MDMD(0) : Opening Call For The Mass Discussion of Mason & Dixon

[Thomas Harberd]

[snip]
> 
> On Fri, 23 May 97, andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk wrote:

> 
> >                THE MASS DISCUSSION OF MASON AND DIXON 
>   [...]
> >      Technique - [...] This is a much more markedly
> >      Historickal Novel than its Predecessors and adopts 
a suitably
> >      Historickal Tone. Is it also a Modern (or dare I 
invoke the Term
> >      a Postmodern) Novel?
> 
It's postmodern in the same way that THE NAME OF THE ROSE is 
Postmodern.  It is, I would assume, a pastiche of time 
periods, although I have not spotted too many.  But there's 
(of course) the Rev. Cherrycoke, someone who advises one of 
the duo not to smoke Indian Hemp, but if you must, then 
don't inhale, and some others that I can't remember because 
it's too early in the morning and I finished my exams 
yesterday.
One main instance of TNOTR's postmodern status which is 
given in most of the articles that I've read about it is the 
 way in which texts are, in a way, folded into Eco's text.  
The bit at the beginning about William deducing a horse that 
he hadn't seen is an amalgamation of several other texts, 
and Adso's "love scene" is apparently a collage of 
quotations from "The Somg of Songs" (actually, I could be 
wrong about the source, like I said, it's too early).  
William's character is also based on the Sherlock Holmes 
type, and Eco goes so far as to substitute Holmes' cocaine 
for William's hemp. (He also has a Watson in Adso).  Eco 
then subverts the traditional expectations of what he has 
"folded-in" by making William make all the wrong deductions, 
and only uncover the "plot" by accident.  There is no 
success in the end, the "baddy" isn't punished because he 
wins, and is, in a way, proved justified by the burning of 
the library seeming to signal the coming of the anti-christ, 
as he had been saying.  (If, infact, Jorge wasn't the 
anti-christ, as is suggested at the end.)
In TNOFTR Eco also puts in modern quotations.  For example, 
there's a bit from Wittgenstein about us being dwarves 
standing on the shoulders of giants which William says to 
Nicholas in the forge on the first day.  This suggests to me 
something in Postmodernism about historical mixing and 
mixup.  I don't know much about Postmodernism exactly, does 
anyone, but it seems that there is a running thread (at 
least a contemporary thread) of loss of 
previously-established historical identity.  The historical 
worlds created are both realistic and anti-realistic at the 
same time, as if to pursue something about universal nature 
outside of our historical perception based biases.
So, (I know, it's all a bit long-winded), M&D is similar to 
TNOTR and (oh, yeah, just remembered), The Island of the Day 
Before (of course).  Postmodern?  Probably, because it 
blends the now (modernism) with the future (from the novel's 
perspective, POST) and by implication the past.

Tom. H.
http://www.uea.ac.uk/~w9624759
"Not even sure I make sense myself..."