M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Monte Davis]

Just to check off the obvious: these readings for both "Chinaman" and
"Corsican" involve stark anachronisms. People of the 1760s or 1780s knew
nothing about (1) importation of Chinese labor to the American west or (2)
Napoleon -- Corsica was just another Mediterreanean isle of hot-headed
banditti like Sardinia or Crete.

That doesn't mean they don't do the work you say, only that they do it
winkingly for us rather than the ostensible audience. "Jesuit," by
contrast, was good contemporary currency, with sinister attachment to

- Jacobite risings in Great Britain (1689, 1715, 1719, 1745, and support
for a notional French invasion in 1759)
- Catholic (and Francophone) Quebecois, most of Canada's settler population
even after British victory in the Seven Years' War
- those sneaky Catholics in Maryland, who had lost toleration in 1692 and
did not regain it until after the War of Independence.

On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 4:50 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> A Chinaman, a Jesuit and a Corsican....etc.
>
> Never finished. I offer this 'reading'.
>
> Jesuit. The spying network in M & D, as also the embodied conspiracy
> in American History notion, but also
> an invasion of privacy problem (at least) in history, in the history of
> America
> but also Jesuitical, the common stereotype of able to
> find rationalizations for whatever one argues, wants to believe, quite a
> pattern in the old and new world of religious freedom NOT, where justifying
> one's own against all other religions is always a reality.
>
> a Corsican. in M &D (and in the stereotype again), an adventurer. But also,
> having
> read part of an old (1962 Twayne's Authors (!)) trot through Churchill's
> writings, I learn
> what I think I learned here in a previous read but now know was extensive
> at one time.
>  Napoleon was called the Corsican in much common talk and in books. ( A
> hero of Churchill's, as one might expect, that :Hero
> of the Empire" himself).Take your Napoleon associations
> and apply them to America's adventurous spirit--America's self-chosen,
> self-justifying Empire
> "adventures", much later in history than M & D's American time but not, of
> course, England's.
>
> And a Chinaman. The word applied to the many immigrants who came and built
> the infrastructure of America with their
> hard exploited work. Also, as TRP does, another statement of the East's
> influence on the US.?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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