italics and caps

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> 
> The Caps thing in M&D seems to me to be a graphic conceit, rather than
> a matter of emphasis.  Away back in the olden days spelling hadn't been
> sorted out yet, wigged and unmannerly majuscules asserted themselves
> where they would, sporting beauty spots, and ss's were shaped like
> ff's.  The text is wearing a costume, like F.Murray Abraham playing
> Salieri on stage. If mechanical ducks can pursue vendettas, and Learned
> English Dogs can function as plain-text oracles between buttsniffs
> perhaps we are to imagine the narrator as a sort of animatronic Ben
> Franklin puppet?  Telling us, assembled, wearing our red cowboy hats
> with the white contrast stitching, or our coon-skin caps, an earnest
> fable about America?
> 
> It took me a while to get used to it.  At first I tried to read M&D as
> though the caps were meant to be meaningful somehow, and kept stalling
> out.  Once the caps are ignored, the sentences run beautifully.

In other words the capitalization is lawless. Is this metaphorical or
emblematic for the sometimes lawlessness of the book's narrator and of
early America itself?
		P.