MDDM Ch. 11 Summary

[John Bailey]

So, here we have a return to Tyburn, that perverse primal scene we've 
encountered earlier. Interesting that we go back there, considering it had 
seemed a bit of a stand-alone thing in the previous description, as a sort 
of device to build up Mason's melancholy character. Not as if *that* much 
was being said about Tyburn itself. Now we're back there.

Previously...The Seahorse set sail, then returned to port abruptly. The duo 
head off to the Cape, from which they will return. For Dixon, from the Cape 
to St Helena, and back again. Clocks travelling to and fro, and so on. 
There's a whole lot of yoyo-ing going on, both literally and structurally in 
this book. I'm tempted not to call it yoyo-ing, actually, as I think it's 
more like the swinging of a pendulum, which is an appropriate metaphor for 
this novel, being of course the expenditure of energy *between* two poles, a 
back-and-forth motion as opposed to the motion of the Line. I think that P's 
characters usually inhabit that sweep of the pendulum's arc, rather than 
it's end points. An pendulum's arc as an inverted parabola? As above, so 
below...

I find Lomax's name fascinating. I have no idea why. Anyone with any 
thoughts please elaborate. It just *sounds* like soap to me. There was a 
Lomax who was a very famous American musicologist. And Lomax is also, if I 
recall, a French company who make some obscure mechanical parts for 
something. Can't remember. But it just *sounds* like a soap company.
I'm sure it does.


>From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: MDDM Ch. 11 Summary
>Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 22:57:27 +1100
>
>Night. Hail outside the parlour window. "Genial Uncle Lomax", younger than
>Ives but older than Ethelmer, has joined the "Den of Parlor Apes": the
>relations are gathering one by one.
>
>Ives is "smug", cynical. Ethelmer is sceptical, maybe a little miffed.
>'Brae, compassionate, flirts.
>
>Euphrenia's attempt to hijack the role of narrator is subverted by Wicks,
>though it quickly emerges that neither of them had ever been to St Helena.
>
>Ives: "Then how are we ever to know what happen'd ... ?"
>
>How indeed.
>
>***
>
>James's Town is a sinister, violent place. Human behaviour here mimics the
>"Blows" of the Ocean, the fierce Rain-Storms, and the Wind, "brutal and
>pure".
>
>To Mason it is as if "Darkness" has usurped the Sun as motive force in the
>universe.
>
>To the narrator, the town has "begun to climb into the Ravine behind it",
>fearful, perhaps, of the "Creatures of the Ocean depths" which watch and
>wait in the shallows. And, we are told, "travelers" in the highlands "have
>reported" that the "the sea appears to lie *above the Island*".
>
>Maskelyne has been here for over a year, joylessly observing the nightly
>journey of Sirius, the Dog Star, across the Southern Sky.
>
>A pair of gallows is poetically compared to St Paul's Cathedral in London.
>
>The population comprises sailors, female convicts, young wives alone on
>their way to join husbands in India, and "Company Perpetuals" ....
>
>One of these women, Florinda, beautiful but with appalling fashion sense,
>recognises Mason from a day at the Tyburn hangings. They sing a duet --
>something of a hangman's lament in all -- commemorating a nobleman's demise
>they witnessed when first they met.
>
>We learn how Mason's melancholy after Rebekah's death drove him to
>debauchery, though Wicks is both interrupted by 'Brae and egged on by the
>Uncles, who are plying him with brandy it appears.
>
>There is another song about the general spectacle at Tyburn, and a comment
>on 32 year old Mason's irrational urge to "chat up women" there, before the
>social gala accompanying the execution of Lord Ferrers for the murder of 
>his
>valet, and Mason's conversational gaucheness with the bawdy belle, are
>described in satirical detail. The two stroll and take wine, while 
>affecting
>French mannerisms and speech. Florinda begins to lose interest when she
>discovers Mason's vocation as an Astronomer. And, soon, as they banter,
>poor, sad Mason realises that Florinda has only been practising her wenchly
>wiles on him ....
>
>Back to St. Helena. Florinda's intended appears in the darkling dusk, a
>Bergmanesque apparition of Death with, like his fiancee, something of a
>theatrical past. Mason, humiliated as before, introduces Dixon, who again
>begins and again does not finish his (one and only?) Joak ....
>
>best
>


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