MDDM: Town and Country

[jbor]

on 12/2/02 10:11 AM, Scott Badger at lupine at ncia.net wrote:

> The Surveyors arrive
> at John Harland's farm on the 8th of January, a choice of location that
> Dixon, finally -- grudgingly --, admits is in part contingent, 'Mr. Tumbling
> fir'd his Rifle at us'. (331.16)

I think Dixon is just being honest - faux innocence which comically deflates
Mason's discourse and authority. Mason has tried to bamboozle Mrs Harland
with technical data in order to avoid her question. She isn't fooled, so
Dixon answers her question directly.

I think one of the prominent themes of _M&D_ is the tension between urban
and rural cultures. It plays out in Mason's and Dixon's bickering with one
another right from the outset, and is evident here when Dixon shares a
private joke with farmer Harland at Cha's expense at 331.33. The passage
detailing the "cryptick Intestinal Commentary" of the sausages hanging
against the sky which opens Ch. 29 foregrounds the theme very strongly.
(289) And, boundary-making and litigation (and, to a degree, politics) are
shown to be the province of city folk, and the way that the city aspires to
exert control over the land, as well as over those who make their living
from the land. Pynchon shows that the process of cultural imperialism
operates in subtle ways as well as in its more obvious colonial and imperial
manifestations of war, trade, and subjugation of aboriginal populations.

The "mariform" *grades* (i.e."gradient(s), slope(s), ascent(s) or
descent(s)" ?) of Mother Earth are going to prove somewhat less tractable
than Farmer Harland, however, and even more recalcitrant than Mrs Harland.
The metaphor about the earth swelling like an alien tide is extended again
in the lovely description of her field of sunflowers planted on the hill in
defiance of her husband's directions at 334.2. The way that a narrative
voice exclaims "ah! you might be transported beneath the Sea" and describes
how Ma and Pa Harland's "own Fields had begun [...] to move, in a Swell of
Possibility" is quite a wonderful literary conceit. Harland now "wants the
West". His newfound "Romantic thoughts" of discovery and adventure - and
conquest - derive as much from the augury of his wife's alien landscape as
from the stargazing and surveying he has been involved with in the
expedition south. "The meaning of Home is therefore chang'd for them as
well." The seeds of Manifest Destiny have been planted.

best