MDMD(11): An Entirely New Angular Relation to Mercy

[Dave Monroe]

"She occupies now an entirely new angular relation to
Mercy, to those refusals, among the Living, to act on
behalf of Death, or its ev'ryday Coercions,-- Wages
too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners,
Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death's thousand Metaphors
in the World,-- as if, the instant of her passing over
acted as a Lens, the rays of her soul have undergone
moral Refraction." (M&D, Ch. 16, pp. 171-2)

Oops, reposted the wrong post.  What I meant was ...

>From Terry Castle, "Spectral Politics: Apparition
Belief and the Romantic Imagination," The Female
Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of
the Uncanny (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), pp. 168-89
...

"Why do we no longer believe in ghosts?  In his
nostalgic celebration The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
(1897), Andrew Lang blamed the skeptical eighteenth
century: 'the cock-sure common-sense of the years from
1650 to 1850, or so, regarded everyone who had an
experience of a hallucination as a dupe, a lunatic, or
a liar.'  Enlightenment thinking--to put it
bluntly--made spirits obsolete.  Keith Thomas takes up
a similar theme in Religion and the Decline of Magic
(1971), but develops it rather more ingeniously.  Men
and women of the eighteenth century 'stopped seeing
hosts,' he asserts, not so much because ghosts came to
seem 'intellectually impossible' (though this was
certainly the case) but because ghosts gradually lost
their 'social relevance.'  In traditional English
society, he suggests, the belief in apparitions
performed a powerful community function.  The idea
that the spiurits of the dead might come back to haunt
murderers, locate stolen objects, enforce the terms of
legacies, expose adulterers, and so on, functioned as
a kind of implicit socail control--a restraint on
aggression and a 'useful sanction for social norms.' 
With the emergence after 1700 of new and bureaucratic
forms of surveillance--with the rise of an organized
police force, grand juries, insurance companies, and
other information-gathering bodies--the need for a 
spectral monitoring agency, composed of ethereal
headlessladies, morose figures in shrouds, and other
supernatural busibodies, gradually began to fade.
   "Like most functionalist arguments, Thomas's
hypothesis has an attractive economy.  It also makes a
kind of intuitive sense, offering a larger
explanation, perhaps, for one's innermost feelings of
paranoia...." (pp. 168-70)

Castle citing/paraphrasing here the magisterial ...

Thomas, Keith.  Religion and the Decline of Magic.
   New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971.

For which I also give thanks, as she's saved me the
trouble of combing back through Thomas's (Keith, not
Pynchon) 716 page (inc. index) magnum opus.  Specific
citations @ pp. 606, 600 and 605.  Castle quotes at
length from p. 595 as well, shortly after where I left
of quoting her.  

By the way, another great Pynchonian phrase here,
"Death's thousand Metaphors in the World," and do note
that list of just what a few of those "thousand
Metaphors" are, "Wages too low to live upon, Laws
written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison." 
Speaking of spectral politic(k)s ... 

And note the optic(k) trope as well, "as if, the
instant of her passing over acted as a Lens, the rays
of her soul have undergone moral Refraction," see,
e.g., ...

Cantor, G.N.  Optics after Newton: Theories
   of Light in Britain and Ireland, 1704-1840.
   New York: St. Martin's, 1983.

But to take a step back in Pynchon, and to continue in
Castle ...


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