MDDM Ch. 78 Longitude Tables

[jbor]

on 22/9/02 1:08 PM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

> "As a beneficiary of the old boys' network, Maskelyne
> always manages to be in the right place at the right
> time.  Mason is deeply resentful of his successes and
> sees himslef as far more deserving.  He concludes that
> Makselyne has abused and exploited him.  Mason is
> especially upset about Maskelyne's appointment to AR
> ....   Their relationship ends with a hateful
> exchange. (770-771)  In a great irony, Maskelyne
> edited Mason's corrections of Mayer's Lunar Tables in
> 1787, a year after Mason's death." (Clerc, Mason &
> Dixon & Pynchon, Ch. VI, p. 79)

I'm not sure that I read the scene as clear-cut as that. On the one hand the
narrator comments that  "[a]t this Cusp of vulnerability, Mason, with the
Exquisiteness of Picador, launch'd his Dart", this "cusp of vulnerability"
being Maskelyne's brief expulsion from the R.S. Council during 1783-4. But
in the actual exchange at The Mitre which is recounted in the text Mason
seems to blow up at Nev without any premeditation whatsoever:

    From an innocent discussion of the Great Meteor of the Summer previous,
    they abruptly surrender'd to Earthly Spite. (770.10)

I think that what prompts Mason's sarcasm and fury is the perceived slight
in Maskelyne's remark about the new planet having its "Radiant in Perseus",
which Chas interprets as a snide reference to Rebekah's ghost, and to what
Chas thinks Nev thinks of as nothing more than a quixotic obsession with a
long-dead wife (" ... would the Soul I seek, emerge and fall from a region
so attainted? Never.") Up until this point, even though he had been jealous
of and enraged by Maskelyne always being promoted ahead of him, I think
Mason had remained loyal and respectful to Maskelyne, and after returning to
England had even come to confide in him and regard him with affection. Just
before the episode the narrator poses the question: "Did he now include
among his Enemies Maskelyne?" (769.4) I'm not certain that he does, and that
at that moment in The Mitre he just snaps.

There's a lot in the chapter which leads up to this sudden outburst: Mason's
increasing solitude and despair after Dixon's death, and at his own father's
lack of acceptance and understanding; his supposed "Madness, which grows
ever less hopeful" (761.25); as well as the actual omen he saw through his
lens, the "fore-inklings of the dark Forces of Overthrow ... procession of
luminous Phantoms" (769.13,18), which Maskelyne fails to take seriously.
And, of course, the reminder of Rebekah's absence. I think that the abrupt
decision to take the whole family off to America (to try and ensure their
financial well-being there?) is a direct result of the estrangement with
Maskelyne, and Mary's bewilderment about the emigration is explained in
Chas's not mentioning the bust-up to her (761.28).

I suspect there might be a little bit more to this last chapter, and Mason's
death-bed vision of "a great single Engine, the size of a Continent"
(772.17), than a logarithmick solution to the problem of the Longitude.

best