M&D Deep Duck 7-9: Why doesn't Mason sleep with Austra?

Tue Feb 3 10:51:22 CST 2015

To me Mason & Dixon is historical fiction - a novel - but probably more specifically or accurately categorized as “historical metafiction” or  “historiographic metafiction.”  Books like this investigate the “culture” of the past - what we can “know,”  or “not know” or  

**  According to Hutcheon, in "A Poetics of Postmodernism", works of historiographic metafiction are "those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages".[1] Historiographic metafiction is a quintessentially postmodern art form, with a reliance upon textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization. **  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiographic_metafiction

 Doctorow expanded the genre greatly when he wrote Ragtime (pub. 1975) which included Freud and Jung taking a little trip through the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island.  I suppose that kind of invention had been done before 1975,  but Doctorow took it way further.  Rather than just the dry “facts” and details of history books,  “Ragtime” looked at the social history - so there were a lot of archetypes and allusions and metaphors and other tropes involved in his telling the story of the family in New Rochelle - actually, imo,  the book is marvelous history in that it presents the ways that the day’s people and events were interwoven in the lives of the people.   Doctorow did quite a lot of research.  There was a reason for that scene - 

Lots of books like this -  Salman Rushdie,  Umberto Eco,  Orhan Pamuk,  John Fowles, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro  

Same with M&D - the "setting” is way more than some kind of “background” - it’s thoroughly interwoven into the lives of the characters.  The history (a whole ’nother definition)  is important in this novel!  Without the history we have almost zip.   The whole narrative is thoroughly immersed with historically verifiable people, places, events, etc.  The thing is that Pynchon just uses them in different contexts and with a different point of view to come to conclusions which are emphasized though his imaginary episodes.  -  

The question becomes “why” did Pynchon use non-historical scenes the way he did? - Why did Gabriel Garcia Marquez use pig tails and ice machines in 100 Years of Solitude?  The fantastical scenes are pointing out something about something - the culture clash in Garcia’s book -  the "lunacy" of putting a grid on a globe in M&D -  lots more there - 

[In M&D] …** The dichotomy between stories and facts is one of the novel’s principal motifs and is manifest in the text’s [M&D] narrative architecture and thematic system. Implicit in this central contrast is the issue of what is and what should be, or more precisely, what should have been. Mason & Dixon is filled with alternative histories and alternative worlds.** 
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/6492/Mason_Dixon_Thesis.pdf;jsessionid=16C1F24073869C3A6B8F5FFF4A383F46?sequence=5   (a Senior thesis - "Discursive Life in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon")

If you’re interested in the workings of historiographical metafiction vs history,  especially in the light of post-modernism,  this site is pretty good: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/Hutcheon_outline.html

