The Ampersand and the Capital

[Rob Jackson]

On 08/11/2009, at 8:39 AM, Clement wrote:

> 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.

http://www.revue-textimage.com/04_a_la_lettre/chamerois1.html

Unfortunately my French isn't good enough to get much more than a  
general sense of the article, but the way that Chamerois traces the  
use of typographic effects through the various novels, and compares  
and contrasts how these effects both symbolise and embody central  
thematic and/or structural concerns, makes a strong case for his  
thesis on M&D.

It's interesting that if it was an 18th or 19th century novel or  
historical text as originally published, then the capitalisations  
wouldn't be unsettling at all, even to us as modern-day readers. It's  
what we expect from something written in that era; there is a natural  
connection between the text and its context; and so we factor the  
apparent oddnesses into our reading and accept them readily. At most,  
they might seem "quaint", but they don't interfere with the sense or  
meaning of the text in the slightest.

With M&D, however, Pynchon's subversions of contemporary typographic  
and writing conventions to emulate those of the prior era are  
unsettling precisely because of the disconnection between the text and  
its context. The inordinate and obviously loving care taken to alter  
the form and style of the novel, in order to make it seem as if it  
were written from within the historical moment it describes (or nearly  
thereabouts), brings to the very forefront of the reading experience  
those questions about the differences between events and their  
representation, about history as experienced, or witnessed, or  
remembered, and history as it's written down or related, which figure  
explicitly elsewhere within the narrative. We are constantly aware  
that a novel from the latter part of the 20th century wouldn't  
normally be written like this, that it didn't need to be written like  
this at all, and that it took an extraordinary and deliberate effort  
on the author's part to make it so perfectly and unnecessarily into  
something which it shouldn't be. As so often in GR also, the act of  
reading thereby becomes an acutely self-conscious one; the text  
doesn't allow us to suspend disbelief (willingly or otherwise) for  
longer than a moment or two before the rug's pulled out from under  
again, the clockwork mechanism's revealed, the fourth wall's torn  
down, and there we are and there the page is and we're forced to  
consider how the act of reading is a production or projection of  
meaning rather than merely its replication.

Pynchon's novels have always seemed to resonate with Continental  
readers and critics, and they in turn have often been far more  
perceptive and attuned to the works and their significance. I think  
that part of this has to do with the way that Pynchon has positioned  
himself over the decades as an outsider from the American cultural  
establishment, but I also think that this public stance is consistent  
with the perspectives adopted within the novels themselves. For much  
of the time there's a fish-out-of-water premise to the narrative  
protagonist's experience, whether it's an American adrift in England  
or Europe, Englishmen in the States, or the like ... Tracing the  
connections between Pynchon and Henry James along these lines might be  
an interesting topic to pursue.

best regards