TWILIGHT OF THE IDOL(SMASHER)

[David Casseres]

Chris K sez
>... Has the encyclopedic journey, the politics, the deeply embedded
>texts, the hard gorgeous poetry, the pure SPEED of the earlier books got
>you aching...for more sssspeed?  I know what you mean, man, but lissen: 
>this is Sal Paradise here telling you to switch gears, Dean, switch
>gears, or you'll miss it.  Settle down.  Repeat after me:  Snowballs have
>flown their arcs.
>
>...The book rocket lands.  The
>language is an idiosyncratic mock-18th Century idiom, the text is more
>subtle, less densely embedded, the mood is elegiac.  Now everybody goes
>"Ahhhhhhh!"    
>
>Say it again:  Snowballs have flown their arcs.

Thanx for that, Chris.  I miss that speed too, though I love a lot else 
about M & D, and you've just expressed the difference beautifully.

A couple weeks ago I was on vacation in Virginia with my family, and 
since my daughter at 12 is just about the right age to enjoy some 
history, we went to the 18th Century, as restored at Williamsburg and 
Mount Vernon and Harper's Ferry.  Pynchon was everywhere, explaining and 
bringing to life the original stamping-grounds of so much of what we now 
call "American."  After a few hours on the Virginia freeways in my 
sister's old Volvo, I had a new appreciation of those weird trips in 
ingenious Coaches, arriving at the power centers of the Colonies.

At Harper's Ferry we went up to Jefferson's Rock, to see the view of the 
confluence of the Shenadoah and the Potomac; Jefferson said it was worth 
a trip across the Atlantic.  At Mount Vernon we gazed down from 
Washington's front porch, past the "hanging" hillside forests he planted, 
to the wide Potomac and the wooded hills on the Maryland side; evidently 
it was this view that mattered to Washington, more than the rather modest 
mansion he built with Martha Custis's millions.  Why, I wondered, doesn't 
Pynchon write about these landscapes of the New World, which enchanted 
the Europeans and about which they wrote volumes?  He can do landscapes; 
plenty of striking ones in V. and Gravity's Rainbow.  And realized that 
surveyors wouldn't see landscapes that way; they would see with a much 
more technical eye, as the axmen chopped out the ugly visto for their 
Line.  And purposeful as ever, Pynchon shows us how it looks to them and 
makes that the view seen by powerful Americans in general, reinforcing 
his central trope about the drawing of boundaries on the land as one of 
the main ways the land is colonized, Europeanized in a way that defines 
it to this day.

Which leads me serendip'ly to this: one of the notable differences about 
Mason & Dixon is that it's consistently far less visual than the previous 
books, not just in its lack of landscape description.  Why is that?  One 
thought I have is that it is much more concerned with the inner lives of 
the characters, and with questions of spirituality, the English Colonies 
being a perfect setting for such concerns.  Forgive me, I ramble, but 
perhaps someone can do more with this question.


Cheers,
David