animals in M&D

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Richard Romeo wrote:
> 
> M&D goes back to the beginning when the Age of Reason was in its
> ascendancy--Pynchon through his images wants us to remember that as history
> remembers things by reducing complex systems to certainty, that so much gets
> left out, leaving his lonely crazies to wander the flat entropic plains,
> listening only for those to bring them death.
> Vineland bookends with M&D the three previous books, in that in Vineland,
> everything is pounded flat, language, revolt, even rock and roll, M&D is
> where it starts in Pre-Revolutionary America (no pun intended). Pynchon, in
> effect, is giving us the alpha and omega of the three quest late 20th
> Century malaise novels, and hence one can see P's direction after GR--why
> not show the present results of what went on in V CL GR, 1980s America, and
> where it began, right at the end of the 18th Century. (of course, this begs
> the question, what could P do next as seen in this specualtive view, as to
> how can he fit anything new into the pre and post-GR dichotomy.)


> 
> But Pynchon through his affinity for the margins, not a surprise, has his
> readers look to the margins for the bits of transcendence that the Grinch
> forgot to steal from Cindy Lou (me and you). The duck and the dog are such
> examples.


I like the first paragraph here, but this second part
confuses me. What are the margins? What bits of
transcendence are offered by the Dog and the Duck?