M&D - Chap 10 - pgs 96-97

Tue Feb 17 04:51:35 CST 2015

Jochen,

I have speedily hit & ran on the academic discussion you posted. The
guy has read and reread Mason & Dixon lovingly and had we all world
enough & Time, we might pull out
his analyses section and paragraph and scene by section and paragraph
and scene. Would be a project and a half.

Since I can hardly read and digest it all, and I don't like (nor know)
so much academic jargon, I also see it as maybe too clever for even
the deep purposes we are trying for on the Plist. He writes, IN
ITALICS, of key places where Cherrycoke's narration is indelibly
merged/the same as the overall narrators. OK, to me, Becky's
straightforward Cherrycoke talks, he sorta disappears and we are like
a camera and then he comes back is comparable and good enough, yes?

Bloom remarked on an incredible critically seen junction in TWELFTH
NIGHT that even Shakespeare could not have planned it. I wonder if
that applies to this guy's thesis. Did even Pynchon think through all
these diegetic levels as the PHD guy lays down? Or did he just create
a few levels---still a magnificent act of poised, coherent
ambiguity-creating---out of a vision of belief in such ambiguity--and
play with them more loosely. Do we read M &D more like we read GR
after all. (all those narrative voices hidden in GR are fascinating
but the point is their useful meaning in the novel, right?)

Isn't a key point what 'reality' Pynchon lays down so we can
understand how to take the ironies about that reality? The satire, the
ambiguities concerning ultimate reality?

This guy does agree with your earlier remark that the story of the
Vroom household could NOT be being narrated by Cherrycoke. OK. Where
does that leave us in understanding its meanings?

This guy seems to disagree with your earlier remark along the lines
I---and others---did. M & D is hardly an historical novel which we
read as we do Wolf Hall or Pat O'Brien. (I got a Wolf Hall and read
that first bloody scene, which might be hysterical historical realism
but does seem to me to be realism. Yes? Pat O'Brien is superb in
actual realistic detail as I remember, right? I cannot get how M & D
is even close to these two. But maybe you too have modified your take)

This guy does not seem to give much weight to Cherrycoke's statement
that he is an unreliable storyteller, a remark I might be giving too
much weight too. Ok, that's true, some Plisters have said but still
there are lots of scenes that must have some kind of reality. Let's
take them at face value but read the ironies.

