M & D Deep Duck: arc of years

[Mark Kohut]

David Ewers writes:

What could Mason help Cherrycoke with?  That passage (with the Rev
feeling like the haunting shade...) suggests the interface
(mirror/line...) between worlds-type-thing, right?  Again, with Mason
having "arriv'd at Death"... it's got me wondering about departures
and arrivals, and what's in between.  An arc?  In the 1760s, could the
Colonies be said to have departed British-ness but not yet arrived at
America-ness?

Best I've heard on why the story does not start as M & D ended their
work. Off the top, it could have. All of their part could have been
more or less---but w Pynchon I think "less", trying to understand
why--the same on the page.

So, these twenty years are another boundary (period)? THIS is when the
'real' America formed its patterns, always undertowing the coming
ideals? Although we learn "nothing' about those years, the omniscient
narrator gives us all the detail of the way the world IS behind 9and
after) M & D, so to speak?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l