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

Wed Feb 4 16:17:44 CST 2015

Mark, I doubt that the whole of chapter 7 or the Austra episode is told by
Cherrycoke. Do you think the matter of erections is something Mason would
mention to the Reverend or, if he did, the Reverend to his audience?

I think one of the more interesting questions in reading this, yes
historical, novel – it's as historical in my eyes as Wolf Hall or Master
and Commander –  is who is telling what – where are the lines between
Cherrycoke's narrative and that of storyteller who tells us about the
unreliable narrator's story.

2015-02-04 22:38 GMT+01:00 David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net>:

> On Feb 2, 2015, at 2:29 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> <kelber at mindspring.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I apologize for the long-winded, rambling nature of this post. Just to
> fill the silence …
>
>
> Long-winded and rambling; perfect for a sea voyage...
>
> > 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.
>
>
> I think that, given that it's being related by the Reverend (a
> storyteller, not a scientist, and prone to be rhetorically metaphorical, or
> vice versa?), and considering all the too-good-to-pass-up lines connecting
> solar and soul-ar foci, I'm inclined to give some latitude here.   By
> traveling through the tropics, they would indeed have had that shadowless
> day; maybe whether or not it was also the same day they crossed the equator
> isn't as important as shadowlessness being an equatorial phenomena,
> impossible to experience in Europe (or North America, or Cape Town, for
> that matter).
>
> > 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).
>
>
> Funny how the V.O.C. man basically refers to Cape Town as a ship at sea,
> just as we're chewing on all the madness and bizarre rituals.
> Speaking of which...
>
> A Crackpot Earth-As-Battery Theory, Presenting Mason's South-African Siren
> Singalong as Potentially-Catalytic Function:
> I think it's safe to say that M-& D-'s drama is part of a much larger play
> (like the Colonies in the 7-Years' War?).  It seems to me that the same
> play is going on in all of Mr. Pynchon's books.  To me this play has
> something (loosely and way broadly put...) to do with the Machining of the
> earth.  In it (at least the way I imagine it), 'They' would be the human
> toadies for a force I loosely associate with an inorganic (mineral,
> crystal, synthetic...) "will",  acting in some unfathomable [fluid
> situation] that is simply not scaled to human comprehension.  But I also
> get that there's a 'They'-ness, and we all got at least some 'Them' in Us,
> scaled to us....
> Even though 'They' (the human 'They', that is, us with the most 'Them' in
> them...) appear to possess access to more power or powers than the rest of
> Us, 'They' - being traitors, of course, and toadies of forces that will one
> day come for 'Them' - come off as the smallest fish of all, relative to
> pond volume.  At least to me they do.  So indulging the notion of the Earth
> as something that might fluctuate between organic and inorganic
> ascendencies (and perhaps the idea is that the tide is going out for Our
> side...) could the Northern and Southern hemispheres be seen by the
> machining forces as Terminals of a sort of earth-battery that - by some
> volatile mixture of opposites (just like M-& D-!) animates trade (slavery
> is perfect for that!), requiring and enabling the 'gridding' of the organic
> sphere ( a process continuing now, on the microscopic level...) thereby
> accelerating the exploration for, and mining and the consumption of organic
> compounds by inorganic machines, and the synthesizing of organic compounds
> into inorganic forms....?  Today's Death-culture is Tomorrow's Robot Fuel,
> or something like that?  Maybe Mason doesn't sleep with Austra because, on
> some obscure level, he knows.
>
> BUT... given all that, maybe the hope is that some consequences, like the
> Revolutionary effect of the Seven Years' War to The Crown, are Unforeseen?
> So tilt at windmills, or be a luddite, or join some probably-doomed
> Counterforce, because One Never Knows, Do One....?
>
> By the way; I don't know about sub-Saharan Africa, but some cultures
> equate the color white with death and decay.  I'm not sure how it relates,
> but I remember reading Jorge Luis Borges' account of going blind (don't
> remember if it was interview transcript, or his writing...), in which he
> describes it not as a gradual blackening, but a gradual whitening.
>
> MIght as well mention that, in my understanding, while England might have
> laid claim to some DOMESTIC moral high ground regarding slavery in the
> 1760s....  If I'm not mistaken, North American slave populations, as
> inhumanely as they were treated, managed to sustain themselves, while
> British colonies like Jamaica were true death machines, requiring a
> constant supply of human sacrifice in order to function.
>
> On Feb 2, 2015, at 2:29 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> <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
> >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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