TWILIGHT OF THE IDOL(SMASHER)

[ray gonne]

David Casseres wrote:
> 
> 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.  
> 

thinking back to m&d through the lense of your intrigue, it seems to me
that the america section of the book is the most barren of landscape
description, which strikes me as appropriate to the time/setting. v
takes place in large part within the urban sprawl, and pynchon has a lot
of fun showing us around his cities. gr provides him with the
opportunity to deconstruct various cities and leave the parts lying
everywhere. america, in m&d, is somewhat of a blank canvas upon which
the characters scrawl their desires and fears. it's somewhat of a
reversal of his earlier works, in which his descriptions of places and
situations were undeniably intriguing, over-the-top, breathtaking...and
he got much shit for flat characters (tho perhaps the more enlightened
of his readers saw that there was something to it, that it was not
necessarily a weakness of his writing). m&d is dominated, scenically, by
the flat (tho not uncomplicated, just as flat stencil is not without his
complications) america, populated most notably by mason & dixon, two
well developed characters whose psyches are spread out for us on that
vast canvas upon which they draw "their" line.
ray