Sea Voyages & Insanity

[Terrance]

r j palcho wrote:
> >
> 
>   May I suggest that W.C. is "insane only as it pleased ev'ryone to style
> (him)" Lying with the rats and vermin he has had a mystical experience,a
> satori,such as experienced by Hindoos and Chinamen--a moment of knowing,of
> loss of self. He then sets sail "in the hope that Eastward yet might dwell
> something of Peace and Godhead,which British Civilization, in venturing
> Westward,had left behind"
> 
>   And 25 years later,he ends up at his sisters' home in Phila. for an
> unintended stay,finding that "he cannot detach"  hauntin the dead
> Mason,"expecting him to HELP HIM WITH SOMETHING", the something being the
> "supernatural Guidance" he sought "from the Lamas old as time" but never
> made it to the East to experience.
> 
>   The story of M&D is the spiritual/religious odyssey of Mason and
> Cherrycoke to rise above the mechanical oppressions of life, "to sail those
> East Indian lanes" Not sure this will hold up, but it's the approach I'm
> taking this time through.
> 
> best
> r.j.p.
> 


As Joseph Dewey asks in his essay on M&D:

Why then opt for such a narrator? And why a minister?

The narrative presence of Wicks Cherrycoke turns Mason &
Dixon into an 
explicitly religious novel that explores the damaged legacy
of Christianity, 
the emerging muscle of the Enlightenment and, finding both
systems wanting 
for largely the same reasons, turning to the most unexpected
source-the 
mysticism of the East-for (re)solution.

See Dewey's note #2 where he cites John A. McClure's essay,
an essay that I 
have mentioned here, wherein McClure argues, convincingly,
that "Pynchon  is 
the most exciting religious writer of our time." 

But Dewey is perhaps too eager to discover an Eastern
"(re)solution."  My own reading will focus on the turning
East that is  in fact a turning full 
circle to American Christianity. But, I will argue, there is
not a solution or resolution, but a conflict paradoxically
sustained.  

The editors of the volume on M&D note that two camps of 
Pynchon scholarship have developed. We could see these as 
the camp of   secular postmodern "satires" (see
Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion, his introduction is a
near perfect synopsis of the application of Postmodern
theory) and the camp that reads a deep "religious
contemplation" that suggests, if only a wick waiting for a
spark, that profane man or non religious man (Eliade) may
not have extinguished all that is sacred.  Again,  I think
Melville's novels and stories are all over M&D. 

Founder of the Club Of Confusion