MDMD "tedious lit-crit"

[Doug Millison]

Paul:
If you've bothered reading this far, Doug: apologies for the tedious
lit-crit.


Your posts are not what I had in mind.  Tedious lit-crit, in my opinion, is
the kind that's unreadable, or that which celebrates jargon for its own
sake.

If you've read all the way through M&D, I expect you will have discovered
that one of the delights of the book is the way Pynchon moves qualities
back and forth between his two eponymous  protagonists -- it becomes quite
difficult to draw any clear lines between the two men, although, and I find
this the marvelous part of Pynchon's characterizations, they reman distinct
and fully human.  You see this in their interest in and response to things
supernatural and occult and magical, and their family affairs-- Dixon is
the one who claims to have visited the hollow earth and who chases anything
in a skirt but who also manages to keep things together and live a happy
family life, while Mason ends up obsessed with occult mysteries and
estranged from his family.

Too bad you weren't here for the first MDMD, when the novel first came out.

-Doug