MDMD: The Age of Unreason

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> It is interesting to see how Unreason (Foucault's term in Madness and
> Civilisation) flourished during the so-called Age of Reason. In terms of the
> novel, I suppose, there are few texts that are less conventional than
> Tristram Shandy. EP Thompson's history-from-below set out to give
> working-class people a voice 

Snip 
> 
> Popular resistance is what Pynchon is writing about, certainly in M&D and
> CoL49, if not quite so obviously in GR. 

Snip 


> 
> And then, in Ch4 there is Captain Smith's introduction to his crew: "'Well,'
> advised the young salt, 'you've got a good job, - don't fuck up'" (p35). I
> think Pynchon deals with the situation Thompson described: the transition to
> a capitalist free-market economy retains  older notions of duty (a clash
> between what Raymond Williams would call residual and emergent cultures). If
> Smith does fuck up, his crew will pay the price: his duty to them is one
> capitalism, with its myth of the free agent, cannot tolerate.

It's interesting too, that the Captain has been in a tidy corner of
Hell. 
And this Captain, more philosophikal and Scientifik than Militant 
Superstitious sailor,  aboard the Jackass Frigate, discovers in the
beast, a gilded glory, a fire, a Saint Elmo's Fire to bleach away all
pain, all failure, all fear. 

Blinky, not the brightest Wapping boy pressed into service, seems to be
trying, perhaps too hard, to impress the men on the quarterdeck with his
quip. What is a stupid kid doing on the quarterdeck? ANd if he doesn't
recognize the Captain (he does figure that  Smith is an officer) 
perhaps he's not quite smart enough to know that he has just insulted a
bunch of officers.