M&D Ch 20

[Mark Kohut]

Making bread. The basics of life, the staff of. The Soul, the staff of. Our
empty wholesome essence.

Chapter 20 is one of the chapters which must have made all the reviewers
who thought Pynchon
was all literary cleverness and not enough simple human feeling think
differently about THIS book.

On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 3:32 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Ch 20
> Mason has come home to find Bradley’s family doesn’t want him around as
> the family processes Bradley’s death, despite their close friendship. He
> tells his own  family he is being considered for work in America. Most
> oppose the idea. M’s father has plans to put Mason’s 2 sons to work milling
> or baking.
>   The memory of bread making with his father and Mason’s divergent
> interest in the stars is moving and an odd mix of  the senior’s domineering
> emotional blackmail and fatherly love,   all mediated by a contemplation on
> bread-making which touches on science, the cycle of life and death, class,
> christianity, and the likeness of bread/dough to flesh, all of which which
> enters Mason’s dreams.
>    There is  a passage about the holes  in bread and the spaces inside the
> spaces, leading to the conclusion that the whole is mostly space. But
> bread, like his family is full of human drama, farmed in soil light and air
> , cut down with steel sickles, ground to powder, wetted and oiled and
> yeasted, moist, hot, sticky, crusty, chewy and finally excremental. Mason
> seems to long for spaces and boundaries more geometric, less entangled with
> flesh,  points luminous and measurable in their relationships. -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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