MDMD that duck

[Doug Millison]

Thanks so much, Dave, for taking the time and making the effort to pull
together the notes and references you've provided.

The Duck is certainly fertile, and I suspect -- can't know for sure, of
course -- that Pynchon expects his more energetic readers to trace out much
of this material; I suspect, as well, that's part of what led to him
spending a quarter of a century working on this novel, enfolding so many
allusions and working out the way that some of them might work together to
create stories that work beneath the surface level of the text, the way
that Dugdale, Hollander, and other Pynchon critics have suggested.

Palmieri, in the article Terrance dug up the other day, offers an
interesting suggestion re the Duck. I reserve judgement on it and tend not
to agree with his point, but it's worth reading:

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/12.1palmeri.html

" [...] There is one other notable way in which Mason & Dixon revises the
representation of systems of control in the earlier novels. Especially in
V. and Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon analyzes the declension from the human to
the mechanical, the colonizing of the living by the inanimate, the making
of human beings into automata by systems of scientific knowledge and power.
Vineland presents a view of human-machine hybrids which stands apart from
the view in the earlier novels and more closely resembles what will come in
Mason & Dixon. In the earlier novel, "Tubefreaks" such as Hector Zuñiga or
Zoyd Wheeler who act and think in imitation of the characters in television
programs appear as colorful, slightly eccentric characters, not victims of
an ominous conspiracy to liquefy the brains of Americans. But perhaps the
most important evidence in Vineland of the beginnings of a reversal in
Pynchon's representation of hybrid creatures comes from his depiction of
the Thanatoids. These characters--who after death continue to exist, eat,
sleep, dance, and talk, only at a slower rate than the living--revise the
representation of the living dead as frightening, threatening zombies. In
fact, they are mostly gentle, and include some of the most decent and
sympathetic characters in the novel. Like the Tubefreaks, they occupy a
middle ground between the living and the dead or the real and the unreal
that produces not danger and anxiety so much as a muted and sorrowful
desire.

36.	In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon proceeds much further by representing
hybrid forms such as mechanical animals who take on the attributes of
living creatures--intelligence, speech, a sense of justice, even a capacity
for love. The movement in this novel reverses that in the early works by
proceeding not from the human to the mechanical, but from the mechanical to
the sentient. It is difficult to name all the intelligent animals and
articulate machines in Mason & Dixon. They include not only conversing
chronometers, but the celebrated, witty, and dangerous Duck of Vaucanson,
whose involvement with the expedition contributes its one love story to the
novel, and who also constitutes one of its moral centers, when she observes
the "minor tho' morally problematick part" (669) that Mason and Dixon play
in world history. I would also note the numerous intelligent and ethical
animals in the novel--from the gigantic Golem who protects the mad poet,
Timothy Tox, and who "takes a dim view of oppression" (490), to the
electric eel who could kill those who touch him when he is exhibited, but
chooses benevolently not to. Dogs play a significant role in the narrative
both early and late. The Learned English Dog, also known as Fang, may have
met an untoward end, perhaps having taken his own life as a result of too
trustingly conversing with humans. Later, a dog named Snake warily keeps
his own counsel when Mason asks about his old friend Fang. Near the end of
the novel, in the guise of another younger dog, Fang visits Mason and Dixon
when they have returned to England, letting them know as they sleep that
when the two of them are together, he will be with them (757). The
mechanical Duck, the electric eel, the learned and thoughtful dogs, as well
as the other hybrid creatures that figure in the novel, whether mechanical
or animal (such as Zepho the beaver-man), are unlike most of those hybrid
machine-creatures who were associated with control, lack of choice, and
death in the earlier novels. These later mechanical and animal creatures
exhibit life, wit, and moral intelligence. Instead of humans becoming
automata, these automata and animals have become their own moral
agents.[28] The possibility these hybrids have of choosing to act ethically
in solidarity with others confirms the moderating of the paranoid vision
that dominates Pynchon's earlier novels.

37.	Although Pynchon's representation of animals as ethical agents
might appear isolated and anomalous, in fact one of the most distinctive
lines of inquiry in contemporary philosophy concerns the ethical status of
animals. Peter Singer, for example, has argued that in ethical
deliberations the suffering of other species should count equally with
similar kinds of suffering experienced by human beings (Animal Liberation
9), and that it is wrong to kill animals who can anticipate the future,
because their death deprives such animals of future enjoyments (Practical
Ethics 93-105). Tom Regan similarly makes the case that all animals who can
be understood as being "subjects of a life"--and not just human
beings--have inherent value, and a right to have that value respected.
Rosemary Rodd maintains that many species of animals possess traits--such
as the capacity for suffering and anticipating the future, consciousness,
and a sense of self--on the basis of which we assign ethical value to human
beings.[29] Both in Disgrace and in The Lives of Animals, J. M. Coetzee
questions the morality of killing animals in order to eat them. In
responding to Coetzee and extending his reflections, Barbara Smuts has
argued for the significance of interpersonal relations between humans and
animals (Lives of Animals 107-20). Thus, far from being idiosyncratic,
Pynchon's concern to represent animals as ethical agents engaged in
interpersonal relations with humans actually participates in an active and
continuing philosophical conversation--one that first emerges around the
same time as the late works of Foucault in the late seventies and early
eighties.

38.	Mason & Dixon thus joins Foucault's later work in moving from an
earlier vision of regimes of power that preclude choice and change to a
vision of a self-disciplined subject and of some limited ethico-political
agency.[30] Although Foucault and Pynchon ascribe to agents in their late
works an ability to distance themselves critically from their historical
present, such a limited critical agency does not derive from a return to a
humanist (Foucault) or purely human (Pynchon) individual subject. Rather,
it is the late postmodern that is committed to recuperating the liberal
individual: The X-Files and The Matrix, for example, posit a global
conspiracy so that a heroic individual agent can save human beings from
becoming hybrids with machines or aliens. By contrast, Foucault, Pynchon,
Haraway, Laclau and Mouffe, and the other than postmodern thinkers, are
interested in the opposite of such a return to the autonomous individual
subject; they are investigating subjectification and subject positions,
trying to propose ways that people can participate in forming themselves as
local ethical and political agents. Their turn away from paranoid or
conspiratorial visions accompanies the turn away from the liberal
individual subject; moreover, as they decline to idealize the unmixed human
self, they are more open to hybrids combining humans with animals or
machines. Beside those discussed so far, other contemporary thinkers are
also attempting to work out what forms of political and ethical agency can
be pursued based on a fissured or incomplete subject rather than the
unitary subject of liberal humanism (see Butler, Laclau, Zizek). Still, it
is important to recognize that The X-Files and other examples of late
postmodernism participate in the dominant form of consumer culture,
encouraging a private consumer self. The other than postmodern thought of
Foucault, Pynchon, and those who similarly challenge such privatizing
subjectification remains a less prominent, emerging formation. [...] "