The Crime of Anonymity (Mason/Dixon, not MalignD, -related)

[Sebastian Dangerfield]

Insofar as we are reported to be in a state of Hyacinthine Holiday
Hiatushood pending the next volley of VL exegesis I suppose that this is
as good a time as any to drop this note  (which endeavor the Hyacinth
Girl was good enough to encourage me to do over Pad Thai) . . . After
all, at this point, there is only one direction that discussion can go.

The current naming names spat brings to mind one of the uses of anonymity
that features at least intermittently in Pynchon--social protest.  

Rev'd Wicks Cherrrycoke, we find out early in M&D, was transported for
the "Crime then styl'd 'Anonymity.' "  This is no mere wink to Pynchon
readers regarding the author's now somewhat tiresomely
celebrated/excoriated reclusiveness, but rather a specific historical
reference, a reference taking us to one of the more fascinating episodes
in English history--the "Black Act" of 18th C. Britain, the first in a
series of repressive statutes in which Parliament created some fifty new
capital crimes--all against property.  
The Black Act was passed in Spring of 1723, during the reign of George I.
  Its title was in reference to folks who went about in black-face--to
hide their identities--laying wrack and ruin to the property of toffs
grown fat on the toil of the peasantry.  The history and significance of
the Black Act was explored in a tremendous book by the (sadly) recently
deceased historian E.P. Thompson in his book "Whigs and Hunters."  

Prominent among these potentially lethal proscriptions were laws
criminalizing the posting of anonymous messages.  On this feature of the
Black Act in particular, I turn to E.P. Thompson's essay "The Crime of
Anonymity," which is surely a source with which Pynchon is familiar, if
not his principal source.  The first Black Act included a provision
saying that anyone who "shall knowingly send any letter without a name
[or with a fictitious name (!)]  demanding money, venison or other
valuable thing" commits a felony "without benefit of clergy."  (Damn,
those 18th Century laws had an ominous mode of expression).  These laws
were applied with respect to threatening messages, issued by the same
sorts of people who went about in black face, warning of the ill
consequences of further aristocratic rapine of the peasants' common
rights--and against what we ordinarily understand as garden-variety
blackmail.  But there was some question whether this proscription might
apply where the threats are of a more general sort--the airing of social
grievances--in which no money or deer meat was demanded, but more of a
general righting of wrongs done to the people, under pain of (usually)
fire.  After the Corn Riots of the 1750s, the prohibition was clarified
to extend to those threatening murder or the "arson of houses, barns,
stacks of corn or grain, hay, or straw."  The reason: "Whereas divers
letters have been sent to several of his Majesty's subjects threatening
their lives or burning of their houses, which letters not demanding
money, venison, or valuable effects, are not subject to the penalties of
[the Black Act]."

This, we must remember, is an era in which enclosure of common fields was
continuing, and along with it the wiping out of other kinds of customary
rights--like the right to hunt deer or rabbit take peat for one's
fireplace, or to hunt rabbits--by an aristocracy that was laying claim
not just to arable land, but also to forested "waste."  Further the
letters protested corn prices, as well as the prices of other staples,
which had skyrocketed in the mid 18th Century, in large measure due to
price supports (the ones Ricardo famously denounced in Parliament and in
his Principles of Political Economy, but that's another story).  

These folks shared a common MO with of course, our friends the Luddites,
who posted  messages that were either anonymous or signed in the name of
Ned Ludd.  This kind of social protest was also revived in an agrarian
setting in the 1830s, in the name of Captain Swing.  The Swing-ers were
agricultural luddite types who went after mechanized threshing machines,
burned barns and inflicted various other kinds of mayhem on the landed
gentry. See Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude's fine study "Captain Swing." 
Also worthy of mention is A.J. Pocock's, Bread or Blood: A Study of the
Agrarian Riots in East Anglia in 1816.

The incendiary missive genre makes fascinating reading, though I have not
the time to reproduce any here.  (Some samples, however, are included as
an appendix to "Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth
Century England," a great collection of articles (including Thompson's
'Anonymity' piece) by a talented group of historians from the George
Rude/Eric Hobsbawm 'history from below' school.  Joe Bob says check it
out).

As Thompson wrote,

"The anonymous threatening letter is a characteristic form of social
protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy,
in which forms of collective organized defense are weak, and in which
individuals who can be identified as the organizers of protest are liable
to immediate vicitmisation."

Thompson related the story of "The Crime of Anonymity," as well as his
exhaustive study of the Black Act more generally, in aid of a deeper
understanding of 18th Century Britain than that generally accepted by
historians, viz., an age of consensus and rational statecraft.  "On the
surface," wrote Thompson, "all is consensus, deference, accommodation;
the dependants petition abjectly for favor . . . not a word against the
Illustrious House of Hanover [that line of sausage-sucking loons --ed.]
or the Glorious Constitution breaks the agreeable waters of illusion. 
Then, from an anonymous and obscure level, there leaps to view for a
moment violent Jacobite or Levelling abuse."  

I see a similar project of demystifying our conventional historical
narratives going on in Pynchon's works.  In Pynchon's novels, we are
receiving a host of incendiary missives from the "anonymous and obscure
level" telling us that much of what we think we know about our legacy is
wrong.  Certainly in M&D, which I am by no means far into, we have not
only a raconteur who committed the crime of anonymity, but a splendid
send-up of cherished assumptions about reason, science, and
enlightenment.  This is a project not unlike that of Thompson, Rude, or
the Italian line of the family, Carlo Ginzburg or Piero Camporesi (whose
study of the pre-modern world as seen by the general run of poor humanity
as one of unreason and literal hallucination is not to be missed).  

'Tis the Age of Reason, Rhhf?

I would love to elaborate further, but alas, no-one pays me to write
about Pynchonian history (prob'ly for good reason) so I must return to
the Ghastly Quotidian.

Sebastian
who assume a name for little reason other than his own amusement

___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]