MDDM Ch. 32 "a reliable Ticker" (317.12)

[jbor]

I actually just meant the short snippet you quoted. R.C. speaks and then a
narrator says that the watch was bewitched by women or manufactured by men,
which does seem to be R.C.'s elaboration. But it isn't speech, it's
narration, as you note. The whole episode is supposedly Wicks retelling the
tale told to him by Dixon, but I think this is yet another example of the
way the narration shifts away from the ostensible tale-teller and into "the
moment" of the event, and takes up a new protagonist's perspective. So I
sort of suspected it was R.C. narrating here because of the crude pun in
"Country Women" (cf. his pun on "'Prize'-money" at 322.9), the somewhat
misogynistic attitude, and the way that the episode is being recounted in
the present tense. Also, there's the account of R.C.'s domestic life *after*
the expedition on 324-5, which I think only R.C. would know the details of.

I think that Emerson's plan might have been to demonstrate the fallacy of
determinism (i.e. Newtonian physics, predestination) to his student, rather
than merely to hide the watch. As he says back at 318.5 - "Oah, another's
easily built .... " And, what eventually happens to the watch seems to defy
all probability or expectation, which might be why he thinks the plan
"work'd to Perfection". Emerson's a perverse old sod.

best



on 10/2/02 12:18 AM, Scott Badger at lupine at ncia.net wrote:

> 
> Rob:
>> The passage you've cited - and it seems to be R.C.'s narration rather than
>> Dixon's, by the way, and it's certainly not Wicks's
> 
> Did you mean to say Emerson (instead of Dixon)? If so, I wasn't suggesting
> that it was Emerson's narrative (or Dixon's, for that matter), just that if
> Emerson's plan 'work'd to Perfection', than he, also, chose to hide the
> watch from the World.
> 
> Until I typed the passage, I thought all of it was a direct quote of R.C.'s.
> I agree that after, '"What were my choices?"', it follows that R.C. would
> list them, but as he isn't quoted again until '"I had less than one of the
> Creature's Ticks to decide.[...]"', I'm not really sure who to attribute the
> narration to.
> 
>> But R.C. is "too insane for ev'ryone else's good"
>> (322.25), so I
>> don't think he's an altogether reliable authority on the subject.
>> 
> 
> R.C. may be insane, but who isn't??
> 
> Scott Badger
>