M&D - Chapter 16 - Star-Gazing

[jochen stremmel]

>From the wiki:

*Mason, Rebekah*
52; Charles' first wife, who died young; her tombstone at Sapperton Church
gives her date of death as February 13th, 1759, and the epitaph includes
the phrase "Wife of Charles Mason, Jun'r. A. R. S. (Associate of the Royal
Society); 109; 164; story, 167-84; 346; 536-41; 703

2015-03-24 19:43 GMT+01:00 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>:

> 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"'.
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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