M & D - Learned E.D.: Tail Chase

David Ewers dsewers at comcast.net
Fri Jan 16 15:26:26 CST 2015 

...expression of a process, that is...



On Page 22, The Learned English Dog says there are no Talking Dogs, as those would be supernatural (there's a koan right there); but there is preternatural himself.  L.E.D. is not otherworldly but hyper-worldly, maybe? (an "extreme Expression" of an evolutionary "Process"?)

	So, and riffing on the idea of psychic parallax (sorry…): if the L.E.D. describes himself as an extreme expression  process wherein dogs learn to throw up a lens (like that "...circle of Absence..."; p23) for us humans to see them through (shifting the distance between dog and human, as perceived by us, so we view them as too much like ourselves to eat...), could he, the L.E.D., 'personify' a sort of extremely (vanishingly) small human/canine parallax?

A Lunarian (p22), speaking to Algernon - (...the short story we read in Jr. high school, Algernon was a mouse with artificially (scientifically) heightened intelligence...), referring to him(?) here as his "fellow Civiliz'd Human" ... 
What do you make of that?

As far as Mason is concerned, the L.E.D. could be seen as Science that leads to Mysticism (the "Dog-reveal'd Crone" p24), yes?  Then there's the presumption that Mason was led to by the L.E.D.; the idea that Science, (in some rarefied state, like the L.E.D....) might lead (allow) him reasonably believe "there exist safe-conduct Procedures for the realm of Death" (p25)?  So Mason is self-consciously trying to determine a parallax between worlds; here trying to adjust his own twin lenses so he can see the light? (L.E.D. pun here, as by the light of dawn he is gone, like one of those fleeting epiphanies we only get at night, or under unusual conditions).

Is a Learned English Dog (...Science...?) still man's best friend?

One more thing:  Considering the parallax stuff, then is the L.E.D.'s "blood-love" (p24) more canine, human, or Scientifick in [praeter]nature??



