The Ampersand and the Capital

[Michael Bailey]

Michel Ryckx wrote:
> <<In his historical novel Mason & Dixon (1997), Thomas Pynchon uses the
> very materiality of letters to convey some of his major preoccupations,
> and this in at least two ways. The ampersand on the cover plays on the
> opposition between curves and straight lines at the core of the novel,
> but also announces a deep interrogation on filiation which climaxes at
> the end of the book. The innumerable capital letters unsettle the
> rectilinear typography and, through the syntactic ambiguities they
> create, disrupt the very linearity of reading." >>
>

filiation in Wikipedia links to paternity, and Dictionary.com has
3 clusters of definitions including:

1.	the fact of being the child of a certain parent.
2.	descent as if from a parent; derivation.
3.	Law. the judicial determination of the paternity of a child, esp.
of one born out of wedlock.
4.	the relation of one thing to another from which it is derived.
5.	the act of filiating.
6.	the state of being filiated.
7.	an affiliated branch, as of a society.

I'd say M&D does indeed - the scenes with Mason and his father the baker,
for instance.

For those of us (me, for one) who don't read French , and are easily distracted,
we might coarsen the "interrogation of filiation" to "Hoosier Daddy?",
and of course
"the act of filiating" seems worthy of a discreet chortle - o tempora,
o mores...

On a more respectful plane of inquiry, the physicality of letters was certainly
an important part of V., as well, wasn't it?