About that book ...

[Paul Nightingale]

A visitor is "perhaps being led to meditate upon Punishment,-- or upon
Commerce...for Commerce without Slavery is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must
ever include, as an essential Term, the Gallows,-- Slavery without the
Gallows being as hollow and waste a Proceeding, as a Crusade without the
Cross" (M&D, for those of you familiar with it, p108).

One should hesitate before indulging in a biblical (the Gospel according to
His Muchness) reading here. Consider, instead, the way Pynchon links the
different terms. Commerce, as a topic to meditate upon, is an alternative to
punishment. This is qualified by the assumption that commerce necessarily
includes slavery, which in turn necessarily requires the gallows. So
punishment is equated with the gallows, ie as capital punishment; and, in
the C18th, of course, this was a lot more common - ie as a punishment for a
wider range of so-called crimes - than it is at the end of the civilised
C20th. Capital punishment has symbolic importance: it allows the institution
of slavery to survive, even prosper, unchallenged (just as a crusade, any
crusade, is justified once we know we have the appropriate god on our side).

This passage, therefore, includes both C18th 'facts' (the generous use of
hanging to enforce observance of this or that 'law') and also late-C20th
sensibility (I suspect we're rather more sceptical about crusades now). Yet
the paragraph has opened with a delightfully impressionist moment, straight
out of Manet (or Zola): "a pair of Gallows, simplified to Penstrokes in the
glare of this Ocean sky". Furthermore, the passage reminds us of Mason's
line in spectator sports (which is then taken up by the rest of the
chapter). It reminds us (as does the exchange between Cherrycoke and Mr
LeSpark, p105) of the global economy that has politicised the scientific
endeavour of Mason/Dixon. Signifiers one and all, with no (ultimate)
signified to establish meaning once and for all.

So - from Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History": "Genealogy does not
oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher
might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary,
it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and
indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for 'origins'" (in
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p140).

The introduction to St Helena follows a discussion that bridges the end Ch10
and the beginning of Ch11, the first time in the novel that this has
happened. Aunt Euphrenia, recalling her own visit to the island, insists she
be allowed to "mourn" what she cannot have known personally, ie "Orange and
Lemon-Groves, the Coffee-Fields" (p105). What she leaves out, of course, is
the slave-labour, without which her "Paradise" would have been unlikely.
Cherrycoke then admits that his own recollections are anything but personal,
because once again he wasn't present when Mason/Dixon arrived on the island.
So the chapter has opened with a recollection quickly exposed as false: what
exactly do 'personal recollections' amount to? Should the individual laying
claim to such a recollection - ie claiming authorship - have actually been
there? Conversely, does it add authenticity to the recollection if one were
there, 'at the time'? This, of course, is the question M&D has been asking
us to ask throughout. The novel's present (ie the passages that frame
Cherrycoke's narration) does seem to have moved on a stage with the
appearance of Aunt Euphrenia.