MDDM Chapter 44 Notes & Musings

[jbor]

John wrote:
> 
> Well, we’re 440 pages into 773 page book, and the party is only just now
> setting out on the Line.

I agree that the chapter is consciously marking the/a beginning of "the
story": a birth, or rebirth, figured in that "haze of green Resurrection" at
the top of p. 441 too. I'd say the upset or frustration this might cause a
reader isn't accidental. It recalls the way that _Tristram Shandy_ in
particular, but _Don Quixote_ and _Moby-Dick_ also, deny the reader the
satisfaction of a linear, Aristotleian tale. Another typically postmodernist
undermining of expected novelistic narrative structure and exegesis.

440.18 "I try not to wonder. I must wonder."

cf. (perhaps) Beckett's "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the
silence, you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." [_The
Unnamable_, p. 418]

444.14 "The first day of the West Line, April 5th, falls upon a Friday ... "

Excellent timing, methinks. Thanks John.

best



> This upset me a little on first reading. It’s not
> the ‘linear’ narrative I’d been made to expect from reviews. Sure, there’s a
> kind of teleology to it, but the Line itself takes up very little of the
> narrative. The next few chapters cover the period during which the line was
> walked, but a lot of it is taken up by diversions and digressions. Not that
> I have a problem with that. But it does make it obvious that the Line
> itself, which is the thing most people would associate with M&D, is not here
> of importance in itself, but only as a symptom of other forces,
> relationships, jostlings of power and traces of history. From this Chapter
> on, however, the Line is at least there, in the background, forming as a
> real, physical fact, and it begins here, at the Post Mark’d West.
> 
> 440: ‘Ley-lines’: s/z noted in the first read-through that this term wasn’t
> coined until the 1920s.
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9801&msg=22892&sort=date
> 
> The Rev’s description calls to mind (my mind at least) the later railroad
> expansion to the West, and the powerful changes in society, as well as
> individual psychology, which it effected; as well as, perhaps, the internet,
> the Jesuit Telegraph, and other ‘imaginary’ elisions of space. The
> implication seems to be that the Line, in fact any line of this sort, is
> powerful precisely because it allows the mind to reduce physical space to a
> function of consciousness. Something is always lost in this translation,
> which is why the Line is often painted as a negative force.
> 
> This section is written by Wicks, and once again the Rev. is not exactly
> espousing orthodoxy. ‘Something is there, that permits it
I try not to
> wonder. I must wonder.’ Spooky talk. I think that the suggestion here is
> that the drawing of the line permits it.
> 
snip