M&D - Chapter 16 - Star-Gazing

[Mark Kohut]

Wonderful conceptual gambit that: IS Rebekah real?

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Elisabeth Romberg <eromberg at mac.com> wrote:
> Spooky and weird. I hadn't thought of it like that. You think she's not
> really real? Uncle Ives did state <<There's no record of her in Gloster>>
> didn't he. Which I thought was a weird thing to say when I read it at the
> time. It was like the voice of the author came through, like HE hadn't found
> a record of her in Gloster.
> But they had children? Where are they? (I had to skip a couple of chapters
> to ketsjap, it was a terrible decisio but it had to be done) Have they been
> mentioned?
>
> 24. mar. 2015 kl. 05.01 skrev Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com>:
>
> Mason, lost and alone, lovesick for glamorous Susannah and having apparently
> lost interest in the day's festivities, nearly finds himself The victim of
> Cheese malevolent when the Vicar's mild roll of a Double Gloucester sets off
> a near catastrophic chain of unloosened cheeses, with Octuple breaking out
> of its Wagon and nearly singling out CM for 'Misadventure'.
>
> Instead, in the best mock-epic romantic fashion, Rebekah dives into the
> story to save CM. Dressed in Taffeta rather than Silk, suddenly life in
> Aleppo doesn't seem quite so unappealing.
>
> TRP is kind enough to explain his wordplay for us: '"Were it Night-time,
> Sir, I'd say you were out Star-Gazing" ... [which] in the those parts was a
> young man's term for masturbating'. Unusual for TRP to make the jokes so
> explicit (I can't help but wonder how many other similar jokes am I missing
> out on?), but perhaps he wants to emphasise that, for all the brilliance and
> sublimity of Mason's profession, he is prone to becoming self-absorbed and
> wrapped up too exclusively in his own world. (I might well be straining for
> meaning here over a mere double-entendre - rather onanistically so).
>
> Mason almost reproaches Rebekah for her blunt comment, but founds himself
> "stupefied" by her beauty. TRP describes her mouth in ambiguous detail:
> "Lips slightly apart, in an Inuiry that just fail'd to be a Smile,- like a
> Gate-Keeper aout to have a word with him". Yet this is the only detail that
> TRP, lover of verbose descriptions, offers about Rebekah's appearance. He
> tells us that she's not an English Rose like Susannah, nor a "rugged Blossom
> of the Heath", but he doesn't tell us what she does look like.
>
> Admittedly TRP might have elaborated a bit more in a now forgotten earlier
> passage, but the lack of physical description resonates all the more when we
> start to question whether Rebekah's a ghost. The Gate-Keeper comment, and
> Mason's reverie about "black Fumes welling from the Surface of her
> Apparition, heard her voice thickening to the timbres of the Beasts ... the
> serpents of Hell, real and swift, lying just the other side of her Shadow".
>
> This furthers the connection to Eurydice - does Charles fear that Rebekah's
> been consigned to Hell because she gave birth out of wedlock? The children
> are registered as Gloucestershire born, but Mason and Rebekah hadn't yet
> been registered as married - presuming they hadn't got married elsewhere,
> like Greenwich instead ... or that she is the mother of his children ... or
> that she existed in the first place ... "I am outside of Time"
>
> Is Rebekah Mason's muse? His guiding light in his life and his career?
> '"Look to the Earth," she instructs him. "Belonging to her as I do, I know
> she lives, and that here upon this Volcanoe in the Sea, close to the forces
> within, even you, Mopery, may learn of her, Tellurick Secrets you could
> never guess"'.
>
>
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