MDDM Ch. 28 "what else?"

[John Bailey]

The lead plates are real enough, and I like the fact that there were four, 
two have been found (can't get any photos unfortunately) and Washington 
mentions that he dug a couple (ie the other two) up. What isn't so certain 
is the Chinese inscription on the reverse side. I'd guess that this is more 
of a confabulation of Pynchon's, but why? The 'readers' in this scene, as 
jbor points out, all attribute different meanings to the plates; they 'read' 
the plates through different filters...but the inscription, for the purposes 
of the story, are real enough. Why *are* they there? Interesting that no-one 
translates (or, I guess, later tries to have translated) the inscriptions.

Also interesting is the way Washington becomes a little suspicious that 
Mason & Dixon recognise the Chinese origin of the inscription, as, I 
presume, most people in this period wouldn't. Fair enough. But if that is 
the case, why *do* they recognise it?


>From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: MDDM Ch. 28 "what else?"
>Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 11:13:48 +1100
>
>
>     [ ... ] the essence of Magic is the power of small Magickal Words, to
>     work enormous physickal Wonders,-- as of coded inscriptions in Fables,
>     once unlock'd to yield up Treasure past telling. [286.26]
>
>Thus Wicks "speculate[s]" about the significance of the "message" sent via
>the lead plates planted by the French at the head of each stream in the
>American mid-West in the lead-up to the Seven Years War. It seems to beg 
>the
>question of what this "Treasure past telling" might be, and the irony of
>Wicks's (and his creator's) singular status as story-teller is acute within
>this speculation. (It also begs the question of whether such objects
>actually existed.)
>
>But it's not the only possibility mooted by the characters. George
>interprets them as "Flags", the "Surveyor's equivalent of a slap from a
>Glove" (286.22), while Gershom, parodying Cockney/Australian rhyming slang,
>refers to them as a "Bunch of Dead Weights". (286.36) And it's Dixon who
>introduces the idea of a more sinister "Electrickal Purpose", and George 
>who
>refers he and Mason back to Franklin's paranoid theory about a "Jesuit
>Telegraph". (287.25)
>
>If Pynchon's Gershom is a stand-in for either or both Sammy Davis Jr (and
>therefore George = JFK, Martha = Jackie O, Franklin = Sinatra, Mason and
>Dixon = Lee Marvin and Peter Lawford ... where does it end?) and one or
>another Kabbalist scholar I do wonder what the "Treasure past telling" the
>reader that this *is* the case might be. Just an observation.
>
>best
>




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