MDDM Ch. 76 That Mandeville of Mohawks

[Dave Monroe]

   "'The Savages of America,' intones the Doctor, '--
what Powers do they possess, and how do they use
them?'  As if here, at the Edge of the World, they
might confide what no one would ever say aloud in
London,-- with Boswell a-bustle to get it all
scribbl'd down into his Quarto.
   "The abruptness of the Doctor's Question reminds
Mason of himself, addressing the Learned English Dog,
a dozen years ago...his mouth creeps upward at the
corners, almost achieving an Horizontal.  'Would that
my co-adjutor Mr. Dixon were here,' says Mason
(missing Dixon as he speaks), 'for the Magickal in all
its Occurences, to others of us how absent, was ever
his Subject....  Potions, Rain-Making, the undoing of
Enemies remote,-- that Mandeville of Mohawks would be
sure to enlighten you.  I can myself testify to little
beyond the giant Mounds that the Savages say they
guard as Curators, for some more distant Race of
Builders.  I have fail'd to observe more in them, than
their most impressive Size, tho' Mr. Dixon swears to
Coded Inscriptions, Purposive Lamination, and
Employment, unto the Present Day, by Agents Unknown of
Powers Invisible.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, p. 746)

Main Entry: quar·to 
Pronunciation: 'kwor-(")tO
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural quartos
Etymology: Latin, ablative of quartus fourth
Date: 1589
1 : the size of a piece of paper cut four from a
sheet; also : paper or a page of this size
2 : a book printed on quarto pages

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary


"addressing the Learned English Dog"

   "'There is something I must know,' Mason hoarsely
whispers, in the tone of a lover tormented by Doubts,
'-- Have you a soul, that is, are you a human Spirit,
re-incarnate as a Dog?'" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 22)


"that Mandeville of the Mohawks"

Jean de Mandeville (? - 1372?)

The author of a book of travels much read in the
Middle Ages, died probably in 1372. The writer
describes himself as an English knight born at St.
Albans. In 1322, on the feast of St. Michael, he set
out on a journey that took him first to Egypt ....  He
next visited Palestine, then, by way of India, also
the interior of Asia and China ....  After an absence
of thirty-four years he returned in 1356, and ...
wrote in Lüttich an account of his experiences and
observations. In the manuscripts 1372 is given as the
year of his death. Later investigation, however, made
it clear that the real author was Jean de Bourgoigne,
or à la Barbe, a physician from Lüttich, to whom
several medical works are also attributed. He really
lived for some time in Egypt, and during his sojourn
may have conceived the idea of describing a journey to
the Orient. Having visited no foreign country except
Egypt, he was compelled to make use of the
descriptions of others and to publish his compilation
under a pseudonym. He discloses, in the situations
borrowed often word for word from various authors, an
extraordinarily wide range of reading, and he
understood how to present his matter so attractively
that the work in manuscript and print had a wonderful
popularity.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09587b.htm

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1480) ...

http://www.romanization.com/books/mandeville/

http://www.iras.ucalgary.ca/~volk/sylvia/Mandeville.htm

ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext97/tosjm10.ttx

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=782

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/mandeville.html

Not, however, to be confused with ...

http://johnmandeville.net/


"Mounds"

"Over the crest and down to ford and then follow the
creek through a gap in the hills to another Stream,
where, in the angle of Confluence, its tip just
catching the first rays of the Sun, stands Capt.
Shelby's 'Mound.'
   "'Eeh!' cries Dixon.  'Why, 'tis a great Cone!'"
(M&D, Ch. 61, p. 598 ff.)

Reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon" ...

If readers accept that the analogy of narrative Loops
complementing and competing with the main "Line" of
the narrative is one useful way of following Mason and
Dixon, then chapter 61 quickly looms in prominence and
importance, for that is the chapter in which the two
surveyors investigate an Indian Mound "quite in the
projected path" of their proposed Line guided by one
of their party who knows the local territory, a
Welshman named Shelby.

[...]

It would be an oversimplification to label the
contrast between Line and Mound a contrast between
modern and ancient ways of knowing, science and
religion. A more accurate way to state the contrast
would be between heaven-centered vs. earth-centered
forms of knowledge, both ancient and modern....

[...]

