MDMD 1: "Beach'd upon these Republican shores"

[Thomas Eckhardt]

"After years wasted (...) past remembering those Yearnings for Danger,
past all that ought to have been, but never had a Hope of becoming, have
I beach'd upon these Republican Shores,-- stoven, dismasted, imbecile
with age,-- an untrustworthy Remembrancer for whom the few events yet
rattling within a broken memory must provide the only comfort now
remaining to him,--" (8)

Echoes, associations: I am afraid it is Eliot and "The Waste Land" all
over again. "Memory and desire" and the "heap of broken images" from
'The Burial of the Dead', the rattling bones of 'The Fire Sermon' etc.

Also resounding here is the perennial theme of the sea-voyage. Like
Odysseus Cherrycoke finds himself stranded on some shore far away from
his home, and like Odysseus to the Phaeacians he is about to tell the
story of his long adventurous  journey. Perhaps a hint that the book in
front of us could be perceived as an epic - matters of genre might be of
interest here as well, as always IMHO -, but an epic told by Tristram
Shandy instead of Homer. The difference, of course, being, that
Cherrycoke is an "untrustworthy Remembrancer", a for the most part
utterly unreliable narrator. The theme of memory and remembrance, the
relationship of story, history and historiography, or, to put it
bluntly, of fact and fiction, lies at the heart of the "Herodotic Web of
Adventures and Curiosities" (7), the "Tale about America", that is
"Mason & Dixon". In the archives you will find some longish discussions
of these topics that were a lot of fun at the time...

Also, the distinction between the subjunctive and the indicative,
between "all that ought to have been, but never had a Hope of becoming",
between all those "Possibilities" that are reduced to "Simplicities that
serve the ends of Governments", as it says on page 345, is important. In
this fiction as in gruesome reality, I might add. Then as now.

My best wishes go out to each and everyone of you,
Thomas