Re: M&D: Learnédness (vs. Bornness//as reason for hope?)

[Mark Kohut]

Per the great writer himself, the excluded middle is a crock.

Of course, that overt and covert underbelly is there, and I have pointed
out much of it and will continue to.

Per your own words, I think you should have written to what I wrote about
the text and not to me.
Reducing me to your narrow paraphrase is "not fun"--my granddaughter---and
inaccurate.

I think it is clear in the text that he begins and ends the book under the
rubric of Comedy as a genre, even if massively ironic, as many great
comedies are. This novel isNOT Gravity's Rainbow, nor even Lot 49....in
shape and form.....
>From the glorious snowballs--by English children not Americans-- to the
End, ---"we'll get jobs...We'll fish".... his ambiguity is
ALWAYS there.......that this ending is as much about the wonder of America
as its failure to live up to that wonder
does not negate the expressed beauty of that wonder...in resources--see
DeTocqueville...and in ideals......(all thru).

And who are the haunted (beyond Rebekah), which we haven't talked about
yet? More of his genius about the founding of the country, imho.

Mark



On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 12:12 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Interesting that you see M&D that way and see it as such a celebration of
> America. I see lots of comedy and in fairly equal doses the same dark
> underbelly, that same whelming momentum of colonial control that runs
> through all of Ps work. Freedom is  a powerful idea and a powerful force
> but as we see throughout M&D some always build their 'freedom' on others'
> backs. The westward movement was annihilating some; this was not just
> ambiguity or the minor taint of humanness. It was murdereously  essential
> to the project. The connection between this dark thing that will play out
> to be a fatal flaw in a tragedy or the minor character flaws in a comedy is
> still with us and profoundly undecided.
>  I agree with David Morris that P sets these dark tendencies against
> transcendent reversals. Hope is part of the mix. But for me there is an
> overly religious and unrealistic  faith in any euchatastrophic mindset.
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jan 2, 2018, at 7:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We can't forget that Mason & Dixon is a sustained full-length comedy in
> most of the major senses. Anyway, I can't.
> >
> > Check wikipedia on Comedy for the usual trot-through of everything
> important and more.
> >
> > George Meredith said that "One excellent test of the civilization of a
> country ... I take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and
> the test of true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.
> >
> > American literary theorist Kenneth Burke writes that the "comic frame"
> in rhetoric is "neither wholly euphemistic, nor wholly debunking--[that
> balance beam of ambiguity which makes TRP a great mental gymnast of ideas,
> imho]—hence it provides the charitable attitude towards people that is
> required for purposes of persuasion and co-operation, but at the same time
> maintains our shrewdness concerning the simplicities of ‘cashing in.’"
> (Burke 166).  Critical to the comic frame is an understanding that humanity
> is good, but flawed.
> >
> > The simplicities of 'cashing in' are what I try to avoid.
> >
> > Here's one answer to Ugly:
> > "However, the characters portrayed in comedies were not worse than
> average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, which is a
> species of the Ugly."
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 5:23 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Speaking of satire, as we were.
> >
> > Sometimes, as some say about today's America, as Roth said about it in
> 1963; sometimes it is very funny just by "imitating" reality.
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > http://www.classicsandclass.info/product/169/
> >
> > On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 11:25 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Third time through this book, and I am struck (again) by just how early
> in the text the LED comes--as if there should be no question about how many
> questions there will be about the world of the book.
> >
> > But the learnedness is interesting to me. The LED is the most civilized
> member of most every group of talking mammals he encounters. The LED's
> learnedness is the most foregrounded part of his identity. His civility is
> acquired.
> >
> > And this, some time later, p. 92, amid the rainstorms, the young and
> learning Seductrices Vroom, pursuing their "malicious fun," trying to
> trigger what we might assume are at least somewhat born-in sexual responses
> from our Astronomers (mostly M, though even he may be a more acceptable
> substitute for the African boys ("Babies, rather," as Austra reminds and
> admonishes the V sisters) they might otherwise be exploiting) as they await
> the Transit ...
> >
> > "[Austra's] blond Procuresses all begin to expostulate at once, and
> Mason understands that the vocal assaults of the Vrom Poultry are not
> inborn, but rather learn'd in this World from their Owners."
> >
> > Does ugliness, just like civility or refinement, descend through great
> hierarchical chains of ownership?
> >
> > I think some version of this question underlays the book just like so
> much of the political philosophy that background the novel, the Hobbeses
> and Lockes and Hamiltons of what is, we are told, the Age of Reason. Isn't
> it?
> >
> >
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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