M&D Deep Duck Ch. 3: Innocent merriment

[Mark Kohut]

 If, as Rich pointed out, Mason & Dixon are--and I think he asked if
it was (too) obviously opposing strains in the Americas that are
becoming the United States, let me throw this around the
scholarly-inclined.
We know that Brown's LIFE AGAINST DEATH shaped a lot of the deep
vision of Gravity's Rainbow...you can look it up..

So, I ask, is Pynchon's very full accenting of Mason's proclivity to
deathless therefore death-obsessed thoughts a focussing
on the death wish in Western, soon the real America, society? That
deep foundational Puritan strain excoriated  from Melville, Hawthorne
thru Pynchon and Roth (and all the earlier and later writers I missed)
with TRP carrying it to Freud's death wish thru
Brown? The Discontents with Civilization.

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 11:19 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well... death and mourning and suicidal thoughts and metempsychosis having
> had their say, let's add what we'll learn on pp. 109-110, when a brightly
> outfitted Florinda arrives at St. Helena and greets Mason as "Tyburn
> Charlie":
> "The year after Rebekah's death was treacherous ground for Mason, who was as
> apt to cross impulsively by Ferry into the Bosom of Wapping, and another
> night of joyless low debauchery, as to attend Routs in Chelsea, where
> nothing was available betwixt Eye-Flirtation, and the Pox. In lower-situated
> imitations of the Hellfire Club, he hurtl'd
> carelessly along some of Lust's less-frequented footpaths... 'Twas then that
> Mason began his Practice, each Friday, of going out to the hangings at
> Tyburn, expressly to chat up women, upon a number of assumptions, many of
> which would not widely be regarded as sane."
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 6:09 PM, <msacha1121 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> So many suggestions of death in this section, popping up amidst otherwise
>> lighthearted scenes of pre-departure. Tyburn can probably be attributed to
>> mood, but there's a lot to do with the sense of passage and the significance
>> of getting back from the traverse - Mason, in the company of Hepsie, is
>> eager to reach his late wife but not to stay there. Pirate ships are
>> "Bullies (that) shift about in the dark", but it isn't the French at the
>> helm of boats that "wait with muffl'd Oars to ferry them against their will
>> over to a Life they may not return from." The principle word here, I think,
>> being "may".
>>
>>
>> > On Jan 12, 2015, at 3:14 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Life Against Death....and Dixon fearing he is unfit for being with
>> > others in public.
>> >
>> > Then, related, Mason's Puritanism sees joke-telling Dixon as perhaps
>> > dicey to be in public with.
>> >
>> > a lot in its way....major contrasting temperaments and each seeing a
>> > different public self.
>> > has to lead someplace in the book.........
>> >
>> >> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 3:05 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> I think the implication is that Mason's grieving has brought on a
>> >> depression, generating a morbid fascination with death. I don't know
>> >> how
>> >> much deeper one could examine this.
>> >>
>> >> David Morris
>> >>
>> >>> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> >>> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> 15.10: "Mason explains, though without his precise reason for it,
>> >>> that,
>> >>> for the past Year or more, it has been his practice to attend the
>> >>> Friday
>> >>> Hangings at that melancholy place ..." (Tyburn)
>> >>>
>> >>> Anybody care to venture a "precise reason"? This first meeting is in
>> >>> 1760
>> >>> or 1761, so his habit might date to his wife Rebekah's death in 1759
>> >>> (although later we'll get reasons to think he had tended to the
>> >>> Melancholick well before that). And yes, the Tyburn hangings were an
>> >>> acknowledged Sight of London.
>> >>>
>> >>> Is that enough to explain it? Mason is rather gentle, neither sadistic
>> >>> nor
>> >>> vindictive; I for one don't see an obvious or direct connection
>> >>> between
>> >>> mouning and a desire to watch excutions.
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l