MDDM Ch. 76 The Dark Ages upon Display

Tue Sep 10 20:10:41 CDT 2002

"'No one knows why, but he intends to go to the
Hebrides, to the furthest Isle, to view the Dark Ages
upon Display.'
   "'The uncomplicated People, laboring with their
primitive Tools,' gushes Mason, '-- the simplicity of
Faith, lo, its Time reborn.'
   "''Tis fascinating, this belief among you Men of
Science,' remarks Dr. J., 'that Time is ever more
simply transcended, the further one is willing to
journey away from London, to observe it.'
   "'Why, Mason here's done the very thing,' cries
Boswell.  'In America.  Ask him.'
   "Mason glowers, shaking his head.  'I've ascended,
descended, even condescended, and the List's not
ended,-- but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing,
thankee.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, pp. 745-6)

Cf. ...

"Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America
her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the
metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in
the restless Slumber of these Provinces and on
West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written
down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen, --
serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes,
for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise,
Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's
Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next
Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd
and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already
known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the
Continent, changing all from subjunctive to
declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities
that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away
from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by
one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that
is our home, and our Despair." (M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345) 

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html

The Hebrides

http://www.visithebrides.com/

Johnson: "That it is a very vile country, to be sure,
Sir" "Well, Sir! (replies the Scot, somewhat
mortified), God made it." Johnson: "Certainly he did;
but we must always remember that he made it for
Scotchmen, and comparisons are odious, Mr. S------;
but God made hell."  Piozzi: Anecdotes

http://www.samueljohnson.com/scotland.html#163

Johnson: "Seeing Scotland, Madam, is only seeing a
worse England. It is seeing the flower gradually fade
away to the naked stalk. Seeing the Hebrides, indeed,
is seeing quite a different scene."  Boswell: Life 

http://www.samueljohnson.com/scotland.html#261

Johnson: "The happiness of London is not to be
conceived but by those who have been in it. I will
venture to say, there is more learning and science
within the circumference of ten miles from where we
now sit, than in all the rest of the world." Boswell:
"The only disadvantage is the great distance at which
people live from one another." Johnson: "Yes, Sir, but
that is occasioned by the largeness of it, which is
the cause of all the other advantages." Boswell:
"Sometimes I have been in the humour of wishing to
retire to a desart." Johnson: "Sir, you have desart
enough in Scotland."  Boswell: Life

http://www.samueljohnson.com/scotland.html#77

http://www.samueljohnson.com/scotland.html

Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland (1775) ...

http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/journey.html

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2064

http://www.electricscotland.com/history/journey/index.htm

James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with
Samuel Johnson (1785) ...

http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/journal-selection.html

And see as well ...

http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~bosedit/

http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/052103.htm

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3644

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70560&sort=date

http://www.geocities.com/the_odyssey_group/johnson.html

"the further one is willing to journey away from
London"

>From Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England,
America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), "Introduction,"
pp. 1-17 ...

"... the literary 'New World' texts of Renaissance
England.  These texts--notably More's Utopia (1516),
Spenser's Fairie Queene (1590-96), and Shakespeare's
Tempest (1611)--prove more closely related than
critics have so far allowed ....  The most striking
similarity among these works, however, is their
setting: in each case they combine otherworldly poetry
and nation, and then direct them both toward the New
World, only by placing England, poetry, and
America--or rather by displacing them--Nowhere....  
But the purpose of Nowhere for More, Spenser, and
Shakespeare, I will argue, is ... to turn the Engliah
into imperialists by differentiating their otherworldy
potentiality from their otherworldy island: each
writer imagines the more appropriate setting for
England's immaterial value to be a literary no-place
that hlelps the English reader see the limitations of
a metrial investment in little England alone. 
Nonetheless, Nowhere represents as much a constraint
on these writers as a release.... these writers also
have little choice but to confine their expansionism
to an indirection variously conceived as
unworldliness, superstition, error, incapacity,
introversion, distraction, or disgrace--modes of
contrary idealization that I subsume under the larger
rubric ... of trifling." (pp. 6-7)

Cf. ...

Williams spoke of "certain metropolitan intellectuals"
who had inherited "a long contempt … of the peasant,
the boor, the rural clown.… How many socialists, for
example, have refused to pick up that settling
archival sentence about the 'idiocy of rural life'?"
(The City and the Country [sic], p. 36).

http://www.utoronto.ca/cius/HTMfiles/JUS/reviews/rev_lib-sov.htm

Williams, Raymond.  The Country and the City.
   New York: Oxford, 1975 [1973].

"this belief among you Men of science"

theory - 1592, "conception, mental scheme," from L.L.
theoria, from Gk. theoria "contemplation, speculation,
a looking at, things looked at," from theorein "to
consider, speculate, look at," from theoros
"spectator," from thea "a view" + horan "to see."
Sense of "principles or methods of a science or art
(rather than its practice)" is first recorded 1613.
That of "an explanation based on observation and
reasoning" is from 1638.

http://www.geocities.com/etymonline/t3etym.htm

>From James Clifford, "Notes on Theory and Travel,"
Inscriptions 5 (1989) ...

"The Greek term theorein: a practice of travel and
observation, a man sent by the polis to another city
to witness a religious ceremony. 'Theory' is a product
of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To
theorize, one leaves home. But like any act of travel,
theory begins and ends somewhere. In the case of the
Greek theorist the beginning and ending were one, the
home polis. This is not so simply true of traveling
theorists in the late twentieth century."

http://humwww.ucsc.edu/DivWeb/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/clifford.html

http://humwww.ucsc.edu/DivWeb/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/v5_top.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69632&sort=date

"Dr. J."

http://www.unc.edu/~lbrooks2/drj.html

And not only is this a nifty little lyric ...

"'I've ascended, descended, even condescended, and the
List's not ended,-- but haven't yet trans-cended a
blessed thing, thankee.'"

But it could well serve as the refrain to a Listal
anthem here, no?  Er, yes ...

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