dissertation on you-know-who

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: P.D.Thwaites <ELU45B at bangor.ac.uk>
To: Thomas Pynchon List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 4:04 AM
> The process of "social conditioning" reaches a logical conclusion in
> Gravity's Rainbow. But to my mind, Mason and Dixon is a book about where
> this process all began. It began (Frued would be proud) when humans began
> to repress their feelings. Feelings like Mason's natural feeling of loss
at
> the death of his wife. Science teaches him that he is not allowed to rest
> easy in the knowledge that she is with God now. There is no God. Nor are
> there Ghosts, Werewolves, Gollems or talking dogs/clocks/inanimate objects
> of various shoe sizes. Science said so.
> And this, very briefly, is my argument.

Oboy, difficult thing - but do you really think the repression of feelings
began in the 18th century? OK, maybe Freud would think so but this is his
19th-century view. Better try Pyvlov and Norman O. Brown on Pynchon.
The Pynchons were in America from 1630 on, and I consider Puritanism as a
system with a lot of suppressed feelings.
About *Mason & Dixon* I liked this essay very much...
http://www.freitagweb.de/texts/mason.html

regards

Otto