MDMD(2) : Openers

[Monte Davis]

>      2.  Friendship.  Though the reasons for the l'Grand's attack is left
a 
>      mystery, Mason and Dixon's experience of it provides an opportunity 
>      for the development of mutual respect and trust.  What comments can
be 
>      made at this point about their relationship?

What comments could be more acute than Mason's: "I wish I knew where my
Affection for you runs,-- one moment 'tis sure as the heart-yarn of a
Mainstay, the next I am entertaining cheerfully Projects in which your
Dissolution is ever a Feature"...? 

Aren't all of Pynchon's surest, truest relationships characterized by this
flip/flop? The best friends are those you must often re-discover, or
re-invent if you prefer.

Whoever They are from chapter to chapter, book to book, They find it harder
to triangulate, harder to co-opt, a living and oscillating target. They
want stability above all, so instability (sometimes to the point of
scatterbrained-ness) is our only true refuge.
    
>      3.  ...How does Science and its uses thus far in Mason and Dixon
differ with 
>      Science and its uses in GR?
      
I said before M&D came out that I think TRP is most drawn to moments of
52-pickup possibility, like Year Zero in the Zone, or California just as
the Acid Rush began, and that I expected the 1760s would let him offer
Vistos [ok, I didn't say *that*] of many Americas that could have been.

Now write that larger: depending on context, M&D's science can be either a
romantic, even Promethean opening-out... or a Royal Society locking-in. By
1945, between the A-4 and the A-bomb, the bouncing ball seemed -- to the
culturati, anyway -- to have settled on the latter. (Why does the higher
miseducation yield 100 who associate Oppenheimer with "I am become Death
etc" and the security hearings for every one who knows even a scrap of his
creative work?) There's much more ambivalence in M&D: a good set of Opticks
empowers the Sons of Liberty every bit as much as the Jesuits.

>      4.  Resonances--Words.  Note this at the opening of Chapter 6:  "The

>      Interdiction at Sea," it seems to the Rev'd, "was patently a warning

>      to the Astronomers, from Beyond."  The operative word here being 
>      Interdiction, can someone make comments about this all too
Pynchonian 
>      notion?  

I expect better critics than we will be arguing forever about whether the
"false starts" are an ornament or an excrescence. Why the two settings-out
to catch the Transit? For that matter, why three voyages: both the Cape
*and* St. Helena before the New World? Is it just a tic that he brings us
Out of Africa in three books of five? Too many cool notes to omit?  

I wouldn't be without the first 24 or 25 chapters for the world, but given
TRP's sureness with flashbacks and asides, I'm confident that he could have
found a way to work in all their themes while beginning with the _Mary and
Meg_ instead of the _Seahorse_. Thanks in advance to whoever shows me the
architectural inevitability I can't yet see.

In other words: damme if I know. Still, Chris, 247.35: "I am sure that you,
as the unwaverring Larrk of the Sanguine, will find us a way past that."

-Monte <and thank you, Ms. Girl Guide>