MDDM Ch. 70 Higher Assembly

[Doug Millison]

jbor:
>While not discounting this additional possibility it's noteworthy that the
>episode (and much of the narrative) is written in the present tense.

Many oral storytellers work in the present tense, as I'm sure you're aware.
As I mentioned in a message a few days ago, I think you underestimate the
powers of an oral storyteller.  Consider the way somebody like Robin
Williams (Jonathan Winters, etc. & etc.) can slip in and out of various
charater POVs, often in the space of a single  sentence (as Pynchon does in
his prose), with wild shifts of perspective.  With a mind like Pynchon's
behind him, Wicks could be doing something equally entertaining and
dizzying as he tells his story.


> the imagery used
>in the passage - "the Hundred-League Current of *Sha*", the men journeying
>into "Terrestrial Knowledge", the "Cycle" of life as an "Engine" - doesn't
>seem to coincide with Wicks's worldview at all.


I don't see why not?  What is it about those phrases that seem non-Wicksian?


>And I'd say it's unlikely that Wicks is the author of those obvious, though
>fairly infrequent, anachronisms in the text either.


Sha is an anachronism?  Europe had contact with China prior to the 18th
century, through the Jesuits among others, and the Jesuits (some of them
anyway) became intimately familiar with Chinese philosophy, etc.

I agree that Wicks isn't the author of the novel's obvious anachronisms,
that author being Pynchon.