Moving on I think there is lots of room for rich varieties of reading
scene by scene. I hope we all do.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> Oh my!  And we've been skirting all around some of those issues - (That "screen-play" reference is describing somehting quite different from what I was doing. )
>
> And I was starting to look at tense (mostly present but changeable) and the idea of diegetic and  intradiegetic and metadiegetic but thinking of it as Russian nesting dolls, since I didn't have the word - (Mark used it though and I hadn't had a chance to explore.)
>
> I don't think I can read the whole thing - it's 299 pages with an additional vii pages.  (I'll bet his advisors told him to keep it under 300.)
>
> Bek
>
>
>> On Feb 16, 2015, at 10:48 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It is only now that I did look up the external link provided near the bottom of the wikipedia page to M&D: An academic dissertation on structure and sentiment in Mason & Dixon.
>>
>> That text is not only free, it's great. And not only because it has something to say about the narrators of M&D that seems to come near the points I was making in that regard. Especially the pages 63ff. Whoever is interested in getting to the heart of that matter should read these 10 or so pages dedicated to it. Keeping in mind : "a truism of all reading, is particularly useful when reading any of Pynchon's works: trust the narration without reflecting on it excessively; become immersed in it and stay immersed; trust your instincts, because if something, however bizarre, seems to be happening, it probably is."
>>
>>
>> 2015-02-16 19:31 GMT+01:00 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>:
>> yes, your perspective convinced me---along with that camera, Becky's
>> camera, back when
>> this first came up. IMHO.
>>
>> Someone else vote or argue?
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
>> > The reason I'm saying this now (and I'm open to change) is that I sense Pynchon is presenting Cherrycoke as a story-teller and the story he is telling is the (hi)story of Mason & Dixon.  When we tell stories we say stuff like "Once upon a time..."  (or "A Jesuit, a Corsican and a Chinaman walked into a barroom,")  and go on as though we were omniscient narrators.  That's what I think Cherrycoke is doing and how Pynchon is using him to show us that oral/written history is unreliable - he's turning it on its pointy head and using anachronisms etc. -  (flat out errors?)
>> >
>> > This comes up more directly later when in Chapter 11 someone asks Cherrycoke how he can know what happened on St. Helena considering he wasn't there.  (He doesn't give any kind of good answer.)
>> >
>> > Pynchon is showing us that history is unreliable because of the narrators.   This isn't "event" history - this is oral/written history -
>> >
>> > Becky
>> >
>> >> On Feb 16, 2015, at 7:32 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> >And now back to Mason and Dixon at the Cape - where Cherrycoke is back to being our ** unreliable yet omniscient narrator**  again - (sounds like an oxymoron but it certainly works) -<
>> >>
>> >> As I said before, I don't think they are one and the same: There is the omniscient narrator who tells us about Cherrycoke who is the narrator with his limited point of view, who says "I" sometimes, as reliable as you and me, who is kicked out of the house if he don't behave.
>> >>
>> >> 2015-02-16 16:16 GMT+01:00 Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com>:
>> >> Moving along -
>> >>
>> >> ***  p. 96 -  "A Vector of Desire" -   Lacan -
>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_of_desire
>> >>
>> >> http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html  (I'm sure this has been posted prior -  it's
>> >> "Postmodern Historiography: Politics and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon" by Christy L. Burns )
>> >>
>> >> "Celestial Trigonometry"?
>> >> Are we mapping the skies?  Putting the solar system on a grid? Is that why Pynchon "started at the beginning?"
>> >>
>> >> *
>> >> "Somebody somewhere in the world, watching the Planet go dark against the Sun ... (quotes) from Sappho's Fragment 95...":
>> >> "Oh Hesperus, - you bring back all that the dark night scatter'd, - you bring in the sheep, and the goat, - you bring the Child back to her mother."
>> >> (Pynchon uses the H. T. Wharton translation):   http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/sape08u.htm
>> >>
>> >> So what's Pynchon's reasoning in having "someone" misread/misinterpret the Hesperus,  the *evening Venus*  as the Transit Venus of the morning?  Showing the idea of misreading?  Misinterpreting?
>> >>
>> >> Just prior to that quote there is the line that says this misread interruption is  "...seeming to wreck the *Ob,*" - the "Ob"? -   Observation, of course, but which one?  1.  It could be the observation of the Transit itself (perhaps as displayed in the orrery)  or 2.  it could be Cherrycoke's observation about it with "Vector of Desire" and all being so appropriate.  - The question is - are our #1 type  observations also misinterpretations?  What does that do to history and/or events?
>> >>
>> >> **
>> >> "A sort of long black Filament yet connects her to the Limb of the Sun, tho' she be moved will onto its Face..."  "This, or odd behavior like it, is going on all over the World all day long that fifth and sixth of June..."
>> >>
>> >> "... as if the Creation's Dark Engineer had purposedly arrang'd the Intervals thus, to provoke a certain Instruction, upon the limits to human grandeur by Mortality."
>> >>
>> >> Satan?  Death?  This is the first of the pair of Transits - 1761 and 1769 - then not again until 1874 and 1882 followed by 2004 and 2012 and then not again until 2117 / 2125.
>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus#History_of_observation
>> >>
>> >> **
>> >> And now back to Mason and Dixon at the Cape - where Cherrycoke is back to being our ** unreliable yet omniscient narrator**  again - (sounds like an oxymoron but it certainly works) -
>> >>
>> >> **
>> >> Extra credit resource:
>> >>
>> >> Mason and Dixon at the Cape - 4 pages -
>> >> Title: Mason and Dixon at the Cape
>> >> Authors: MacKenzie, T.
>> >> Journal: Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa, Vol. 10, p. 99
>> >> http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1951MNSSA..10...99M/0000099.000.html
>> >> The  clocks and observatory are mentioned on page 100 but also see page 99 - they're all kind of interesting.
>> >>
>> >> **************
>> >>
>> >> p. 97 -
>> >>
>> >> The Zeeman and Vroom households "speed about" getting ready for the Transit - the morning is foggy.  This is likely the case as per the "Journal's Monthly Notes"  noted above - p. 99. (So no metaphor is necessarily intended, but the possibility should not be excluded.)
>> >>
>> >> "Dutch Ado about nothing."   -  groan - lol -   The slaves seem somewhat amused by the behavior of "their owners."
>> >>
>> >> ****************
>> >>
>> >> Please add, subtract, argue, define, categorize, compare, contrast, delineate, deconstruct, verify,  obfuscate, clarify, etc. as you will -
>> >>
>> >> Becky -
>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> >>
>> >
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
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