M&D - Chapter 21 - Mason&Rebekah

[David Ewers]

I'm reading something similar, so you're probably reading it wrong.  But if there are enough of us...


On Apr 12, 2015, at 5:55 PM Jolly good day we are having, Jerome Park wrote:
> 
> 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? 
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> Save his relationship with his sons? 
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> Maybe I'm reading it all wrong. Trying to hard to make the book more than a metafictional masterpiece. Maybe. 
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> 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? 
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> All subjunctive, of course, had young Mason gone to his father, this might have been the conversation likely to result.
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> I don't think Pynchon has underestimated the reader here. There is something else to it. 
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> Tony Tanner says that P's use of the subjunctive is "an elegiac lament for the accelerating erosion of subjunctivity (225). 
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> A brilliant reader that Tony Tanner! 
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> 
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> 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?
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> Don't you feel a little underestimated as a reader? 
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> ;)
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