The Ampersand and the Capital

[Clément Lévy]

I read Gilles Chamerois's article, and I found it very good. For him,  
the story of the cover's ampersand can be seen as the result of the  
progressive knotting into (I'm quoting GR's first page) the great  
problems that Pynchon's fictions represent. Filiation, and European  
settlement in America, for _Mason & Dixon_. Gilles quotes Derrida,  
Henri Meschonnic and Marie-José Mondzain, on text and picture. So  
he's quoting very well known authors or philosophers who wrote on  
difficult subjects, and their works help him give some new insights  
on _Mason & Dixon_, as a literary work and as a typographical object.

I must also tell you guys that Gilles Chamerois gratefully and  
sincerely acknowledges his debt to the Pynchon-List contributors, for  
providing him (in the archive, a wonderful treasure vault) with very  
good data on the publication of MD (on the first page of his essay).

And Gilles's French is both clear and beautiful. He did a great job.  
Thank you Michel, for linking us to this paper!

Clément

Le 7 nov. 09 à 01:58, Michel Ryckx a écrit :

> http://www.revue-textimage.com/04_a_la_lettre/chamerois1.html
>
> French article by Gilles Chamerois (organiser of the G.R.A.A.T.  
> conference on Against the Day).
>
> Resume in English:
>
> "The ampersand and the capital: the letter and its meanders in  
> Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
>
> 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."
>
> Michel.
>
>