MD3PAD 343-345

[David Casseres]

On 5/13/06, mikebailey at speakeasy.net <mikebailey at speakeasy.net> wrote:

> Mason is next to speak after the paragraph that begins, "Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream?"

This is on page 345.  That paragraph is remarkable to me for its
resonance with one of my favorite bits in GR.

Here is GR:

"A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a
topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked
on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among
the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling
like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives?
Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of
desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction
or the mining -- wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that
sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows
up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas
Markets.... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the
outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down
and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his
slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood
with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go
in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the
hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis
and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death,
as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe.
Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and
down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all
its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those
cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.... No word ever gets
back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no
matter how dirty, how animal it gets...." (GR 317)

And here is M&D:

"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, 345)

The GR passage is so physical and political, and the M&D passage so
metaphysical, yet they are about the very same thing, the mechanisms
and motives of the projection of the European way (the Grid, the
ravaging, the Christianity and all) onto the rest of the world,
especially those parts not already mapped to another grid or network.
Each announces a principal theme of its respective book: the genocide
of subject peoples, and the imposition of straight lines upon the
natural land.  The G&R passage portrays the sheer animal predation of
the colonist, while the M&D passage is about the
metaphysical/intellectual aspiration of that colonist's earlier
kinsman.

Has some important change occurred between the America of the 18th
century, and the Africa of the 20th?  Pynchon is probably not
addressing such a question, but it arises nonetheless.  When I discuss
Mason & Dixon with people who loved Gravity's Rainbow but stopped
there, I tell them M&D illuminates GR, like a floodlight, like a monk
with a fine paintbrush, like the sun lining up with the standing
stones.  The two books should really be read in tandem.