MDMD Subject/Objective Reality/Illusion & Subjunctive

Mon Nov 19 12:07:13 CST 2001

Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? --
in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is
allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these
Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor
written down, nor ever, by the majority of mankind, seen, --
serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that
may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms
of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till
the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and
tied back in, back to the Net-Work of Points already known, that
slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from
subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that
serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away from the realm
of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them
unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.
--Mason & Dixon, Chapter 34, pg. 345

"With 773 pages of text to choose from, it seems extraordinary that two
of the earliest North American reviews of Mason & Dixon-John Leonard's
in The Nation and Anthony Lane's in The New Yorker, appearing on the
same day, 12 May 1997-should quote exactly the same paragraph from
Pynchon's novel." 

Brian McHale, "Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, A brief Poetics of
Pynchon-Space" **Pynchon and Mason & Dixon **    Edited by Brooke
Horvath and Irving Malin 

http://www.udpress.udel.edu/udpress/Horvath.html

Why are so many attracted to this passage? McHale says that he can only
guess why the critics were attracted to the passage since neither says
anything about it. His guess is as good as anyone's, I guess, but my
guess is that McHale's guess is a good guess. He thinks that the critics
were attracted to the passage because it foregrounds the "subjunctivity
that is such a salient feature of Mason & Dixon: the American West as
subjunctive space, the space of wish and desire, of the hypothetical and
counterfactual, of speculation and possibility." PMD.44

McHale notes that the Subjuntive Spaces of America are not virgin
frontier, that others have ventured into the subjunctive American spaces
before. McHale mentions Paul Muldoon's poem Madoc

http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/muldoon/muldoon.htm

 William Gibson & Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine

http://www.iplus.zetnet.co.uk/nonfiction/diffeng.htm

But what about Britannia? Albion? What about America (Mexico)? Moreover,
isn't more likely that woman or other marginalized authors might write
from and into subjuntivity? 

Subjects & Objects Judy.  Real and Imagined? Does it matter? Somehow I
think it doesn't and it does. 
Is it a Paradoxical Agon Again. 

Ask Virginia Woolf, she''ll tell you,  Shakespeare didn't really have a
sister, who was also a great dramatist, did he? Could he? 

Virginia Woolf. McHale doesn't mention her, but he could have, he does
mention her in his books on Postmodernism. And what about Latin American
woman? Has Pynchon been reading Mexican novels? 

Back to this later. 

That passage is very popular: 

On  University silly by

This course will consider books that take their readers and their
protagonists on
quests both through time and space for that lost America of love, that
visionary ideal
of harmony with nature, of democratic community, of psychic wholeness.
This
vision structures our hopes and fantasies and has persisted on the
horizon of our
collective imagination despite centuries of brutal betrayal. We'll
explore this vision
through works of twentieth century American literature in ways that
hopefully will
be consonant with the democratic, open, experimental nature of the
literature itself.

http://www.colorado.edu/English/websyll007/4665-mb.htm

In PostModern Literature um Culture Journals

Ultimately, the line changes language games (fictions) to protocols and
to controls (facts). In
    this context, the "fictional" America had served as "a very
Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true" (345). 

http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/postmodern_culture/11.3berressemprs1.html

At Conferences
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~narrconf/Program.html

Steven Weisenburger "Strange Loops: Pynchon's Subjunctive
Historiography"
(Like McHale, I'm only guessing that Mr. Weisenburger will be attracted
to the passage) 

I would like to read this one too.  

Lydia Hearn "Subjunctive Speculation: Gambling and Narrative"

Lot of gambling in M&D. 

In Law Journals
Ironically, Pynchon's narrator insists on looking back just as "America"
is debating its future as the United States.

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/lawrence24.htm

I'll just note that there in that very same Law Journal is an essay 
LAWYERS IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD: INVENTION OF SELF AND
ALBERT                    CAMUS' THE FALL  by  TIMOTHY HOFF

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/hoff23.htm

BTW, Dwight Eddins notes several very Kute correspondences in the novels
of Pynchon and Camus. 

On Web Pages, including this great Quail's

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html

And Allen also provides some information on the Horvath/Malin book.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_criticism.html

Speaking of P-Listers, well former P-Listers, was actually hoping the
machine was broke down for good and we might convince Gary to come
aboard the fabulous lifeboat. 

Here is that passage again: 

http://www.svsu.edu/~glt/pyncread.htm

A review with the passage: 

http://www.samizdat.com/isyn/pynchon.html

http://www.wired.com/news/topstories/0,1287,6177,00.html

http://sohodojo.com/masondixon.html

http://www.spikemagazine.com/0997pync.htm

Tony Tanner's new book (I recommend this one). 

The Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes': Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
http://lis.wwu.edu/record=b1929389

And one more, live objects

http://www.hotink.com/81297.html

These go on and on. 

But to Woolf and Mexican fiction
.