MDMD(4): p 106 Epic Invocations of Place; St Helena

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

"No doubt the world is an imaginary world, but it is only once removed
from the true world."---Issac Bashevis Singer

>      At certain points in M&D, which deserves to be called an Epic novel,
>Pynchon gives us these incredible breathy poetic sentences. The
>Snow-Ball(s) start of the novel is clearly one example, but the entrance
>to Cape Town at the start of chapter seven is another, and the entrance
>to America at the start of part 2 is another. 

     Leaving aside for a moment the complex and interesting  question 
of how or if these function as Pynchon's invocation to a kind of Muse, 
they are certainly invocations of place. 

In the middle of  p 106, we get another sentence-length paragraph.  
Indeed, several rich rolling and perhaps magical paragraphs are
 before us, the invocation to St. Helena:

"The idea, in making port at St. Helena, is to keep to windward, get
south-east of the island..."

The opening a series of directions for the potential 18th Cen sea 
captains among us. As such it is perhaps a weak start.. But as the line 
develops it becomes intellectually more interesting, even Strange:

"...The Clamour wind-bourne, up across the Lines and the Parade,
all being reduced to Geometry and optical Illusion, even what is waiting
there all around, what is never to be nam'd directly."

"Reduced" returning again, sans apostrophe---remembering how much was 
made of the word's mystery in chapter 5, p 45? And what "is never to be 
named directly?" Yahweh, Tristero, my Swiss bank numer? One interpretation 
Pynchon offers is "Darkness," for:

 "the Sun must be reckoned of less importance
than darkness incorporated as some integral, anti-luminary object(...)
Black sheep of the family of Planets, neither to be sacrificed to 
Hades nor spoken of by Name..."

Our sentence refuses to end properly at all, but is a kind of gateway
to the wonderful world of Sirius, the dog star (perhaps my homme planet?
If  I was the L.E.D-star.---) which has domain over the night sky here.
Tom Robbins' Half Asleep In Frog Pyjamas may be lurking, 
for Sirius is no arbitrary star, as some African tribes (Bozo, Dogon)
well know. And Pynchon's invocation is as much to Sirius as to the Island
beneath it, perhaps even more.

At the bottom of 107 the image above ripens and drops into dark Miltonic
battle with the post-conscience of literary history--- , as:

"For years, travellers have reported that the further up into 
the country one climbs, the more the sea appears to lie
>above the island,-
as if suspended, and kept from falling fatally upon it, thro' 
the operations of Mysterion impenetrable on the part of a 
Guardian...As if in Payments made against the Deluge, upon
no sure basis of prediction, the great sea-rollers will rise, 
and come again to the island,-- (...)"

An image of sky, sea and land in a rationally impossible 
but overpowering relation. Again---

"...even what is waiting
there all around, what is never to be nam'd directly."

What else may not wish to be named directly?
Perhaps the Gaia- being of Land and Sea,  another possible
near relation to TRP's muse, which does not wish to be
Reduced to number or degree.  As Doug Kellner 
of UT Austin tells it---  

"...mapping and its other, the limits of representation
and impossibility of mapping, of capturing completely, that which one is
trying to map. This problem becomes especially acute in the America
episodes where M&D try to map what no man has mapped before, the
wilderness, the other of 'civilisation', that which their maps order,
dissect, grid and quantify AND are constantly coming up against the limits
of their mapping, what is left out."


The quality of poetry in the paragraph at the bottom of p 106
is cumulatively powerful, like the expanse and force of Sea it describes 
and imitates.  Can you feel Walcott nearby to TRP as he writes 
this? But there is a queer something or someone  else---as close
to Poe and Whitman as to that living bard:

"Once ashore, the Astronomers hear the Ocean everywhere, no Wall thick,
nor Mind compos'd, nor Valley remote enough to lose it. It shakes the 
Ground and traverses the Boot-soles of the Watch, high in the ravines. The 
floorboards of Taverns register its rhythmick Blows, as they have the years 
of Thumps from the swinging boots of Seamen whose destinies were 
sometimes to include Homicide, as if keeping Faith with the same Brutal Pulse,
waiting upon a Moment, needing but the single sighting,--sworn to, vanish,--
the terrible Authorisation."

 I think a remarkable bit of prose, contrasting sea- force to the fragile 
shores and man-made forms. Poe and literature benefited from
a loving French translation, and Pynchon's Mason and Dixon should be,
I think, translated only  by poets with a feel for Whitman and Poe.

(I mean, we know who to look for under the Boot-soles, right?)

















 


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