MDDM Ch. 62 Stig

[Doug Millison]

>612.6-13 "In the Royal Library in Copenhagen lies an ancient Vellum
>Manuscript, a gift from Bishop Brynjolf to Frederick the Third,
>containing Tales of the first Northmen in America, of those long Winters
>and the
>dread Miracles that must come to pass before Spring....


Stig continues (attributed):  "the melancholy suggestion, that the 'new'
Continent Europeans found, had been long attended, from its own ancient
Days, by murder, slavery, and the poor fragments of a Magic irreparably
broken."


I have  heard  this passage interpreted to mean that some pre-existing
stain or taint has pre-disposed the land to murder and slavery -- something
about the place itself was going to cause those horrors no matter who lived
there. Rereading it now it seems to suggest that the murder and slavery
were brought by "the first Northmen" and the "Magic irreparably broken"
would be that of the original spirit of the land itself, or perhaps its
indigenous inhabitants.  Stig as some sort of "Jacobite" might be worthy of
our sympathy for the Pynchonian underdog pursuing a lost cause and victims
of "imperialism" as jbor observes, but Pynchon also seems to suggest that
Stig may be descended from those who brought murder and slavery to America,
who broke the native magic -- if so, Pynchon has created another fine
ambiguity here, undercutting reader expectations left and right.


Terrance (attributed):
>seems that we can't know exactly or
>definitively, it would amount to reading whip scars or reefers in GR

Yes, something like that.