M&D - chapter 10 pp 100-101, plus maybe....

Thu Feb 19 06:16:55 CST 2015

Yes, and I will get back to basics in a gloss that I hope is not
condescending. The tale here is being told to easily-bored young ones,
we know. They want adventure stories and in AtD, TRP places so much,
so many historical hot-spot events as needing the intervention of the
Chums.

The crisis events of History are the Adventures so appealing to the
young, the, as is clearer in AtD, fictional happenings that distract
us from seeing what is the basic reality.

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 5:11 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>> Or (for something really insubstantial), did anyone else get the sense
>> from the last paragraph of chapter 10 that we were being loosely visited by
>> the skyship Inconvenience?  The subject matter (Aunt Euphrenia's saucy
>> stories of harems among the Domes and Minarets); the fact that Inconvenience
>> is mentioned by name, as an entity, as the substance of her exploits; and
>> even the shape and tone of the thing (the whole Perils of Euphrenia thing
>> feels way more 1900 than 1760 to me...)... <
>
>
>
> I just reread that paragraph and think your suggestion makes sense!
>
>
> On 18.02.2015 21:51, David Ewers wrote:
>>
>> The Transit seems to me to be one of those occurrences (treated here
>> almost like a very miniature Civil War, followed by a quick Reconstruction,
>> etc...) of disturbance, like when a kicked anthill goes chaotic for a minute
>> (the whole world of Gravity's Rainbow?).  The Colony soon enough finds its
>> form, but it's never quite the same, somehow.
>>
>> I get the sense here of a White colonial world so suspended between
>> science and religion that even the gradual supplanting of God by Science is
>> seen in religious terms, as something grand and awesome to behold.  To see
>> the light of Venus cast a shadow, so become corporeal like us, if only for a
>> short time every long time... with one's own eyes, through the cooperative
>> magic of Science... I think the same awe is there; it's being transferred
>> (or Converted, yes! Like energy!) to Science.
>>
>> How's about the idea that the name Tenebrae, to a Christian of the period,
>> familiar with the ritual extinguishing of candles during Holy Week, might
>> imply a 'light-into-shadow' sort of thing?  A Venus, transitting... thing?
>>
>> Or (for something really insubstantial), did anyone else get the sense
>> from the last paragraph of chapter 10 that we were being loosely visited by
>> the skyship Inconvenience?  The subject matter (Aunt Euphrenia's saucy
>> stories of harems among the Domes and Minarets); the fact that Inconvenience
>> is mentioned by name, as an entity, as the substance of her exploits; and
>> even the shape and tone of the thing (the whole Perils of Euphrenia thing
>> feels way more 1900 than 1760 to me...)...
>>
>> As to the meditation, I don't think Mason ever gets anywhere near Quiet,
>> and I think Dixon shows himself to be just a little full of sh*t in this
>> regard, and not quite as spiritually groovy as he'd have us believe.  I
>> think they both behave like Us.
>>
>>
>> On Feb 18, 2015, at 10:56 AM, Becky Lindroos wrote:
>>
>>> 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.)
>>>
>>> > >Fromhttp://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.
>>>
>>> *********
>>> **  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."
>>>
>>>
>>> ***********************
>>> 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. ")
>>>
>>> *******
>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>>
>>
>
> -
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