Becky 

> On Feb 2, 2015, at 2:29 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> 
> I apologize for the long-winded, rambling nature of this post. Just to fill the silence …
> 
> 
> M&D isn't a historical novel, in the sense that Pynchon's not out to recreate as faithfully as possible an event in time. He does seem to have very different attitudes towards math and science, on the one hand, and history on the other. He would never knowingly misrepresent, for creative purposes, math or physics – he knows how to double-check his facts. He also conducts rigorous historical research. I'm sure that not only did he thoroughly read and re-read Mason's sea-log, but he must have (no way to confirm this, but I still feel absolutely, adamantly certain)taken all the nautical notations therein, to reconstruct, day by day, the Seahorse's progress, including the likely day it crossed the Equator. Given what he knew, he must have found it plausible that the Seahorse "could" have crossed during the equinox, resulting in Cherrycoke's lack of shadow. 
> 
> He must also have researched thoroughly the culture in Cape Town in this period, and felt comfortable describing the sexual and racial situation in a somewhat humorous tone (certainly compared to Mondaugen’s Story).
> 
> My read (which could be a misread, I acknowledge) is this:
> 
> Mason and Dixon take their meals at the Vroom household, which consists of Cornelius, a comically conservative and clueless Burgher, kind of an Archie Bunker of his time and place, and his sex-starved wife and daughters. In addition, there's the slave-girl Austra. Everyone's quick to write Dixon off as suitable for, presumably marriage, but also sex. He's happy to go "native," like a current-day yuppie/hipster/gentrifier, hanging with the locals and raving over their cuisine. Mason, though, is fair game for the wife and daughters, who all but rape him, though the daughters seem also to maybe want to marry him. One night Austra appears in his bed. She tells him that her mistress (Joanna) has sent her there so that he can impregnate her – the lighter-skinned baby fetching a higher price in the slave market. She tells him that Joanna and her daughters have been throwing themselves at him just to keep him horny so that he'll have sex with her.  In fact, she's the only one who will actually have sex with him. Mason, horrified by this commercialization of Austra's sexuality, demurs. Eventually, he starts sleeping with Joanna (at least I think so. Am I wrong there?). Austra herself is very matter-of-fact about the scheme, noting that white women are forced to bear excessive numbers of children merely to please their husbands' vanity.
> 
> OK, so there are lots of scholarly papers and less-scholarly articles about the position of slaves in that time and place. I’ve skimmed through various sources (many of which use letters and court-proceedings of the day), and though much of it is contradictory, there's general agreement that slaves were mostly imported, originally from West Africa, then from East Africa, but also from India and other parts of Asia. There weren't the large-scale plantations that existed in places like the West Indies. Most households, even poorer ones, had at least one slave, but few of the wealthiest had all that many, and masters and slaves tended to live in the same house. Various sources have somewhat contradictory info:  that inter-racial sex was criminalized, that the VOC (Dutch East India Company) ran its own slave-brothels, and that in 1766, a law forbidding the sale of mixed-race slave children fathered by Christians was enacted. Men, both free-white and enslaved – out-numbered women 4-1. Mostly male slaves were imported by the VOC, and the ranks of white men were swelled by visiting sailors and other VOC employees. White women, being in demand, were quickly married off, sometimes as young as 13 years of age. 
> 
> So The Vroom girls probably wouldn't have been single, and lighter-skinned slave kids were probably pretty common. Joanna certainly didn't need to recruit Mason into impregnating her slave, given the abundance of unattached white men available for the task.
> 
> All of this casts some doubt on Austra's explanation for her presence in Mason's bed. Is she an unreliable narrator? What exactly is Pynchon doing here? Why wouldn't stodgy Mason simply sleep with Austra, to avoid entanglements with Cornelius over his women?
> 
> Pynchon doesn't want Mason, as a good-guy protagonist, to be the archetypical European colonialist, feeling he has a right to the bodies of indigenous women in Africa and the Americas. Dixon's out there canoodling with women of various races on (we're left to surmise) some sort of non-commodified basis. Mason is too uptight to do the same, but he refuses to play the Colonialist card. Reading this, it struck me as highly unlikely that a man like Mason wouldn't bed down an offered slave. Slavery was legal in Britain at the time, though of different character than that of the colonies. It's an ahistorical rendering of his likely behavior (well, I think so). Pynchon's not trying to be accurate here. He's making it clear that Mason (and Dixon), a-historically or not, are NOT colonialists. They're Men of Science, divorced, in some sense, from history and culture. But can anyone really be that? As the Tom Lehrer song says: "Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
> 
> Can any author get away with portraying a purported good guy as harboring the racism of his time, without appearing somewhat racist himself? There was a good discussion here a few years back about whether or not Raymond Chandler himself was racist, given the casual racism he depicts in his books. It's hard to imagine Pynchon doing anything but taking the author-ially easy way out of this dilemma.
> 
> LK
> 
> A couple of sources:
> 
> http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/modules/lesson7/lesson7.php?s=11
> 
> http://www.sahistory.org.za/south-africa-1652-1806/history-slavery-and-early-colonisation-sa
> 
> 
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> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l