M&D - Chapter 19-21 - The Father

[Jerome Park]

Why cast Mason's dreams in the language of money? His Investment in
Precious Sleep yielded not a "Farthing's Dividend"The syntax is rather odd
and puzzling. But putting that aside for the moment, the idea that an
investment in Sleep had the potential to produce a dividend implies that
Mason's Precious Sleep does not belong to him, but to some company that
pays dividends, to a contract. So in working for whomever or whatever he
works for, Mason has invested not only his time, but his sleep and his
dreams. That money, in the paradoxical operations outlined by Georg Simmel,
liberates Mason from his Father's Bread, though not from his Father's
leather to the bone, here now figuratively applied to his figuring and
calculating the lost days,"it minimizes exceptional, incommensurable
achievements in art and love." The global currency (Scientific Time and
Financial Derivatives), as the Landlord suggests (192), is based on
a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth (The Book of
Revelations"), one that resists critical reflection because it is the
special gift of a spiritual and cognitive elite. These gods of Science and
Finance conspire with the "Walpole-Gang[s]" to rob the People of their
Time.

Mason takes the melancholic humorist's position, Swiftian in its
misanthropic analysis of Language, Love, and Death in the Western World.


On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Veblen and Weber, Marx, are on the books that Pynchon may have read and
> been influenced by, What about Georg Simmel? _The Philosophy of Money_,
> maybe?
>
> Here, from that Online Encyclopedia we all love is a bit worth
> considering:
>
> Simmel believed people created value by making objects, then separating
> themselves from those objects and then trying to overcome that distance. He
> found that objects that were too close were not considered valuable and
> objects that were too far away for people to obtain were also not
> considered valuable. What was also considered in determining value was the
> scarcity, time, sacrifice, and difficulties involved in getting objects. In
> the pre-modern era, beginning with bartering, different systems of exchange
> for goods and services allowed for the existence of incomparable systems of
> value (land, food, honor, love, etc.). With the advent of a universal
> currency as an intermediary, these systems became reconcilable, as
> everything tended to become expressible in a single quantifiable metric:
> its monetary cost.
>
> Simmel's outlook, while gloomy, is not wholly negative. As money and
> transactions increase, the independence of an individual decreases as he or
> she is drawn into a holistic network of exchange governed by quantifiable
> monetary value. Paradoxically, this results in greater potential freedom of
> choice for the individual, as money can be deployed toward any possible
> goal, even if most people's sheer lack of money renders that potential
> quite low much of the time. Money's homogenizing nature encourages greater
> liberty and equality, even as it minimizes exceptional, incommensurable
> achievements in art and love.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Money
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 8:36 PM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Why that turn in the common phrase? So Pynchon writes that Mason
>> "invested Precious Sleep" and don't we expect that Mason *Lost* or *Wasted*
>> or *Spent* Precious *Time* and not that he Invested Precious Sleep. Mason
>> did not invest Time or Money. Time is money and money time. But Sleep is
>> Precious and is invested when one loses it, wastes it, spends it by not
>> sleeping. Hamlet would like this riddle. Had he, when a child who posed
>> questions about the World wasted his father's time/money? What good the
>> education the Father spent his time/money on if the Son can't explain the
>> the theft of days to the boys in the Pub?
>>
>> The Theory of the Leisure Class
>>
>> AND
>>
>> What Money Wants.
>>
>> http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21847
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 6:43 AM, Elisabeth Romberg <eromberg at mac.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> There is a bit of role reversal at the bottom of page 191, betwixt Mason
>>> and his father.
>>> «He now began to quiz himself insomniac with this, wond’ring if his
>>> father had struggled thus with Mason’s own earlier questions about the
>>> World. He invested Precious Sleep in the Question, and saw not a Farthing’s
>>> Dividend"»
>>>
>>>
>>> > 30. mar. 2015 kl. 20.48 skrev Elisabeth Romberg <eromberg at mac.com>:
>>> >
>>> > This chapter is a real close up on Mason. From the shoe-buckle to
>>> internal dialogue and memories of his father.
>>> > On page 191 there are two hints that lead us to think Mason
>>> (regularly?) took a beating from his father, right?
>>> >
>>> > But Leather and Bone? Should it not’ve said Leather and Flesh?
>>> >
>>> > -
>>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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