M&D - Chapter 21 - Mason&Rebekah

[Jerome Park]

To continue....in addition to Tanner's brilliant readings of what he calls
The American Mystery, there are other readers who have anchored Pynchon to
the American Romance, including, one of my favorites, found in that Pynchon
Cambridge Companion, Amy J. Elias's reading, "History".

So, although it seems that Pynchon has rubbed our noses in what Brian
McHale might call our "Modernist Reading" of Mason's imagined dialogue with
his father, the fact that he inserts that sentence to emphasize the
subjunctive may not be a meta-fictional rub, but something else, something
Romantic, even Sublime.

On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 8:55 PM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Continuing my riff...vamp...on Pynchon's subjunctives and  metafictional
> games and why I suspect Pynchon is up to so much more than proving that he
> can do what has been done a thousand times since Chaucer, I want to add
> that Mason is not to be dismissed as a melancholic and guilty soul who has
> serious issues with Death and his Father(s). Early in the novel, Dixon,
> ironically, reminds Mason that they are scientific men and that the days
> must ever run in a single direction irreclaimable.
>
> And, the pathos of these chapters, the sentimental parody, yes, of
> romantic loss of childhood inhibitions that once made so natural the bond
> of boys to fathers, of Mason to his, though it spoiled early and is now
> lost, of his sons to his surrogates...and...and...
>
> but if days are reclaimable, if Newton's machine may be jammed yet by a
> miracle, a fancy....might not the dialogue that Mason has with his father,
> yet, by grace, by Nature, and her chaotic evolution against the day, save
> him if not their relationship?
>
> Save his relationship with his sons?
>
> Maybe I'm reading it all wrong. Trying to hard to make the book more than
> a metafictional masterpiece. Maybe.
>
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 2:35 PM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Tanner, Tony. The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to
>> DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000,  242pp., ISBN: 0521783747
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> In this example the hypothetical or subjunctive dialogue is only a
>>> paragraph. And there it is, right there, on the same page. Had he, instead,
>>> would have...
>>>
>>> Why rub it in?
>>>
>>> All subjunctive, of course, *had *young Mason gone to his father, this *might
>>> have been* the conversation likely to result.
>>>
>>> I don't think Pynchon has underestimated the reader here. There is
>>> something else to it.
>>>
>>> Tony Tanner says that P's use of the subjunctive is "an elegiac lament
>>> for the accelerating erosion of subjunctivity (225).
>>>
>>> A brilliant reader that Tony Tanner!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 1:13 PM, Elisabeth Romberg <eromberg at mac.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Next paragraph, an imagined dialogue between Mason and his father as
>>>> Jerome points out. Do you agree, though, that the last sentence: «All
>>>> subjunctive, of course, *had *young Mason gone to his father, this *might
>>>> have been* the conversation likely to result.» is over the top. I mean
>>>> it’s not as if we’ve forgotten it was imaginary from the start?
>>>>
>>>> Don't you feel a little underestimated as a reader?
>>>>
>>>> ;)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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