M & D and ATD, thematic homage, parallels, etc.

[Daniel Harper]

On Wednesday 25 April 2007 10:11, you wrote:

<snip>
>
> Pynchon is not exempt from this weakness. Much as I admire the passages
> Tore cites, they tell me more about Anglo-European bad conscience (not
> that it wasn't richly earned), and about the mythic power of *all* Eden
> stories, than about the Americas as a unique Last Blown Chance to be
> Better Than Human.

It's one of my pet peeves when preindustrial people are considered as angelic 
beings, or that their lifestyles or civilizations are treated as idyllic, but 
this is perhaps a bit unfair. Pynchon is largely a metafictional writer -- 
his characters and situations are generally not to be considered "real", but 
as representations of other fictional universes. In M&D the Native Americans 
(and America in general) seem to be a sort of extended metaphor for purity, 
for "innocent savagery" or whatever, but are not really intended to be "real" 
people. (Neither, for that matter, are Mason and Dixon "real" in the way that 
you or I or even Hamlet are real.)

To make a similar point with a nonhuman element of M&D, I don't think that 
Pynchon sees state lines as intrinsically evil elements the way they are 
portrayed in the novel. The Visto is a thematic element that has meaning only 
within the narrow viewpoint of the novel, not in the world around us. While 
it may seem strange to view characters in the same way, I think it's fruitful 
to view his personages as metafictional structures rather than as "people" in 
and of themselves.

Then again, I'm still wrapping my head around how to read Pynchon. So I could 
be _way_ off base. But that's my two cents for today.

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper
countermonkey.blogspot.com