MDMD(Part1) possible style explanation...?

[Vaska Tumir]

Will Karlin writes: 

>In the Auster essay about Beckett's novel M&C, he also mentions how the
>pace of the narrative matches that of a "walking pace" which "is beating
>out the rhythms of Mericer and Camier's perambulations."

If you're reading Beckett's M&C, check out a little gem by Flaubert, too,
when you get the chance because in many ways it stands right there behind
Beckett's stuff and not too far off M&D, too. _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ it's
called, and there's got to be some English translation available.  Mason and
Dixon have frequently reminded me of Flaubert's own fallible, comic,
melancholic duo in that novel, though Pynchon's style gives his novel a
*much* richer and earthier mix in comparison.  A real "mischiatura".  

>  This started me thinking about the structure of M&D.  Yes, Pynchon is
>fond of narrative games, but mightn't there be a deeper purpose of (or
>several...) the structure?  Rather than only playing with form, perhaps he
>is trying to convey the sense of the work they were engaged in?  

Could be....  It could also be -- also, simultaneously -- TRP's way of
creating the formal equivalent of a search for some historical, humanly
graspabale truth [or what passes for it], narratively: a search that has to
double back on itself and criss-cross the territory of time over and over
again, adding at each turn another layer of events secular, human, frought
with [in]significance and ambiguity, of all that "stuff" history is made of,
after all.  If Mason and Dixon are "surveyors" of space, earthly and
celestial, Pynchon has always been there with them, in a sense, mapping out
but also inventing those officially invisible and forgotten regions of time.    

Vaska