MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[jbor]

Bandwraith wrote:

> Is this a subversion of the biblical eden, humankind
> in a secondary role to the garden itself, de-noblized
> from tragic heroes to pests, tolerated but less than
> important? I hope so.
> 
> Could it be Cain's garden? Make me even happier...

Someone (Crawfford??) says, at the top of p. 656, "[t]his is Acre upon Acre,
and cannot be God's Work."

I agree that the parody of Eden and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' ("Did ye hear
someone going Fee Fie Fo Fum?" Mason frowns.) readings are definitely in
play here. There's also a touch of the Alice in Wonderlands about it too.

But I don't think you can divorce the extraordinary vegetable patch from the
description of the Indigenous Americans' giant hemp tree which segues
(somewhat postmodernistically) into either a real or imagined visit to
"these Gardens Titanick" which lie somewhere "West of Cheat".

The narrator's elaboration of Dixon's comment that "*Dagga* hath many
mysteries" implies that there eventually is a bit of a pot ("peace-pipe"?)
session between the "Indians!" and the two surveyors, and which is what ties
it back to the scene at Mount Vernon. The narrator sez: "One [mystery]
being, that talking about things, while not exactly causing them to happen,
does cause something,-- which is almost the same, though not quite. Unless
it is possible to smoke a Potatoe." (655.26-29) This is yet another example
where the narrator is fairly obviously not Wicks, imo.

Anyway, the chance that it is all just a (hash-)pipe dream aside, there are
a couple more points to note in the discussion of these extraordinary
veggies. The mention of Franklin (Crawfford again? 656.15) again has a
slightly negative aspect to it. On the next page Dixon's comparison of the
Beet to "a like-siz'd Vein of Coal" (657.11) does fit in with notions of a
living planet which run through Pynchon's work, but the question begged by
both Dixon and the text is whether, once this conceit is accepted, there is
in fact any real or moral difference, apart from the colour men's skins are
turned, between these farmers exploiting vegetable "life" and "Geordie
Pitmen" exploiting mineral "life", and, by extension, whether there is any
difference from the way those Native Americans exploited the giant hemp tree
(654-5) or from GW growing hemp as a cash crop back in Ch. 28.

best