MDDM "Pynchon's overarching concern with international human commerce"

[Doug Millison]

"[...] <16> The defining frame of the South African scene, concentrically
replicating Mason and Dixon's first meeting at a London hanging, and
defining the attributes of all their other loci, is the gallows and
slavery, which in turn frame Pynchon's overarching concern with
international human commerce, "for Commerce without Slavery is unthinkable,
whilst Slavery must ever include, as an essential Term, the Gallows,--
Slavery without the Gallows being as hollow and Waste a Proceeding, as a
Crusade without a Cross" (108). The Christian reference, though on the
surface only a simile (like Paul's), is remarkably apt when the imagery of
crucifixion as a rallying cry of international military action is
superimposed upon the institution of slave commerce. Death as but another
form of Christian commerce -- Calvin's "diabolical" exchange of flesh for
spirit and vice versa -- works as a potent symbol, and part of its potency
is the reassurance that it is a redemptive death one seeks to buy, one
which guarantees to crusader and trader alike the gift of eternal life.
Instead of redemption, however, what is created is, as Mason finds when
reflecting on South Africa's slavery, a "Collective Ghost" incorporating
all the "Wrongs" inflicted on the Slaves and, "propitiated, Day to Day, via
the Company's merciless Priesthoods," which eventually "brings all but the
hardiest souls sooner or later to consider the Primary Questions more or
less undiluted," leading to as high a suicide rate among Whites as Blacks
(68).

[...] <25> Throughout, the validity of these stories, of or by Mason and
Dixon and the Reverend, is constantly in doubt, but they nevertheless offer
a very real alternative to "poor cold Chronologies," reverting rather to
the developmental and evolutionary value of the preternatural "Tale," as
opposed to supernatural History. In defending his rendition of the
all-too-familiar "family story" in which Dixon frees slaves from a seller,
the Reverend stipulates that such tales must be "perfected in the hellish
Forge of Domestick Recension, generation 'pon generation, till what
survives is the pure truth" (695). Plugged into his theory of history (and
in turn plugged into the role of Christ's resurrection within Western
history), Dixon's mosaic tale becomes part of a quasi-biblical "common Duty
of Remembering" which requires fantastic events which inhabit the communal
memory of humanity -- "how we dream'd of, and were mistaken in, each
other." Thus, the purpose these tales, saved from their European
pre-occupation in Europe and its death-kingdoms of the South, is
"resurrected" here by Pynchon as a controlling motif through which
quotidian dream-scapes can, if not occupy, be at least radically summoned
into "real" earth-bound, enclosed, and circumscribed human experience. The
Native Americans and other southern races, undreamed of by us, through the
extravagance of our violent and sexualized "occupations" (marveling that we
sell them guns to shoot us with), end up in turn occupying our dreams, our
repeated "Fears" (697), our occluded times and places, including within
them the Christian dream of reunion with loved ones in the bodily
resurrection. More immediately, Mason's Line is replaced by the tangle of
"lines" which he himself casts -- his sons, the final "cast" of the novel
-- who are, like himself, the progenitors of and participants in "a
Mobility that is to be." One could call this "Pynchon's Dispensation,"
incorporating all that came before into this future Mobility, even as we
try to repress -- forget -- these other histories of oppression, death, and
ideology, by having them occupy a non-linear vortex of ever-present
storytelling tangential to our own violent past and ominous future [18].


from:
Haunting and Hunting: Bodily Resurrection and the Occupation of History in
Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
Justin Scott Coe

http://www.reconstruction.ws/021/Haunting.htm