dialectic-despair

[David Brodeur]

>Did anyone else find _Mason & Dixon_ tedious-going in places due to its
>insistence on 18th-century spelling and dialect? 

I just finished a second reading of Mason & Dixon and found that the
language was one of the great pleasures of the book. It's not, of course,
really 18th century, but a unique voice that Pynchon created for this novel.
He has a great deal of fun with the language, too, with amusing
"translations" of modern idiom, subtle subversions of our expectations of
18th century language, and other games.

Rereading M&D got me to thinking that each of Pynchon's novels has it's own
voice, appropriate to the setting(s) of the novel. It's just been less
noticeable with his earlier works because they're set closer to our own
period, but the language of Vineland is different from that of Gravity's
Rainbow, too. I think one of the problems I had with appreciating Vineland
was that the language (and setting) were too close to home. GR, on the other
hand, has this enticing 40's hipsterism to it, a collision of swagger and
nihilism reminiscent of old film noir and screwball comedies.