MDDM Ch. 73

[jbor]

John wrote:

> But if you look 
> at it on the more abstract level, it does run throughout M&D, at least. I'm
> thinking of the dog who learns to speak to avoid being eaten, the mechanical
> duck who becomes a slave to her passions, the cook who becomes a slave to
> the duck, the New Yorkers and their troubles with Representation, the golem
> (the revolt of the golem against its maker is usually a part of the golem
> myth, but that only really became a popular part during the 18th C.), Austra
> and others at the Cape, even the Vroom girls, Gershom, a number of married
> couples in America, Eliza, and so on. I'm not saying the theme is
> necessarily that well explored in the novel, but it is there, isn't it? It's
> a hook to hang your coat on, at least.

I'm wondering also whether Chas and Jere aren't often construed in the text
as being "slaves" to particular interests outside their own volition, to
obvious things like the Contract they signed, the King, and the Proprietors,
but also to other institutions and ideas (the Calverts and Penns, the other
settlers, the Jesuits, Franklin, GW & co., the Native Americans, fear,
ambition, their notions of morality), things which they often have
premonitions of, or accuse each other about, more or less jokingly, but also
things to which they succumb unwittingly sometimes (I think there are
dramatic ironies around the two protagonists in the narrative). And in
another sense, too, they are "slaves" to (the text of) history, the
historical data by which their exploits are circumscribed, just as
Stoppard's Ros. and Guil. are "slaves" to the text of _Hamlet_.

So Ch. 73 sets up a "what might have been" for the intrepid duo, a
subjunctive vision of what they could or should or might have achieved if
they had defied their orders and gone on westwards as they both, at various
times, desire to. The results for America, Pynchon seems to be saying, would
have been pretty much the same. But the surveyors have been liberated from
their history here, and I think it sets up something of the tone and purpose
for the novel as a whole too. The Mason-Dixon Line, their Line, and their
main or only claim on posterity, on our memory, is itself "slave" to the
slavery issue, to the Civil War. Pynchon's novel goes quite a ways towards
liberating or resurrecting the Line, and the two men, from that bondage imo.

best