MDDM Subjunctive Spaces

[jbor]

on 23/11/01 2:18 AM, Paul Mackin at paul.mackin at verizon.net wrote:

I think it's much more than a side issue. In _M&D_ Pynchon investigates one
(or several) of the cusp moments in American history, wielding something of
the same iconoclastic hammer that he took to modern European history (and
its writing) in _GR_. But, for me, one of if not the most important clause
in this deservedly celebrated passage is the one to do with language:
"changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to
Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments." As well as polluting and
mapping and parcelling up the new lands to the West -- indeed, the very way
in which this was achieved, labelled as "progress", accepted as an
inevitability, was by a type of linguistic imperialism. English and many
other European languages (though not French) by this time had well and truly
begun to discard the "subjunctive mood", and were marginalising all that it
had previously stood for. It was the grammatical structure which encouraged
-- or permitted -- the conception and expression of what might be possible,
of a range of alternative courses, and which validated the realms of hope
and fear and dream, and it was disappearing, was being subsumed into the
indicative, the hard cold domain of "what is", and "what is to be". The
power of language. The Age of Reason. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Etc.

A large part of Pynchon's aim, clearly, and not just in this text, has been
to revive the subjunctive scope of literary discourse, to reify the
subjunctive spaces of "the real". (Like the magic realists with whom his
work is most closely aligned.) In _M&D_ (indeed, in all his fiction) he
exemplifies the practice and potential of the subjunctive -- again, from
within the historical moment -- and he also delineates an episode from the
history of its surrender.

best


> 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
>>