M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Monte Davis]

JT> Napolean was already active in the wings

But subtly, given that he won't be born for nine years after this first
meeting between M & D.

On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 8:31 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> 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/?listpynchon-l
>
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