M & D Read: otherness

[alice malice]

The boys are part of a project that, along with lots of other things,
seeks to draw lines, to divide, to erect boundaries, but the story
keeps collapsing these. What is real? How do we know? So, the book is
plumbing some traditional philosophical depths, ontological questions
are compounded by epistemology questions.

The battle at sea might be an allusion to Aristotle's famous problem
of future contingency. Even if it isn't, Free Will is certainly
plumbed here as well.  But, even if we don't trace the sea battles
argument through, first to our boys and Leibniz and Berkeley, then to
Wittgenstein and Deleuze, to Borges's story, "The Garden of Forking
Paths", we might want to dig into the sensory and Berkeley, necessity
and probability.



On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Pynchon seems to move regularly in this chapter from the sensory, practical, social reality of M&D's circumstances  in Southern Africa toward the  realm of dream and ghosts, magic and erotic fascination. We are in a strange world, both new in it's separation from dutch calvinism and English pragmatism and almost exotically ancient in the division of class into master and slave, european colonists and a wild mix of southeast asians and africans.
>
> They wonder whether they died in the fight at sea and are ghosts in the wrong story. They live with a family of dutch calvinists with slave girls who lick spilled pomegranate  juices from skin of the mistress of the house who also encourages her daughters to arouse sexual interest in a visitor for business reason. Mason finds himself seeking a magic potion to foster indifference as his will weakens. Dixon finds help from a tribal man for whom dreams are as real as waking reality. Mason dreams he is in a colony of hell, contending with a dark figure who, who after a dream battle involving shin kicking expertise yields a wavy malay knife which when Mason wakes is real. Perhaps shit kicking should be the phrase since Mason vocalizes the forbidden lower class term shit  as the perfect substance to describe what he wants to rid himself of.
>
> Dixon brings them back from this dreamy state( both Freudian and Jungian) and they talk about their own relationship and the question of how and why the RS brought them together, and whether it's about Maskelyne trying to set up success for the lunar table approach to longitude which he favors.
>
> One metaphor of this juxtaposition that I found telling was the girls oiling Joanna's skin so that it won't be as the dry pages of the Bible. Again we are reminded of theDutch otherness from the NT vision of healing and sharing with the least and the call to treat all as brothers and sisters, versus the erotic pull of power over the bodies of others. Thus P satirizes the speed with which christian mission and resolve liquifies and is recast into the solid colonial 'erection' of a dreamworld of endless self indulgence.
>
>
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> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l