The Marraige of Maule & Pyncheon (Pynchon's mesmeric process)

[Robin Landseadel]

Looks like "We" is back.
On Sep 3, 2010, at 7:09 PM, Dave Williams wrote:

> We doubt research into Pynchon & Co. and the family heretics will  
> produce anything more than shades of gray. Pynchon, like Hawthorne,  
> uses biographical and historical material, not to write biography or  
> history, or even autobiography, but romance.
>
> We might consider how the romance, HSG, influenced Pynchon. How does  
> the marriage work? Photography? The mirror? Is Pynchon now, mingled  
> with Maule, looking into the mirror, the Evil Genius?
>
> We have already hinted, that it is not our purpose to trace down the  
> history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the  
> House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how  
> the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house  
> itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim looking-glass  
> used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within  
> its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected there, -- the  
> old colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of  
> antique babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or  
> manly prime, or saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the  
> secret of that mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and  
> transfer its revelations to our page. But there was a story, for  
> which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity  
> of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking- 
> glass, and that, by what
> appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its  
> inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had  
> shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier  
> hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of  
> life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed, long kept  
> itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the  
> wizard Maule; the curse, which the latter flung from his scaffold,  
> was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become  
> a part of the Pyncheon inheritance.
>
> To the thoughtful mind, there will be no tinge of superstition in  
> what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead  
> progenitor -- perhaps as a portion of his own punishment -- is often  
> doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family.
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