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

Wed Feb 4 21:50:04 CST 2015

On Wednesday, February 4, 2015, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:

> Think of it like a movie -  scene 1 -  (p. 47) Cherrycoke is seen telling
> his story to group in 1785.  We watch as he tells his story in his words
> for a page or so and then the film slides into the story he’s telling -
> where the “Frigate captains are uncomfortable sailing in formation,”  (p.
> 48).  Those two paragraphs following Cherrycoke’s ditty are far less
> personal in tone.  This is the start of the "omniscient narrator”  a kind
> of transition there in those two paragraphs. When Mason says, “Insane,” the
> transfer to an omniscient narrator is complete - and it’s almost jarring.
>
> The next transfer is from shipboard back to fireside when the Twins ask
> “Why?" (p. 55).  The Revd talks to them and us (somewhat like an intrusive
> narrator) until p. 56 when the omniscient narrator of 1761 takes over
> again, “The Astronomers have a game call’d ’Sumatra’ where the Revd often
> sees them together.”   -
>
> The Revd is mentioned in these paragraphs toward the end but that’s
> because he’s in the scene,  not because he’s saying the words.  When he’s
> talking he says “I,”  "we,” “us,”  etc.  Also,  starting at about that
> point we’re getting into the heads of Mason and Dixon again.  Cherrycoke
> hasn’t really done that on his own - not to this point, anyway.
>
> I think  Cherrycoke is *understood* (by the reader)  to be telling the
> story to his audience but that’s in the background of the omniscient
> narrator parts and he’s using his own words back there with the kids,  not
> the words we’re reading in the less personal (I, us, we)  sections of the
> narrative.  Cherrycoke introduces a vision or something - a flashback,  but
> the omniscient narrator is there at the scene.
>
> Becky
>
> > On Feb 4, 2015, at 5:17 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> > Where do you think Cherrycoke is speaking; where the overall narrator?
> Only where Cherrycoke is there talking to his audience?
> >
> > Cherrycoke started Chap 6. So, the reflective ending of Chap 6 is the
> Revs. Then it isn't?
> >
> > I did think he was entertaining his audience. "" French Women!"
> ...Brae's crush on an experienced man.....in chap 6, there is " looking up
> skirts" ....
> >
> > I did think Cherrycoke set the story in motion and he, Cherrycoke
> semi-merged with the ' omniscient narrator" much like a modern
> semi-omniscient merged first person narrator.
> >
> > I cannot see it like the books you say; enlighten us as to how. I see
> weird irreality hung on ideas. I cannot read the Austra and Vroom girls
> that way. So, my weakness.
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > On Feb 4, 2015, at 4:17 PM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> >> 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
> <javascript:;>>:
> >> On Feb 2, 2015, at 2:29 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com <javascript:;>> <
> kelber at mindspring.com <javascript:;>> 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 <javascript:;>> <
> kelber at mindspring.com <javascript:;>> 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
> >>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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