MDDM Ch. 27 Apothecary shoppe

[jbor]

Thanks Otto. I couldn't find anything specific either, but from the quick
search I did this morning I think that there's a Part 2 of Franklin's
autobiography as well, and there is certainly extensive published
correspondence. It seems that for much of the brief time he was back in
America from 1762 to 1764 Franklin was busy inspecting post offices in
various towns and, as Pynchon depicts him, embroiling himself in the local
political disputes and affairs of state.

I'd say that in all likelihood Mason and Dixon's appointment and arrival
from Britain were a big deal in the colonies, exacerbating local intrigues
and fuelling the rumour-mills, and that the pair would have been given
official welcomes as well as private audiences with some of the local
dignitaries along the way, just as Pynchon has it in the novel. So, yes,
parody is one part of it, but there's actually a strong "realist" impulse
still throbbing there too - "a thrust at truth and a lie" as Pynchon puts it
in _Lot 49_. Which is why I don't think it's so easy just to discount the
"history" side of it all, and the way that "real" historical figures have
been (re)drawn by Pynchon, especially if one is interested in deriving
political or moral significance/s from his text.

Scott's tip about Melville's _Israel Potter_ as a potential source seems
like a worthwhile route of investigation as well I think.

And I agree with you that _M&D_ (all of Pynchon's novels in fact) fit under
Linda Hutcheon's category of historiographical metafiction. There's quite a
good page here with some links:

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Metafiction.html

Linda Hutcheon differentiates the terms "metafiction" and "historiographic
metafiction."  She says that "historiographic metafiction, in deliberate
contrast to what I call late modernist radical metafiction (American
surfiction), attempts to demarginalize the literary through confrontation
with the historical, and it does so both thematically and formally" (289). 
Works are dubbed "historiographic metafictions" because of their conscious
self-reflexivity and concern with history. The earliest histories contain
fictional elements. They are implicit amalgamations of fact and myth. The
composition of the word "history" itself contains the word "story". Yet, as
realism took root, history came to represent "objective" fact and the novel
came to represent subjective "fiction."

Modernist and postmodernist questioning challenged the authority of
histories by acknowledging that the "fact" presented is the author's
subjective interpretation. Historiographic metafictions are "novels that are
intensely self-reflective but that also both re-introduce historical context
into metafiction and problemitize the entire question of historical
knowledge" (Hutcheon 285-286). Historiographic metafictions bridge the
fissure between historical and fictional works by recombining the two
genres. They employ "a questioning stance through their common use of
conventions of narrative, of reference, of the inscribing of subjectivity,
of their identity as texuality, and even of their implication in ideology"
(Hutcheon 286). 

Beyond reconnecting history and fiction, Linda Hutcheon remarks that
"postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in
fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to
prevent it from being conclusive and teleological" (209). To accomplish this
re-presentation of the past, historiographic metafiction, "plays upon the
truth and lies of the historical record. Certain known historical details
are deliberately falsified in order to foreground the possible mnemonic
failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate
and inadvertent error" (Hutcheon 294).

Through its play upon "known truth" historiographic metafiction questions
the absolute "knowability" of the past, specifing the ideological
implications of historical representations. In its process of redefining
"reality" and "truth" historiographic metafiction opens a sort of time
tunnel which rediscovers the histories of suppressed people such as women or
colonized natives. 

best


on 14/1/02 3:10 AM, Otto at o.sell at telda.net wrote:

> 
> Given the fact that our novel heroes meet Ben Franklin, George Washington
> (Chap. 28) and Thomas Jefferson (395.23ff) I believe that we really have
> embarked in the land of Hutcheon's Historiographic Metafiction here:
> "To parody is not to destroy the past; in fact, to parody is both to
> enshrine the past and to question it." (1989, 6)
> 
snip
> 
> The autobiography ends on July 27th, 1757.
> 
> I found nothing on the case between Pennsylvania and Maryland. But by
> looking more closely it should be possible to locate something like: "I am
> no stranger to rejection, I have long learn'd to deal with it in Dignity, as
> a sane man would" (269.20) in his writings if he has really said so. It fits
> very well to "Strangers, heed my wise advice - Never pay the Retail Price"
> (267.31-32).
> 
> I had some fun reading his aphorisms like:
> "He that lieth down with Dogs, shall rise up with Fleas."
> http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/quotable/quote13.htm
> 
> "Fish and visitors stink after three days."
> http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/quotable/quote32.htm
> 
> Otto
> 
> 
> 
>