M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Joseph Tracy]

I was thinking along similar lines, that the examples are anachronistic, though the target audience  is hard to tell. I think Mark is onto something with the Corsican. Napolean was already active in the wings, Corsica was seeking independence and in a few decades Napolean would be in St Helena where one instance of the joke takes place. The Chinaman  seems to me to point in a different direction. China a mecca of trade and the culture of the east for centuries at the time of M&D and a chinaman would probably imply the exotic other. I think Mason’s first love interest was the daughter of a silk merchant.

What to my mind is deliberately anachronistic for comic effect is the structure of the Joke which is widely used now, but has anyone heard of this joke pattern from the 18th century? What were jokes like at that time? 
   
> On Jan 21, 2018, at 7:51 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

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