M & D from Joseph's post

[Becky Lindroos]

 I was figuring those Bible pages were dry because of the ugly South-easter.  So the fair skinned Dutch mistress,  who ignores the Bible anyway, has her good-looking slaves oil her skin (and drape her with silks and feed her pomegranates - licking off the dripping juice).   Dixon sees the ploy to ensnare Mason (Dixon hates slavery) but Mason doesn’t even see it  - he’s too messed up by the “melancholy winds.” 

Mason slowly comes to an awareness of the “Nakedness of the Arrangements” and "grows morose,” while Dixon, who has always been aware,  treats the slaves more civilly than their masters. 

Becky

> On Feb 13, 2015, at 8:47 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Why are the pages dry? Because the book is dry reading? It is not
> sensual but puritanical. Hardly. This is the common kick at the Bible
> by those who've obviously never read it.
> 
> Because the holy book, all holy books, sacred texts, European, Asian
> ...indeed all the books they have there, will dry from the winds and
> the heat, so they must be cared for, as the skin, but the book is
> neglected and dries while the skin is oiled against the parching
> clime.
> 
> So why does the narrator put the emphasis on the Bible's dry leaves?
> Contrast them with the oiled skin? If the narrator here is the Rev,
> then we should look to the audience he is addressing. There is, at the
> chapter's conclusion, a joak, or more than a joke, a derisive quip on
> Christ and his Death and Resurrection, connecting these events with
> all the blood that floods time in His wake. The pornographic episodes
> and the moralizing, the sermonizing, the tale of bad girls and the
> parents who compete with them, these may be targeted at the young in
> the room, the Uncle, the cousins, and who can know how they may be
> inspired by them. Some may be repulsed, others aroused, erotically,
> others politically...
> 
> An old Pynchon theme, the books that young people read, are influenced
> by, from "The Secret Integration" to _Against the Day_, and how the
> imagination is free, is entirely free to reject the intended moral or
> immoral lesson, to find Grace and take flight, even from the parched
> papers of the Bible.
> 
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "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."
>> 
>> I also saw this as a metaphor for the sensual, the paganish embrace of
>> the body vs. the way the Bible has created repression from its pages.
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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