M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Mark Kohut]

Most/many of my "readings" and overall reading risk being more
ahistoric than historic. I skew and may skew too much in the steady
directional belief that M & D is willfully, yes winkingly, one of the
most "contemporary" historical novels ever.I won't mention the most
obvious examples here,--hemp, hemp anyone?-- known to all.

Have we all read any reviewers/ lit crits who are always saying that
the most realistic, faultlessly researched historical novels STILL
ALWAYS reveal their tacit contemporary, cultural, historical
perspectives?

When I read the last one of those---on Mantel, I think--I inevitably
thought that THIS was another 'truth' Pynchon decided to make almost a
part of M &D, another longitude line; a line of metafiction about
historical fiction, so to speak---in  order to show those constant
American patterns that I have been seeing and trying to articulate
THIS reading.



On 1/21/18, 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