M&D - chapter 10 pp 100-101

Wed Feb 18 12:56:27 CST 2015

Again: 
Chapter 10 - 
P. 100  (in Kindle)

** After a few weeks to regroup from the “Catastrophe of the Passions” (p. 99) things go back to “normal” and some young writers show up at False Bay but without enough money to draw the interest of the Vroom sisters - but plenty to get Johanna’s attention for Austra (or someone).
False Bay -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Bay

** Johanna is "Monomaniackal in her Pursuit” -  like Ahab seeking the Great White Whale?   And Austra along to help pick a “Sprig.”  (Like a sprig of thyme.)   
From  http://www.masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_10:_94-104#Page_100

**  Mason - “… had the Town undergone some Conversion?  Had I, without knowing it?"  and that reminds Dixon of John Wesley at New Castle. — 

**  John Wesley, founder of Methodism.   The scene on following page relates that Wesley tried to come up with a "method" to where anyone could understand and reach an experience providing them with the truth of his own religious experience and awakening. 
http://www.masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_10:_94-104#Page_100

photos and text re Wesley’s New Castle: 
 http://ukwells.org/locations/displaylocations/2116

Dixon "remembers” that Harry Clasper out-keel’d the Lad from Hetton-le-Hole - 
http://www.masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_10:_94-104#Page_101

Harry Clasper wasn’t even born when Dixon was relating this to Mason - nor when Cherrycoke is retelling it.  The question becomes: 

1.   If the narrator is Cherrycoke  - how can Dixon or Cherrycoke remember or even know about something which does not even happen for maybe up to a century later?  It would be like Cherrycoke deciding to reminisce about the first time he saw an electric light bulb (patented in 1879).  

2.   Is there yet another narrator - one existing after 1812 (when Clasper was born) ? -  But he’s having Dixon say this nonsense so it’s totally unreliable.  (Perhaps he’s from an ”other world.”  - next chapter). 

 3.   In any case,  this would be a truly “omniscient” narrator (lol)  but still - he’s having Dixon say it so it’s not relevant how “omniscient” the narrator or the character is if the substance is inaccurate and therefore unreliable. 

Bottom line,  imo,  this anachronism was deliberately placed.  (*Unless TRP simply missed by a century and then it’s authorial error - which DOES happen,  but usually only in 1st editions.)  So as an anachronism why is it there?  -  To further underscore how history is a mess of an infinite number of tangled threads (lines?)  including some with unreliable narration as well as the reader (“Pynchon” - or model author -  making research errors) putting his own ideas into the subject and relating them.  

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**  Then Dixon compares the changes brought by the Transit of Venus: 

 “… this turning of the Soul, have tha felt it, - they’re beginning to talk to their Slaves?  Few, if any , beatings, - tho’ best to whisper, not jeopardize it too much.”  (a little superstition there - heh.) 

** This strikes me as a good example of post-colonial lit!   
so I checked that idea out and found this at the Swarthmore site (bottom lines): 
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason2.html

 “… just as Gravity's Rainbow proved so stimulating in the late 1970s and 1980s to testing the full range of possibilities in deconstruction as a theory of reading, so will Mason and Dixon be one of the crucial texts for testing the resources and limitations of current "cultural studies" and "postcolonial" critical theories.”   

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p. 101
Mason and Dixon talking - Mason questioning Dixon about the spiritual experience of Quakers - “… but the fairly principal thing is to sit quietly…”  and wait for the great embodiment of the Quaker “Grace.”

 There’s a newish book out called" Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno” by Martin Paul Eve (2014) which is too expensive for me to mess with but there are little samples on GoogleBooks - 

Also of interest is Carl Ostrowski’s paper entitled "Conspiratorial jesuits in the Postmodern Novel Mason & Dixon.”  at: -  http://tinyurl.com/p7sgjg7   or: 
<  https://books.google.com/books?id=i5BlLrcWUe0C&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=carl+ostrowski+jesuits&source=bl&ots=H10lP_s8mr&sig=cIjxEnI64uoYxD4AGtaUfgDCnXk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MdvkVIKzCNLHsQS_tYKwBA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=mason&f=false  > 

So Mason sits quietly, jumping up whenever he feels a momentary stir (or something) and finally falls asleep - whereupon Dixon steps out for a drinkie-poo.  

** And the great change subsides  - the abuse of slaves resumes as does their own Bush tongue -

*******************
 ** Finally the slaves return to their homes and 

"Riding in and out of Town now may often be observ’d White Horsemen, carrying long Rifles styl’d “Sterloops,” each with an inverted Silver Star upon the Cheek-Piece.”  (p. 101) 

I think for Americans this “White Horsemen with Rifles”  will have the resonance of the KKK,  and Pynchon is American and this is an American novel and I suspect this is deliberate -  so -  why is it there?  
https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/77/165
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inverted_pentacle.PNG   

This comes up again much later in the novel.  

**  Rifles:   “Something More Than a Rifle: Firearms in and around Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon“… 

“… while Freud says that sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, a rifle is always something more than a rifle." – William T. Vollmann."
https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/77/165

("Our investigation about firearms in M&D will show us how Pynchon may enforce the paradigms of realism while at the same time playing with the conventions of realism, achieving a condition of ontological uncertainty by putting two different stage-props on his narrative stage, but letting us believe that they are one, the same weapon appearing both in South Africa and in the American colonies. “) 

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That’s my story for the day - do with it what you will - there is a WHOLE lot I can’t cover in under a couple years.  

Becky 

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