M&D first notes

[Joseph Tracy]

The prose is old fashioned, elaborate, supple, easily moving between amusement, sentiment, the exotically strange and P's darker considerations of avarice and violence.  And one realizes that Pynchon’s prose has always had it’s roots in an older literary tradition. In fact one can distinctly hear strains of Hawthore, Melville, Washington Irving along with more recent cousins like Dickens. My own sense is that never before M&D has P’s writing style with those elegantly elaborate sentences been so at-home in a period of time. 
  It is not that his classification as experimental or post-modern is wrong, but that classification has much more to do with overall structure and his intriguing prefiguring of the age of hyper text than with the way he writes a sentence or a paragraph. Pynchon’s hyper text is more than info traveling. I t is also time traveling and builds layers of meaning that create a surreal depth and place him with the moderns.  What I am saying is probably obvious but here is a top of the head illustration. Reading any paragraph in GR or V in comparison to Huckleberry Finn would make Twain sound utterly modern by comparison in terms of a prose style which sounds like man on the street common sense, and is artistic but accessible, pithy, lucid and dramatically active. 

Christmas in Philadelphia
   Philadelphia was central to the problem and raison’ etre for the M&D line. The 40th parallel was the original line defined by royal land grants but the 40th  was miscalculated to be south of Philadelphia  and would have cut off Philadelphia from Pennsylvania- the city that was chartered as the center of the colony. By the time Cherrycoke is telling his story, Pennsylvania had abolished slavery( 1781), so a division between slave and free was already in progress and Philadelphia ,that dream of brotherly love, was not in slaveholding Maryland.  In that sense his story is a celebration of elaborate compromises worked out among competing interests  and lines that both free and enslave.
   Christmas is not officially observed by Quakers but not judgmentally condemned either. Midwinter festivities seem to be part of life for all northern peoples. Pynchon observes frolic and storytelling, storytelling as distraction,  as reflection,  as a vast exotic journey and a return to the realities of the moment. Most would prefer to forget the realities that would have been the birth of a wage laborer’s son under Roman occupation and enjoy the distance provided by modern mass marketing, sweet hopeful carols  and colorfully wrapped gifts.. But the idea of incarnation , of divinity finding a way to walk among the living and dying  is universal.  I agree with Mark that it seems to have a compelling attraction for Pynchon 
 There is a correspondence in my mind between the christmas story and Cherrycoke’s story. Both carry the mystery of mythic doings that have shaped the world and both have the delicious taint of sex, distant violence, exotic spices and dog shit. We are diving into a world where Imaginary lines become real,  and real animal barns become the convergence of heavenly triangulations.  -
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l