Zhang associates these latter forces with "the true
inner shape, or Dragon [Shan], of the Land," while for
Dixon they represent Tellurick or earth-centered
forces, especially magnetism. In the Indian Mound
these forces find their most powerful centering, their
most direct contact and conflict with the different
energies embodied by the measuring of the Line. For
Pynchon, the Indian Mound and the Dragon Shan
represent not only ancient world views antithetical to
Enlightenment science, but are prophetic of how that
same science already contained within it anomalies
that could only be resolved with the invention in the
twentieth century of quantum physics, fractals, and
the sciences of chaos and "complex systems" combining
both linear and non-linear iterations. Hence we are
meant to see in the Mound's Vortex not a unique or
exceptional occurrence but an emblem for the infinite
number of narrative Vortices or alternative universes
already present in any Linear rendering of either
space or time. 

Pynchon's narrative also playfully raises questions
about the origins of the Mound---who built it and what
it signifies....

[...]

The Mound may also be read as a primary model of how
to do alternative cultural history. Mason's and
Dixon's training exemplifies not only the world of
Enlightenment science but also emerging
eighteenth-century views regarding how to understand
cultural history. The Enlightenment project sought to
define universal laws of the history of civilizations
comparable to those governing the physical world....

[...]

Such a vision of cultural history also inextricably
links the forces of market capitalism, colonialism,
and a sense of racial and national superiority....  If
Enlightenment reasoning led to the belief that the
right of personal liberty was "inalienable" for some,
for others it justified their being defined as aliens
and slaves. The strain of this contradiction shows
itself most clearly in Hegel's contradictory use of
his famous dialectic in constructing his theory of
comparative cultural history....

[...]

Of course, this Enlightenment cultural project had its
dissenters and other internal contradictions....

[...]

Yet it is too simple to say that Mason embodies the
Line's energies and Dixon the Mound's, though this is
partly true....  What has not yet been sufficiently
emphasized is how well this pairing allows Pynchon to
explore the cultural contradictions of the
Enlightenment embodied in each of his primary
characters and in the country most famously founded in
the name of Enlightenment truths, America itself.

[...]

In the end Pynchon's novel does not resolve the
conflict between the Enlightenment project and its
contradictions and alternatives, just as it does not
side with either Mason's or Dixon's world-views but
rather presents them both in all their complexity and
inter-relatedness. The novel is both Line and Loop,
Loops infinitely expanding within the narrative of the
Line....  Pynchon's deconstruction of Enlightenment
cultural studies as well as its natural sciences .... 
Moreover, just as Gravity's Rainbow proved so
stimulating in the late 1970s and 1980s to testing the
full range of possibilities in deconstruction as a
theory of reading, so will Mason and Dixon be one of
the crucial texts for testing the resources and
limitations of current "cultural studies" and
"postcolonial" critical theories....

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason2.html

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason.html


"more distant Race of Builders"

http://www.daniken.com/

http://www.daniken.com/e/biography.shtml

http://www.drury.edu/multinl/story.cfm?ID=1109&NLID=135

http://www.debunker.com/texts/vondanik.html

http://skepdic.com/vondanik.html


"Coded Inscriptions, Purposive Lamination, and
Employment, unto the Present Day, by Agents Unknown of
Powers Invisible"

   "'A marvel no one taught you this, Mr. Mason, for
there is a lengthy Knowledge of such things,--
according to which alternating Layers of different
Substances are ever a Sign of the intention to
Accumulate Force,-- not necessarily Electrical,
neither,-- perhaps, Captain, these Substances Mr.
Mason so disrespects may yet be suited to Forces more
Tellurick in nature, more attun'd, that is, to Death
and the slower Phenomena." (M&D, Ch. 61, p. 599)

Cf., e.g., not only V., Tristero, The Rocket, Them,
er, The Department of Justice, et al., but also ...

I recall watching Ervin type with four fingers and
mocking him mildly, followed by his quick retort: "It
isn't how fast you type, but the words you choose." He
went on to add, "I tend to use long words ..." ...

[...]

... he was extremely exacting about his writing
techniques: "You know, Bruce, those high school
biology texts with centerfold transparencies, first
the skeleton, and then the muscles...well this is the
technique I use for writing.' Don't ask me to explain
that statement, other than the reference to the
layers....

[...]

Ervin was not a paranoid!!! If anything, he had an
excellent handle on the maneuverings of "The Great
Society" and those cloak and dagger war mongers and
their cohorts who helped spin the great wheels....

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



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