Sea Voyages & Insanity

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Thanks for passing that along, Terrance. I think Dewey
> and McClure are onto something here, re Pynchon as a
> "religious writer" and M&D being a "religious novel."
> I guess such notions aren't beyond the pale of
> accepted criticism after all.

Dewey says, 

> 
> > 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...

Now, if we turn back to Moby-Dick, chapter 16, The Ship, we
discover that the 
damaged legacy of Christianity (recall that the "religious"
men that own the ship are set in opposition to  the widows
and orphans and the men that labor, they are Quakers with a
vengeance and American Calvinistic Proof motivates their
dealing with man and beast and God. 




and that the ship's Departure is on Christmas and that at
Christmastime the ship's Latitudes reach absolute zero 

reminds me of Blicero's crossing the equator with Rilke in
hand (mirrors and bookish symmetries indeed), of Stig later,
of the captain in V. and the intertextuals Dave Monroe
pointed out--Poe and Conrad

and Ahab, who has been haunting the ship with his mysterious
absence emerges from below...

It's not quite a critique of Capitalism, but of something,
as Weber taught Pynchon, 
Spiritual.