On Jan 16, 2015, at 10:50 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Addendum to this post, with which I assent and Monte's and Bekah's
> can't-be-bettered on P's characters's posts. .
> 
> What I want to add concerns those early critics and roundedness.
> Besides all that Monte wrote I think
> the public reviewing meme is that, with book-long characters on almost
> every page in a LONG book---unlike
> most of TRPs early fiction, who do interact a lot, exhibit a lot of
> various behaviors--as in a Fielding novel; Fielding
> an oft-compared writer to TRP--who do have time to and do change...........
> 
> viola, they round up.
> 
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 1:37 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> The portrayal of the friendship between Mason and Dixon is endearing, and unusual for Pynchon, but it's hardly the meat of the book. Certainly wouldn't describe the novel along the lines of: Pynchon's heartwarming depiction of the growing bond between two very different men.
>> 
>> Laura
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com>
>>> Sent: Jan 16, 2015 1:25 PM
>>> To: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>>> Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>> Subject: Re: M & D Deep Duck continues.
>>> 
>>> I have to agree -  yes - "rounded" characters are nice in their place,  but they're a thing of Forster and his telling readers/writers in "Aspects of the Novel" and showing us in "Howard's End" and "A Passage to India."  Rounded characters were the stuff of "literary fiction" for a long time.  (And imo, critics who cannot get their heads behind the incredible importance of flattish characters were taught by some really "old school" lit teachers.)
>>> 
>>> But no character is completely and totally "rounded" (Forster came close in HE) and neither is any character totally and completely "flat" (unless they are complete 1-dimensional personifications of "good" and "evil" or something - Darth Vader).
>>> 
>>> An author using "flattish" characters is NOT a bad thing!   lol -  (I've said this before.)  He simply has more to do with the novel than examine the psyches of the characters involved - like developing themes of corruption, paranoia, capitalism, (Scarsdale Webb),  etc.  And flattish characters can add some comic relief (Lew Basnight),  or just move the plot along.   some "types" are going to be used.
>>> 
>>> Pynchon's main characters have some "roundish" aspects to them - In M&D so far it's Mason particularly and Cherrycoke less so.  I'll have to continue reading to see more of them.   But although Pynchon does tend to use flattish characters - that's NOT a flaw in any way - the point is HOW and WHY does he develop his characters like this (and it's neither for historical accuracy nor an accident that Cherrycoke is named that).
>>> 
>>> Bekah
>>> and now back to "Crystal Souls" - the new one from Spiderweb Software -  :-)
>>> 
>>>> On Jan 16, 2015, at 6:40 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Monte ramps it up again:
>>>> "Per my recent mini-rant on the WASTE FB group, I like and respect
>>>> Forster, and Aspects of the Novel, and the "flat vs. rounded
>>>> characters" passage, and the Great Tradition-ish context of them all.
>>>> But that should never have been degraded into the simple-minded
>>>> Kakutani scale, by which Roundedness is All, and poor Tom Pynchon --
>>>> previously limited to cartoons and caricatures -- finally started to
>>>> get it right with Mason and Dixon.'
>>>> 
>>>> Agree, have long agreed. This Roundedness is All is a decline, imo, a
>>>> singling up, from the variety of modernisms' ways. One can see why it
>>>> is the default of reviewers and some critics who think they must be
>>>> speaking to readers who do not like 'novels of ideas', "intellectual
>>>> fictions"--I am particularly ironically fond of the recent reductive
>>>> meme of so many--LIKEABLE characters --instead of fiction purposely
>>>> not doing that.
>>>> 
>>>> a postmodern arguer, Lyotard, I think does say that such 'realism' is
>>>> one of the strands of postmodernity.
>>>> 
>>>> on my first full reading of M & D, not understanding that much but
>>>> knowing that much, much of the meaning was happening in all of those
>>>> side scenes, did NOT find P's M & D so much different from the
>>>> characters in his earlier books. Either they had more
>>>> roundedness---Molly Hite declaring emphatically---I knew The Whole
>>>> Sick Crew in real life---or M & D did NOT have as much as
>>>> the reviewers' meme believed. Since M & D were modeled on Real People
>>>> then....well-rounded reality of character. But as we are seeing, P's
>>>> take is beyond their reality a lot.
>>>> 
>>>> But, other other hand, as I told a few non-Plist friends about this
>>>> read, one wrote me how he cried at a couple
>>>> M & D scenes, and never had at the first three novels (did not read
>>>> Vineland). so, another reader heard from.
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 9:01 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I remember an end-of-semester lecture by Chaucer honcho D.W. Robertson Jr.
>>>>> He summarized all the conventional wisdom about the "flatness" of the
>>>>> Canterbury characters -- their appearance, words, and actions dictated by
>>>>> one dominant trait. He noted the implication of wondrous progress since:
>>>>> that authors have learned to capture so much more of human complexity and
>>>>> variety, those last assumed to be eternal.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Then he turned it all on its head (my paraphrase): "I'm not saying that it
>>>>> is or that it isn't -- but just for exercise, consider the possibility that
>>>>> Chaucer was very skilled at understanding and representing... that *that's
>>>>> how people were in the 14th century*... that some or much of what we usually
>>>>> think of as progress in literary technique since then might actually be
>>>>> changes in us... and that literature may have been as much cause as
>>>>> reflection of that change."
>>>>> 
>>>>> Credit it to Luther per Van Den Berg, to Shakespeare per Bloom, to Burton as
>>>>> transition from pre-modern Melancholick and other humors to proto-modern
>>>>> psychology... or go farther with Julian Jaynes
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
>>>>> 
>>>>> and say that  consciousness itself is only about 3000 years old. I don't buy
>>>>> any of them (or Robertson) 100%, but they are *very* useful exercises.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Per my recent mini-rant on the WASTE FB group, I like and respect Forster,
>>>>> and Aspects of the Novel, and the "flat vs. rounded characters" passage, and
>>>>> the Great Tradition-ish context of them all. But that should never have been
>>>>> degraded into the simple-minded Kakutani scale, by which Roundedness is All,
>>>>> and poor Tom Pynchon -- previously limited to cartoons and caricatures --
>>>>> finally started to get it right with Mason and Dixon.
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 7:19 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I say there are, fer sure, or there is such a variety in the manifestation
>>>>>> of
>>>>>> all of its effects, Pynchon wants to make sure we understand that, get
>>>>>> that in some
>>>>>> mannered but still phenomenological detail.
>>>>>> As remarked, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was published again and again
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> three volumes.
>>>>>> If finding the prosaic nomenclature for our feelings is something that
>>>>>> happened in human history---
>>>>>> then Pynchon is modeling that in some way in M & D?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> a Dutch psychiatrist, J. H Van Den Berg, in his most famous book
>>>>>> places the start of our 'inner self'
>>>>>> at around 1520, with Luther's challenge to the Church. Harold Bloom
>>>>>> has famously argued that
>>>>>> Shakespeare created (our current understanding) of the human in the
>>>>>> humanly insightful genius
>>>>>> of how work.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> We can argue that---and I'm sure some will--but I am only throwing
>>>>>> these out as a postscript
>>>>>> to The Anatomy of Melancholy...i.e as a perspective on the
>>>>>> developmental understanding of
>>>>>> many of the qualities of being "human". Grief provides us--at
>>>>>> least--some insight?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 12:32 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Can there be different forms of grief?
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> On Jan 16, 2015, at 12:08 AM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> I agree (nicely said), but I disagree.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Two sides of the same something, seems to me.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Grief, like fear, makes one desperate to flee oneself.
>>>>>>>> Pitch into the hour, so to speak...
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> On Jan 15, 2015, at 8:59 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Nicely said.
>>>>>>>>>> On Jan 15, 2015, at 7:58 PM, alice malice wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> C.S Lewis may be right, but grief is not like fear to me.
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> I have fear of grief. To me grief is not like fear. It is the end of
>>>>>>>>>> fear; there is nothing left to fear because what was feared is. Maybe
>>>>>>>>>> Mason, like Margaret, is not afraid, but is grieving not for what he
>>>>>>>>>> fears, or even for what may or may not be, but for what is surely to
>>>>>>>>>> be and not to be.
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173665
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:21 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> p20. 'pitching into the hour, heedless"...why does Grief cause this?
>>>>>>>>>>> "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."---C.S. Lewis.
>>>>>>>>>>> TRP even has Dixon share, therefore understand by identifying with,
>>>>>>>>>>> this feeling.
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> a lot of anatomy of grief, melancholy, etc. going on from the
>>>>>>>>>>> get-go.
>>>>>>>>>>> Dense web of feelings.
>>>>>>>>>>> -
>>>>>>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>>>>>> -
>>>>>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> -
>>>>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> -
>>>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>> -
>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> -
>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>> 
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> 
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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