About that oven (now synchronized with MDMD3)

[David Casseres]

Last week I wrote
>...that preachy aside of [Cherrycoke's] at the end of Ch. 8 is a corker.  The 
one 
>where that *oven as a transforming principle* shows up again, just like in 
>Gravity's Rainbow, except now, instead of the witch's Kinderofen of war, 
>death, and perversity, it's the Easter oven, transforming dough into 
>bread, the slaughtered Lamb of God into a feast for the faithful (but not 
>for Mason), death into life.  A marvelously compressed little passage.  
>I'm gonna go re-read it tonight.

I did go back and re-read it, and most of what I was talking about is not 
there!  Not in the passage under discussion, and not in any passage 
closely linked to it, as far as I can tell.  It's all left for the reader 
to hallucinate in the days after reading a passage.

See, Pynchon is like that.  I've done this before, and I'm not the only 
one; I see it on this list all the time.  Mind you, I do think all those 
ideas are *in some way* immanent in the very brief passage, and I do 
think it is a signal of what Andrew asserted at the beginning, that if 
Gravity's rainbow is about death, Mason & Dixon is about life.



Cheers,
David