MDMD2: Wigs and Leafless Tree

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

Let me try a less erudite, and more phenomenological-ish approach to
the passage:

A tree, barren now of the fruit of life or knowledge, vaults in an arc
recalling the flight of snowballs which opens the novel, and through
and beyond them, the barren rainbow of cold sovereign gravity itself if
not of the cracked vault of the flawed Creation to which Mason and
Dixon perforce refer in their work. (Am I the only one of us who has
noticed the way these "Snow-Balls" map onto the "Tennis-Balls" which
the Dauphin presents, by embassy, to the young King Hal in
Shakespeare's (or "Shak-spere" as he was styl'd) immortal "Henry Vee"?)
The light of a burning "Lanthorn" (or "Lang Thorne" -- variously a
torch or, more interestingly and significantly for Pynchon, the Sword
of Damocles or bull's pizzle) illuminates the tree of death but is
suspended (how? as by Cherrycoke's fancied Noose at Tyburn Tree?) above
a group of card-players who's poker-faces (though they are as likely as
not to be playing Whist) spout (note the Melville material embedded in
this passage!) the vapors which reveal the secrets they would fain
conceal as they conspire with the Wigs (clearly a misdirection to
"Whigs", the party of landed arisocrats who actually held in themselves
and perpetuated through primogeniture the control both of England and
the Sovereign, and who struggle throughout the period of the narrative
to control their vasty estates in the New World, and 'pon who's errand
Mason and Dixon have been sent), white as snow (v. the blackness of the
slaves they trade and, by proxy, work to their deaths). Roofslates are
known to be dislodged by ice, as by the sneaky-peteing feet of
narrators, placing the conspirators under yet another aerial peril
(Pynchon offers hope!); the faces of these be-wigg'd Whigs nod in and
out of the shadows, indicating the play of revelation and misdirection
which characterizes the TP's method, and recalling Slothrop's
terrifying hallucination of the piebald Never, the memento mori, as it
were, of GR.

Fin.
I say that's a *joke* son.
In that sort of mood,
Mark

Doubtful.


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