terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456

[Monte Davis]

A bell rang when I read this Pynchon passage in 1997: I was sure I'd read
somewhere, long before, about Napoleon himself using the French captain's
words, or very similar phrasing, w/r/t letting some expedition pass,
returning some naturalist's specimen collection that had been captured, or
the like. But I've never tracked it down, nor did it turn up in the 1997 or
2001 group readings here. (Nor do I know of any answer to your question
about how the French captain would have known of M&D's presence, other than
Pynchonian conspiracism about the the higher levels of Them, e.g. IG
Farben,  Shell, GE et al. carrying on despite the distraction of WWII.)

FWIW: In 1813, when Great Britain was at war with Napoleon's France,
English scientist Humphry Davy traveled freely on the Continent and in
Paris collected a prize and medal funded by Napoleon for the best work on
galvanism. (While not common, such interactions were not unknown in other
fields of scholarship as well as science.) Davy remarked to an associate:
"But if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are
not. That would, indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should
rather, through the instrumentality of the men of science soften the
asperities of national hostility." Quoted in Gavin de Beer, The Sciences
Were Never at War (1960).




On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 11:10 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Which brings up the question of why the l'Grand turned away. Was it
> really, as Smith (filtered through Cherrycoke) reported, "France is not at
> war with the sciences?" If so, how did they eventually figure out,
> mid-attack, that this was a scientific expedition? Was Smith able to get
> the letters of passage over to the other captain? Kind of seems there
> should have been some identifying marker - a sail with a sun and two
> crossed telescopes instead of the skull and bones? - to prevent attacks
> before they started.
>
>
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