M&D Chapter 12 - pages 118-119

Sun Mar 1 15:59:00 CST 2015

You and Alice and some critics want to place novels in labeled bookstore
shelves, by category.  I understand that as a vehicle for discussion and
comparison.  I think GR's expanse of genre referencing actively fights that
kind of book shelving.

David Morris

On Sunday, March 1, 2015, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Becky writes:
>
> Maskelyne likens St. Helena to a gothic novel and says:
> "Six months I've been here - too many idle Minutes soon pile up,
> topple and overwhelm the Healthiest Mind."
>
> Maskelyne, man of science, repeats a cultural attitude more prevalent
> among Protestants than Catholics
> sez a Google Books search and paralleling Weber's insights it says
> elsewhere.
>
> And, of course, the Gothic strain of fiction, this upcoming fiction
> within the fiction, is a current of fearful fiction,
> anxiety-filled (and cathartic thereby?) fiction and, even Horror
> fiction. It might be seen as the demonic undertow
> of fiction, the underground answer to the overground novel of manners
> and society.
>
>  Austen, soon a genius of the latter, has her protagonist in the early
> Northanger Abbey get overwrought almost hysterically at times with her
> Gothic novel reading.
>
> The Gothic strain is the anti-optimism strain. The Gothic strain is
> the Cassandra strain. Gothic is the downward pull
> to scientific and societal 'inevitable progress. The Gothic strain is
> the Return of the Repressed strain.
>
> Gravity's Rainbow is Gothic.
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> > Another day,  another couple pages:
> >
> > Maskalyne likens St. Helena to a gothic novel and says
> >
> > "Six months I've been here - too many idle Minutes soon pile up, topple
> and overwhelm the Healthiest Mind."
> >
> > (A little foreshadowing there? -  Suspicions that Mason might go
> completely mad?  Pynchon doesn't really go in for a lot of foreshadowing to
> keep up suspense or whatever - just as well,  it would take the whole thing
> overboard, overdone, too much.)
> >
> > ** "Sirius Business," cackles the Proprietor. -  another groaner gag.
> >
> > This novel has some very serious themes, but told with a LOT of humor -
> not just humor to lighten the atmosphere -there's actually a comic tone.
> >
> > "But I also noticed that the book's  (M&D's) humor was more thoroughly
> interwoven with melancholy and a sense of mortality than ever before in
> Pynchon's work."
> > http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason.html
> >
> > "Mason & Dixon represents an impulse to write history through the
> imaginary field, to crosshatch its narrative with a realization of
> culture's desire to find its identity in the realm of the imagination. It
> thus argues, implicitly, for the importance of artistic imagination
> alongside scientific and historical work. Pynchon rejects the harsh realism
> and more cynical parodies employed by many contemporary authors, using
> HUMOR (my caps)  and even magic as modes of transformation.[17] Talking
> dogs, sexually aroused mechanical ducks, and nighttime apparitions and
> ghosts haunt Mason and Dixon in America; perhaps the country that combines
> technical invention with capitalistic enterprise might be equallymythologic
> in Pynchon's ambivalent history."
> > http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html
> >
> > Thoughts on the humor and how it adds to the mix of history, themes,
> story, whatever -  do you laugh? Why?
> >
> > **********
> > And then, ta-da - it's Maskelyne's birthday - (which would tell us it's
> October 6, 1761 and that he's 29 years old - born Oct. 1732) and he makes a
> big deal of impending doom (age 30 is coming).
> >
> > The phrase "Stygian mists"  is from "To Chloris"  in "Madrigals and
> Epigrams" by William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) Scottish poet.   a
> little chunk of the poem -  http://www.bartleby.com/337/285.html
> >
> > Mason:  (but 30 is)  "... a Number divisible,- penetrable! - by 6
> numbers!"    (eeks?  why?  - numerology of some kind I guess.)
> >
> > ***  Narrator:    "...dismal apostrophes..."    -
> >  And in this case the word apostrophe means exclamations,  not the
> punctuation symbol.
> >
> > **** Now Dixon is leaving for South Africa to take care of Maskelyne's
> "Sisson instrument"  which is probably a quadrant of some sort,  a device
> for measuring angles.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sisson
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(instrument)
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mural_instrument
> >
> >         If the measurement device is off by a hair - then that slight
> error is multiplied exponentially and Maskelyne has invested more than time
> and his career in the instrument ($$?) .  Dixon is the field rep for Johnny
> Bird's instruments?  -  lol - but ...
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bird_(astronomer)
> >
> > Why are the various measurements of time and space inaccurate?   Errors
> in measurement - 1.  human error - the time of the Transit (because M&D
> started/ stopped at different places) and, 2.  device error (plumb line
> screwed up on quadrant).
> > **********
> > Is there really so little on these two pages?    Or is this "so little?"
> >
> > So here's an added little morsel for the Learn'd Dogs amongst us - James
> Wood, in a now "classic" essay soundly criticized Zadie Smith's White Teeth
> for it's "hysterical realism" and lambasted a few others in the process
> (M&D, etc).
> > http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
> >
> > And this is a rather interesting little Wiki article on the subject:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism
> > (interesting little piece)
> >
> > Becky
> > the humor bit reminded me of hysterical and that took me on the little
> semi-side trip to Wood and Wiki -
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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