MDMD: Pynchon's Mystakes (formerly Re: Buzz-Men)

[jbor]

on 30/11/01 1:15 AM, The Great Quail at quail at libyrinth.com wrote:

> While I agree with you on this case, it may be useful to recall that
> Pynchon *does* make mistakes. (There are certainly a few in
> "Gravity's Rainbow," as Weisenburger and others have pointed out.)
> Even the Man himself has admitted to such in the famed "Slow Learner"
> intro, where he discusses both his missteps (dialogue, concepts,
> themes) as well as actual errors ("the Grippe.") I think it's
> reasonable to assume that he is still evolving as a writer, and there
> may be actual mistakes in M&D. (Though again, I agree with Doug on
> this one.)

I'm not quite sure Doug if *was* addressing the "Buzz-men" reference at
187.1, which, up until Steve gave the OED definition as pickpockets (dating
from around 1830), I hadn't been able to track down a source for. My best
guess from the context of the passage was "buzz" in the context of "a low
sound, as of many voices in conversation" or "rumour, gossip": something
like the "low talker" in the _Seinfeld_ episode. But I think that the OED
definition fits because the two "Naboblets" are crowding in on Rebekah and
trying to foist a "fading" sepia "Representation" of Mason onto her - for a
price, I assume - and so she suspects that perhaps they were pickpockets
with speech impediments.

There's lots of other interesting stuff going on in that passage, by the
way. Is it a dream sequence? - If it is, whose dream is it? We've got so
many framing narratives in play (a narrator describing Wicks's telling of
Mason's imagination of Rebekah's recollection of a mysterious encounter with
"Two Gentleman" ... !) that, as I said at the beginning of the MDDM, the
most sensible course is to leave Wicks &c to one side for a moment and try
to unpack the text fragment as is. Other points of interest in it: the fact
that Rebekah had realised that her "marriageable years had ebbed away"
(186.17) - So, was she actively pursuing Chas with marital intentions on
that fateful morn when she crash-tackled him to rescue him from the runaway
giant cheese on the hillside beyond Randwick Church? The way that the
Naboblets echo the word "Representation" - it's another mise en abyme trope
like the infinite regress of mirrors in _Lot49_, a typically postmodern
reflexive touch. But is there a hint of voodooism here as well: If Rebekah
owns the sepia drawing of Chas she will be able to capture his heart? (cf.
Chas's initial reaction to her apparition on the hill, the narratorial
intervention, from Uncle Ives, about there being "no records of her in
Gloucestershire" etc at 171 - If so, who *made* the drawing?) The recount is
a response to Miss Bradley's question of how she came to marry Chas after
all. (186.16)

If that was the "mistake", then I agree that it isn't a mistake, and we were
just trying to reason out why there are so many mentions of archaic terms
which appear to date from *after* the turn of the 19th c. in the text.
Nobody has said that it was a mistake.

But I think Doug might have been referring to this query from Ch. 19:

192.34 "'Twas in that Schizochronick year of '52, that Macclesfield became
President of the Royal Society, continuing so for twelve more years, till
his Unfortunate passing." So what year is it? Bradley died in 1762, his
death is still the topic of conversation at the pub, so how come Mason knows
that Macclesfield dies in 1764? Is this an error? (Or Wicks's interpolation?
Or another narrator?)

I actually thought that some aspects of these two chapters were a little
sloppy, eg. the sentence at 187.30:

    It would have been Mason, desperate with longing, who, had he kept a
    journal, would have written,--

To me that sentence is overly convoluted, if not tautological.

best