summing up Re: MDDM hist. refs re non-Intervention, W & G & Martha

[Doug Millison]

Terrance

>Are the novel's "historical" characters to be given some sort of litmus
>test to determine where they stood on the issues surrounding slavery?
>Why didn't they know better? Why did they act so inconsistently? How
>about..., the religious....
'

"Litmus test" is not a term I would choose, but the way Pynchon blends
history and fiction in M&D seems to invite comparisons between now and
then, and to differentiate between the stories that different sources tell
us about "then".

You've probably read this paper, if not it's worth reading; Bill Millard
may still be a Pynchon-L subscriber; one bit of it seems pertinent to this
particular discussion:

http://www.columbia.edu/~wbm1/snovian.html
Ducking the Snovian Disjunction:
The 'both/and' logic of Mason & Dixon
Bill Millard
Editor, 21stC, Columbia University
Ph.D. candidate, English and American literature, Rutgers University
Presented at International Pynchon Week, London, June 12, 1998

[...] What are we to make, then, of two resonant passages on historical
method and credibility at the outset of the chapter? We encounter first the
epigraph from Cherrycoke's Christ and History favoring a multiplicity of
narratives, since "Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers" and history's
"Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy,
and Taproom Wit"; then, in the heated LeSpark family debate on the same
topic, the rather Rortean assertion by young Ethelmer that


Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in
Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within
the reach of anyone in Power,-- who need but touch her, and all her Credit
is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be
tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters,
Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide
her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep
her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government. (350)

This practical skepticism toward truth claims has much to commend it--so
much so that it is easy to overlook its source. Ethelmer consistently
raises skeptical and heretical points of view throughout the frame
narrative, but he is consistently checked by maturer family authority. His
unusual name puns on the chemical ethyl mercaptan, a harsh-smelling
sulfur-based solvent used to break the structural bonds of proteins2; his
whipper-snapperish skepticism, while eloquent and rousing, is a bit much to
take. He treads close to blasphemy with a joke about history and
Christianity, offensive to his host Wade LeSpark and thus detrimental to
the bonds of family:


"Brae, your Cousin proceeds unerringly to the Despair at the core of
History,-- and the Hope. As Savages commemorate their great Hunts with
Dancing, so History is the Dance of our Hunt for Christ, and how we have
far'd. If it is undeniably so that he rose from the Dead, then the Event is
taken into History, and History is redeem'd from the service of Darkness,--
with all the secular Consequences, flowing from that one Event, design'd
and will'd to occur."
"Including ev'ry Crusade, Inquisition, Sectarian War, the millions of
lives, the seas of blood," comments Ethelmer. "What happen'd? He liked it
so much being dead that He couldn't wait to come back and share it with
ev'rybody else?"
"Sir." Mr. LeSpark upon his feet. "Save that for your next Discussion with
others of comparable wisdom. In this house we are simple folk, and must
labor to find much amusement in Joaks about the Savior."
Ethelmer bows. "Temporarily out of touch with my Brain," he mumbles,
"Sorry, ev'rybody. Sir, Reverend, Sir." (75-76)

A younger Pynchon might have given the wiseassed youth a better outcome in
this exchange, or at least a parting shot, but here Ethelmer's pungent
irreverence must bow to decorum. Later, when his courtship of Tenebrae,
after one promising moment as they read the Ghastly Fop together (526-529),
comes to nothing (as reflected in his musical lament "Say, Mister
Fahrenheit" at the end of Chapter 55 [552-553]), it becomes difficult to
take him with much seriousness. But if Ethelmer is a clown figure, a foil,
and in the terms of rhetorical theory an eiron, his undeniably strong
rhetoric about the corruption of official history, like Cherrycoke's,
presents an interpretive conundrum. These passages condemning monopolies on
truth have the ring of truth, yet they are voiced by characters hardly
associated with truthtelling. Is Pynchon ironizing the statements and
encouraging their mockery, or is he working in the tradition of jesters
from Petronius Arbiter to Lear's Fool to Twain to Lenny Bruce, licensing
the speaking of truth to power under the safe guise of comedy? The line
between these alternatives would seem consequential indeed, but the reader
lacks the stars and sector that would ensure the straightness of such a
Visto.

Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Irony distinguishes between its stable forms,
which leave little doubt about an eiron's unreliability and cement an
agreement between the sender and receiver of an ironic message that the
real message conveyed is antithetical to the eiron's expressed message, and
unstable irony, where no such agreement is possible. The superimposition of
incompatible interpretive frameworks is a powerful way to produce the
disorientations of unstable irony, and when Pynchon executes this operation
in the very passages that purport to deliver conclusions about rationality
itself, the effort to identify true or false meaning must come to a halt.
If the text can have meaning within several interpretive schemes or
language-games, yet those systems cancel each other out, meaning itself may
not be the point. Like Wittgenstein's famous drawing in Philosophical
Investigations (IIxi [194e]) that can be viewed in one aspect as a rabbit,
in another as a duck, but never simultaneously under both aspects--the
visual analogue of textual aporia--Pynchon's irresolvable positions
regarding the accessibility of truth can lead to a host of unanswerable or
meaningless questions, or to a more appropriate question: whether what this
language is really for is something beyond the delivery of messages. The
functions of language can go beyond purposive use to include
noncommunicative experiences, as Wittgenstein compared to "an engine
idling, not... doing work" (Wittgenstein 132 [51e], Guetti 44) In this
spirit, I believe Pynchon's moments of aporia gesture toward meanings but
refuse to mean, instead evoking a koan-like meta-proposition that the
sanest thing one can do with a Line is to occupy both sides of it [...] "


For me, Pynchon manages to communicate enough of the pain, suffering,
despair that humans feel when victimized by other individuals or systems to
move beyond a static koan, however  -- the Buddhist tradition that uses the
koan as a way of knowing is also, after all, known for its compassion and
sensitivity to the suffering of others.