
there are several moments in the book which the Mass Discussion
has already come to where it is employed.. I'd like to review how
two comic deflationary moments in chapter four, before going to 
the opening of chapter five, which uses  a more complex, 
perhaps less amusing  if no less interesting, use of deflation.

 On p 35 Capt. Smith, a "Collier Sailor" to date,  is trying to imagine
his rather pathetic new command of the "sixth-rate...jackass frigate"
the Seahorse in a more positive light. Minds being what they are, how
quickly he moves from the inglorious reality of the actual ship before
him to this reverie of high Naval pomp and magesty:

     "Yet yet,...through the crystalline spray, how gilded comes she---how 
     corposantly edg'd and, if Glories there be, glorious light...and he knows 
     her , it must be from a dream, how could it be other? A Light in which all
     Pain and failure, all fear, are bleach'd away..."

Bleached? The overblown whitewash of imagined glory; fantasy foam 
lapping at the edge of reality's rented dingy.
 
     Within one paragraph the good captain has encountered the first 
of his men, of "loutish appearance...recruited but recently from a 
press-gang sweep of Wapping." A marvellous deflation follows,
worthy of the Marx Bros.  So imagine Capt. Grocho and sweeper Chico---


     " Trying not to bark, Capt. Smith replied, 'What's your name, sailor?'
        'By some I be styl'd ` Blinky.`  And who might you be?'
        'Attend me, Blinky,--I am the Captain of this Vessel.'
        'Well', advised the young salt, 'you've a good job. Don't fuck up.' "

     This Captain is wet behind the ears. The Commander of the Sea-Horse
hasn't got his sea-legs; and is ripe to lead his ship to the near-drubbing
suffered at the hands of the l'Grand.  


     The second deflationary  instance comes later in the same
chapter (p39) and employs roughly the same structure.
Perhaps Terry Jones will agree that Pynchon may have had his
scene from MP & the Holy Grail  in mind, where the knights
of the round table approach a French  castle with fortifications 
vastly superior to the British ability to mount an offensive, and 
are repelled with buckets of manure.  

     The Seahorse, after a brutal battle which seems to have 
happened for no reason in particular comes to a unmeaningful
conclusion  at an equally arbitrary time, we are treated to 
some speculationas to the possible High Ethical, even Cosmic  
Reasons, which may have brought about  the end of the battle.

     "What conversation may have passed between the Post-Captain
and the Commandant?...What was afoot here? Had the Frenchman
really signal'd, 'France is not at war with the sciences?' Words so
magnanimous, and yet..."

      Meanwhile, in the heat of battle, Capt. Smith believed 
Mason and Dixon's royal astronomical observations had 
been the reason behind the instigation of the bloody affair. 

      "I've lost thrity of my crew. Are you two really that 
       important?"

     But of  course, they are not, not to the l'Grand, anyway.
Its all much more arbitrary, and as Chris K has pointed out with
her quote from V.   For mankind can not bear very much 
arbitrary reality. (Though as good Pynchon readers
know, we can not survive very many of our grand plots, either.)

        " Went poohpooh, he did. Sort of flicking his gloves about.
           ' I am weesting my time,' he says, 'You are leetluh meenow,
         --- I throw you back! Perhaps we meet again someday
              when  you are beggair Feesh...Poohpooh! Adeiu!'  "

     The l'Grand moves away, and the Seahorse is miraculously 
rescued. To this occurance, our faithfull Capt. Smith absurdly replies:

             "Nevertheless...I must give chase."

      ---And thankfully, is unable to do so.

     Moveing ahead now to chapter 5, page 42. 

Pynchon builds on the events of the previous chapter to 
offer us Mason and Dixon,  having cemented the bonds of their 
relationship, drawing up a letter to the R.S.  (How much does 
Pynch tell us, and how much does he show us this happening?
Well Henry James is long dead, and I'd rather re-read Mason & 
Dixon than the The Portrait of a Lady, at least this year.) 

For someone such as myself, who has spent/wasted a good deal
of time reading Sartre, Levinas, Buber on the nature of the self, 
the Other, relationship, intersubjectivity, etc, their is a very juicy 
little sentence arranging itself in such a way to ring the bells of 
the existential fire-station. It is spoken by the Narrator, a narrator 
who is probably not the Rev Wicks, but the authorial narrator 
who introduced Wicks, and who narrated Wicks' narrations, 
the voice we are probably lazy enough to trust:

     "In the crucial moments, neither Mason nor Dixon had fail'd
the Other. Each had met the Other's Gaze for a slight moment
before Duty again claimed them---"


     A humane moment. A bit of shared inner peace achieved after 
mutual violent struggle. All terribly serious, moveing stuff. And
in a way, it is serious. It is to be read as written. But in another 
way, Tom's smiling smirking, at someone like me writing
 a book called  "Problems of  Otherness in Recent US Fiction." 

     As Monte points out, we reach the heights of Human relationship,
brotherly/sisterly love, the dignity of I-Thou relation, the gaze upon
the face that calls us to the Duty of Ethical responsibility. It happens
and it is real. But it is also absurdly transient. How quickly the Buberian
I-Thou can turn into Sartre's complex power struggles based 
on fear and aggression. How quickly Levinas ethics of the face can be
usurped by the inauthentic being fostered by that part of Heidegger's
They  we can not help carrying around with us. Relationships? 
Flip. Flop. Flip.

     On p 43 Pynchon offers a very rich but very quiet deflation.
There is humour, but it is dislocated from direct deflation into
the muted tones of good natured imaginings a little too high-flown,
based on a moral sense which makes of the previous ethical action
a  hypocracy. 
For our men of science who have just found a
bit of the goodness man is capable of in each other 
wonder almost if they might not profit more from
taking up war as a career option.

    "----'we should be happy to proceed to war upon any people,
in any quarter of the Globe his Majesty should be pleas'd to 
send us to,--'
      'Dixon think,--what if they should say yes? Do you want to
command a Regiment?'
      'Why,...say,'tis nothing I'd rule out, at this stage of my life,--'
      'You're a Quaker, you're not suppose to believe in War.'
      'Technically no longer a Quaker, as they expelled me(...)
      ----so I guess I may now kill anyone I like...?'  "
    
    Now I know that Mason and Dixon are not quite arguing 
with each other here, although they will begin soon a bickering 
which will pervade their relationship, sometimes quite good
natured and sometimes a bit less so. But I think the underpinnings
of the flip-flop that pervades our relationships with each other
is found here, in the flip-flop we each experience within ourselves.
The bueaty of this scene for me is that Mason and Dixon share 
this inner, absurd flip-flop with each other quite openly. For:

     "They are well on the other side of exaustion, and neither has
       kept his defensive guard mann'd against the other.(...) At 
       least they are past that."



Eric 
   
Eric Alan Weinstein
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk