italics and caps

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

--- Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Michel Ryckx wrote:

> > Something else:
> > Was it overlooked or was it just an uninteresting question when I
>  asked what the function was of the italics used by mr. Pynchon?
>  (esp. Mason & Dixon)
> 
> I, like Otto, never noticed anything all that peculiar in this
> respect. An
> odd thing for me, and others as I recall from the group reading, was
> the
> frequent initial caps in NONproper nouns when in English the
> usual practice is not to use a cap. It's an emphasis supplying
> mechanism
> analogous to italicizing. Maybe it's an 18th Century practice.

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.

Mark

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