MD - UK review (Times Higher Educational Supplement)

[B.Tufail]

(SPOILER)














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>From the THES (Times Higher Educational Supplement -
May 23, 1997, p.22) brief extracts from review follow...

COLONIALISM ON THE COUCH 
By Deborah L. Madsen

...The narrative points to, but never makes conclusive, a conspiracy
between the Royal Society and the East India Company to obtain
ownership of astronomical data that would assist the development of 
trade routes and, more sinister from Pynchon's perspective, the marking
of proprietorships and property boundaries.
... M&D marks a new maturity in Pynchon's historical writing: no 
longer must the narrative remark explicitly on paranoid suspicions 
and emergent conspiracies, for these abstract patterns now develop
out of the characterisation itself.
... Even as readers attempt to bring the new into relationship with 
what is already known of Pynchon's work, we are reading about 
characters who attempt to do the very same thing in respect to the 
American landscape. Making the new conform to the old is what
Mason and Dixon do as they carve a passage westward... that takes its
parameters from western metaphysics.
... By opening up the continent to European knowledge, by laying down 
a conceptual grid on the land, the surveyors have marked the
beginning of its end. 
... If America is indeed Europe's colonial unconscious, in his
fiction Pynchon has the metropolis on the analyst's couch. In this 
latest novel, earlier observations about Anglo-America's colonial
roots give way to a sophisticated, funny, outlandish, bawdy, sad,
subtle, entirely Pynchonesque analysis of colonialism as a culture,
a psychosis, an epistemology and as the lives of real people,
embedded in history.
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 - Though short, the review is comprehensive and very positive, in 
comparison to the idiocies perpetrated in some of the major 
broadsheets.

Burhan
b.tufail at qmw.ac.uk