MDMD(6): The carnivalesque (2)

[John Bailey]

>From: "Paul Nightingale" <paulngale at supanet.com>

<reluctant snip of some wonderful stuff here - has anybody read the Bakhtin 
stuff which has appeared in Pynchon Notes? Any good?>

>
>In Ch9 we are finally allowed to see the astronomers at work; Their
>task is to impose science on nature: "One
>day, someone sitting in a room will succeed in reducing all the
>Observations, from all 'round the world, to a simple number of seconds"
>(p93).

A big part of M&D, this, which also runs through TP's work from the 
beginning: how all attempts to draw lines, 'reduce' (important word) the 
world to a set of mathematical statistics, or create simple borders around 
messy territories, will usually be confounded by the 'natural' elements, 
desire, human error, overlooked variables etc. Someone always smudges the 
ink of the equation, spatters water on the camera lens

or simply oversteps the line.

It's interesting how Dixon seems so much more open to the carnivalesque, at 
least in a literal sense, and embodies a lot of the features which seem to 
make up that concept. How does this fit in with his role as Surveyor? In a 
practical way, Mason is the navigator, whilst it's Dixon who actually draws 
the Line, a job which he has done for a long time, being the guy who marked 
off paddocks, measured enclosures, cut up the countryside. Mason, the old 
school fuddy-duddy, wants to cross lines, between the living and the dead, 
the past and the present, the earth and the skies.

But I guess they both change a lot in their travels. I don't think either of 
them particularly embody any consistent or static set of principles, which 
is what makes them somewhat more satisfying as characters than earlier 
figures in Pynchon's stuff.

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