MDDM Ch. 11 Stars and Planets: Uranus

[Terrance]

Otto wrote
> 
> Thanks for the info. on Sirius's visibility at St. Helena. I think you are
> right. For Mason, whose point of view we have adopted from the top of p. 107
> ("what Mason sees ... "), it is true that "ev'ry Midnight the baleful Thing
> is there, crossing directly overhead." It is thus no error: Mason is
> bemoaning the yellow star's presence every night since *he* arrived at St
> Helena and began watching the skies with (for?) Maskelyne.

Thanks guys. Otto thanks for typing all that up. I looked in the
identical sources. 



Mr. Pynchon seems to know enough about all these things not to make
stupid errors. 
Indeed, what he does is to confound the reader with overwhelming
accuracy, mixed metaphors and crossed up allusions. 

Sometimes a black cat crosses our path and is nothing more than a black
cat crossing our path. 

Uranus is also heaven. The Paradise lost that Euphie mourns is clearly
the garden of eden and all that the loss or fall implies. She not only
mourns for a paradise lost before her time, both classical and
christian,  She mourns the loss of the physical island paradise to
habitation by man. This is one of P's ironic reversals. Man is kicked
out of Paradise. Now he explores the world, finds a paradise and turns
it into hell. 

There is an environmental theme here that P is going to start hitting
very hard--the city, industry, the fouled rivers where men would fish. 

This chapter is full of reversals and is again an obvious double
chapter, Mask standing in as Dixon to Mason or even Mason to Mason who
is now more in Dixon's position, the cape and the island are later
called metaphors. 

And the island is Baedeckered. It is a stage, just as the colonial
outposts in V. are stages. Sirius is inverted among the wires, all but
flowing.