re From Typology to Type

[jbor]

on 18/5/02 2:34 AM, Doug Millison at millison at online-journalist.com wrote:

> Thanks for passing that article along, Dave. Pynchon's typographical play
> in M&D could be seen as a conscious response to Sterne's,-- the dash, yes,
> and also the Capitalization of Certain Words.  The question has come up
> often, here in Pynchon-L, if the capitalized words follow any meaningful
> pattern. 

Generally speaking, it's the nouns (and certain adjective-noun collocations)
which are capitalised in _M&D_, in a similar manner to the capitalisation of
nouns in German, but also in emulation of 18th C. English style. (I have a
feeling that it had something to do with orthographic conventions associated
with the printing press.) Up until the late 7th C., when some Irish texts
begin to show evidence of word separation, all Western writing was scriptia
continua (i.e. no spaces or punctuation marks between the words) so perhaps
when capitals were introduced for names and important nouns they *were*
meant to act like speed bumps for the reader. The use of upper and lower
case letters together in the one script was in fact introduced by
Carolingian scholars (Germany-France, 8th C. to 10th C., under Emperor
Charlemagne), and they also began to codify a general European repertoire of
punctuation in their texts.

In _M&D_ it's not only the capital letters which hark back to the 18th C.
Pynchon often combines his punctuation marks, especially a comma, colon or
question mark followed by a dash, and this is a practice which had largely
been abandoned during the 20th C. And then there's the ampersand (which
doesn't crop up much at all in the actual text), use of ellipsis,
old-fashioned spelling (mainly "ick" for "ic"), and elision of the "e" in
regular past tense verbs (eg. "Eventually, Dick Montague's impersonations
fool'd no-one" etc.) In general terms, however, Pynchon plays around with
orthographic conventions and the mise-en-page (which is what Sterne is doing
in _Tristram Shandy_) in _GR_ and _V._ far more than he does in _M&D_. There
are a few elements of stylistic parody which recur in _M&D_, but there are
other typical features which he doesn't use (eg. there's no elongated "s"
that looks like an "f" without the cross-bar). He's definitely made
concessions to his 20th-21st C. audience: the text isn't difficult to read
at all. 

best

> Paranoid readers might suspect some sort of coded-message scheme
> (a la the Bible code that's been the subject of several books in recent
> years), while others might see Pynchon merely having fun with a convention
> of the novel's historical setting.
> 
> If, as this article suggests, Sterne "is making fun of the control exerted
> by predecessors who pretended to leave all the power in the hands of
> judicious readers but who, in fact, tried
> to drown out every single reader's own private and silent voice, he is
> showing how it is done and doing it in a way just a little more
> technologically advanced"  then what might Pynchon's play say?