MDDM Ch. 75 The 'Forty-five

[Dave Monroe]

"'I imagine there's yet a bit of...resentment about?'
   "The Doctor snorts.  'The word you grope for id
Hatred, Sir,-- inveterate, inflexible Hatred.  The
'Forty-five lives on here, a Ghost from a Gothick
Novel, ubiquitous, frightfully shatter'd, exhibiting
gallons of a certain crimson Fluid,-- typickal of the
People, don't you see.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, p. 745)

Cf. ...

   "'Now then,' Mason's Phiz presently wreathed in
Delphic Vapors, 'that's if ye'll excuse me,--
counter-marching a bit, "the 'Forty-five"?  What would
you possibly know, let alone remember, pray, of that
fateful Year? ...

[...]

        "'When Night was Day
        And Day was Night
        Who, then, was the Jacobite?

   "'Eh?  Of course you were far, far too young to
appreciate those Grand Days of 'forty-five and -six,
all too elecktrickal with Passion,-- '
   "'Thee, Mason,-- a Jacobite?'"
   "'Anyone who was seventeen that summer, young
Dixon, was a Jacobite.'" (M&D, Ch. 31, pp. 311-2)

In 1745 the Scottish Jacobites (aka the Highlanders),
led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince
Charlie," the grandson of James II), rose up against
the British in a last attempt to restore the Stuarts
to the throne. The rebellion was quashed at the Battle
of Culloden in January 1746. This lost battle ended
the risings of the Jacobites, though Prince Charles
escaped and went into hiding for several months before
leaving Scotland; After 1745, the English banned the
Scottish Clan system, the kilt, many of the loved
Scottish traditions and were particularly harsh in the
punishment of holdouts.

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/alpha/f.html#45

The Jacobites were supporters of the claim to the
British throne of the deposed James II and his son
James, the "Old Pretender." Though a few of the old
Tories in England worked secretly for the Jacobite
cause, the chief centers of Jacobite resistance were
in Scotland and Ireland, and were supported, of
course, by the French, with whom the English, at the
time, were more or less continually at war. For sixty
years after the "Glorious Revolution" in 1688, there
were real or imaginary Jacobite plots, though there
were only two serious revolts, in 1715 and in 1745.
The "15," a rising under the "Old Pretender" in
Scotland and Northumberland, was an attempt to
overthrow the recent succession to the throne of the
Hanoverian George I. The "45" involved a much larger
rising of the Scottish Jacobite Highland chiefs under
"Bonnie Prince Charlie," Charles Edward Stuart, whose
army won several victories in Scotland and invaded
England -- ruled at the time by George II -- only to
be forced back and slaughtered at the battle of
Culloden, effectively ending the Jacobite cause
forever.

http://65.107.211.206/victorian/history/Jacobites.html

... in the aftermath of the defeat in Culloden in
1745, there was an unholy reign of terror throughout
the Highlands. Executions, deaths in prisons and
forced transportations of entire highland villages
followed. The pipes were not heard for over forty
years, the wearing of the tartan was forbidden and
entire estates were confiscated so that sheep could be
grazed on land that had once been home to families.
Things have never been the same.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9709&msg=20024&sort=date

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/extra/info.html#jacobite

And from William D. Atwill, Fire and Power: The
American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative
(Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994), Chapter 6, "Chemistry
and Colonialism Gone Ballistic: Apprehending the Mass
of Gravity's Rainbow," pp. 117-37 ...

The moment in which Pynchon wrote Gravity's Rainbow
was the moment of America's triumph in space and
America's disaster in Vietnam.... the litany of global
and domestic upheaval that bombarded the airwaves
would have had to find its way into the work. (p. 122)

... a postmodern version of the historical novel. 
George Lukacs, in The Historical Novel ... makes the
claim that the historical novel of today gives only an
abstract prehistory of ideas and not the concrete
prehistory of the people themselves, which is what the

historical novel in its classical period portrayed.
   As a result ... the distortion of historical
figures or movements is at times inevitable; there is
thus a falling away from that superb faithfulness 
to historical reality....  The direct and conceptual
relationship with the present which prevails today
reveals an immanent tendency to turn the past into a
parable of the present.... Gravity's Rainbow is, at
the very least, a text that finds the shape of
[Pynchon's] world formed by the Potsdam Conference in
much the same way that Scott located his in the battle
of Culloden. (p. 123)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0104&msg=54470&sort=date

... citing Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (trans.
Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell.  Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1963 [1937]), pp. 337-8 ...

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