MDMD Subject/Objective Reality/Illusion & Subjunctive

Thu Nov 22 09:18:38 CST 2001

This grandly expressed idea of BECOMING can apply  not only to the
unfolding of America but to the actuality and might-have-beens of all of
our individual lives. Who can resist something so commonly felt?   I
remember  Stefan Mattesich's telluric review saying that virtually all
reviewers had included the quote. (can't vouch for the truth of this
because I haven't read virtually all the reviews) Mattesich has quite a
fancy theory about the paragraph. Not sure I really got it or particularly
agreed.

American history is so indelibly imbedded is the American soul. Forward
movement is perceived as from East to West.  In my case I started off in
the West and moved East but it's still "back East"  and "out West." Even in
complete contentment the positioning  seems somehow a regression.

Just a side issue of course.

           P.

Terrance wrote:

> 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?.