M&D Ch 1-3 Notes

[Smoke Teff]

Am going to start typing up and sending out my notes in the coming days.
Hopefully will be caught up to ~Ch. 20 within a week or so.

CHAPTER 1





p. 5



“Arcs, starr’d” the language of the novel as ever expressing the conceptual
vocabulary of the novel and its characters.



(Cf. p. 172, Mason & Rebekah’s ghost reflecting on their respective
conceptions of the stars. “[Rebekah says,] ‘You believ’d, when you were a
Boy, that the Stars were Souls departed.’

“‘And you, that they were Ships at Anchor.’ She had, once,--as our Sky, a
Harbor to Travelers from Ev’rywhere.

“’Look to the Earth,’ she instructs him. ‘Belonging to her as I do, I know
she lives, and there here upon this Volcanoe in the Sea, close to the
Forces within, even you, Mopery, may learn of her, Tellurick Secrets you
could never guess.’”)







“the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots” like bells, a kind
of innocent summoning, very church-like, to a sermon that, like the Card
Table, will offer “an illusion of Depth”





p. 6



The sense of remove from the world is continued: “the City today might be
an Isle upon an Ocean.”



“Nerve-Lines of concentrated Light” pre-figuring some of the Tellurick, Ley
Line type stuff to come.



Then of course we are introduced to the LeSpark family name.



“Sultan enough”



The novel is still building its thematic vocabulary—not that it will stop.
The vast majority of our view of the world comes through Anglicized
characters and speech, but we get these intrusions of less occidental
referents, which come with various connotations of exoticism, opulence,
mystery, savagery, chaos, irrationality





p. 7



“the old Pewter Coffee-Machine venting its Puffs of Vapor”



the confluence of coffee and ~wind—two things that get big treatment in
this novel. Wind will take on many different kinds of meaning, none
reducible or fully knowable—and of course that’s the point. Coffee is given
as a kind of superpotent instrument in human discourse. As a chemical
intermediary of the wind?



p. 8



“the eventless corridors of Syncope”



For me, pre-figuring the lost eleven days, and in general the novel’s theme
of meaning and meaningful events occurring outside time, or in some
atypical relation to the normal human conception of forward time.



p. 9



“Uncle Ives[…] but lately return’d from a Coffee-House Meeting[…]
feeling[…] alone, pedestrian, desiring to pass the time to some Revenue, if
not Profit.”



Possible complication of the apparent beneficence of the coffee drug, Ives
who will increasingly come to symbolize juridicism, low-level governmental
corruption, and here the profit motive, the inability to be still and
patient and idle, possibly to know something like peace or God (in the way
Dixon will advise Mason). Introducing the ubiquity of the profit-hungry,
quantifying mind that results from the Age of Reason (explored in real full
flower in Dutch Africa)



Rev: ’twas one of the least tolerable of Offenses in that era[…] the Crime
they styl’d “Anonymity.”’



p. 10 (cont’d from last quote)



Rev: ‘It took me till I was lying among the Rats and Vermin, upon the
freezing edge of a Future invisible, to understand that my name had never
been my own,--rather belonging, all this time, to the Authorities, who
forbade me to change it, or withhold it, as ‘twere a Ring upon the Collar
of a Beast, ever waiting for the Lead to be fasten’d on… One of those
moments Hindoos and Chinamen are ever said to be having, entire loss of
Self, perfect union with All, sort of thing. Strange Lights, Fires, Voices
indecipherable,--indeed, Children, this is the part of the Tale where your
old Uncle gets to go insane.’



Lots happening here, as we come to a close of this first chapter. First, an
incredibly deep and dark catechism into the abuses of the state from the
Rev. Cherrycoke to his children, the notion that the state employs your
name as a kind of SLAVERY to your self/ego. An introduction of oriental
referents not purely for exoticism but for their self-transcendent
potentialities, what we might unironically call wisdom. But what looks, in
the occident, like (the *privilege of *[“gets to”]) going insane.



Also this gives a really interesting emotional component to Cherrycoke’s
(and Pynchon’s?) telling: the notion that he has been to the brink of
ego-death, or has seen some kind of ecstatic and painful truth at the
bottom of the world, but suffers the weight of his name/self-collar in a
way that, here and elsewhere, seems somewhat exhausting…for what? To
educate the children, likely. For the Moral of the story. (Cf. Ch 3: “O
children, I even dream’d in those Days,--but only long after the waking
Traverse was done.”)





But then of course Pynchon subverts this in the next paragraph on the
bottom of ten, as the reliability of the Reverend’s account is brought into
question.



p. 11



“I set sail upon an Engine of Destruction.”



Pre-figures the metaphor of America as such an engine.







CHAPTER 2



M&D get introduced. One of my favorite chapters. Largely an apparent parody
of the obsequiousness and absurd deferentiality of the day’s
rhetoric/correspondence. As if M&D are competing to be the more servile.
But of course it’s deeper than parody—they ARE compelled by the style of
the day to compete in expressing their own servility. Not that, in the
realm of public affairs, they will be immune from other kinds of
competition. But the insanity—the ubiquity of slavery, even in the thoughts
of the people who would seem to be invulnerable to it—comes through in the
language here.



Other thoughts: the formality provides an interesting launchpad to what
becomes an incredibly complex and intimate relationship. Very satisfying to
look back on this initial introduction.



I find comparing their sign-offs interesting. D: “Y’r obd’t s’v’t.” M: “y’r
obdt. Svt.,”



There’s still a bit of anarchy and senselessness to the formal conventions
of the day. Also, I can’t help but see the abbreviations and the
apostrophes through the lens of the “eventless corridors of syncope” from
ch. 1. Grammatical syncope. There are interstitial spaces everywhere. Our
awareness, even our apparently exhaustively formal and precise
communications, are full of assumptions and missing information, just like
the card table, just like…







CHAPTER 3



p. 14



“I was not there when they met,--or, not in the usual Way. I later heard
from them how they remember’d meeting.”



The Rev is outside time.



“O children, I even dream’d in those Days,--but only long after the waking
Traverse was done.”



*Traverse *obviously resonates with the family Traverse in AtD.





“’How can Yese dwell thah’ closely together, Day upon Day, without all
growing Murderous?’”



Two important things being introduced here. The inevitable effects of human
density—as if the natural laws of urbanism and population density involve
some limit that when moved toward/past leads to a kind of chaos and
violence. Also: murderousness. Maybe it’s just common usage of the day, but
it feels like murder in particular—the willingness to take an individual
life—comes in for a lot of focus in this book.



“yet another Term in the Contract between the City and oneself” more on
laws of urbanism







p. 15



“’whilst in London, ‘tis the Paradise of the Quarrelsome, for fair…?’”



Working against any notions of the unique savagery of the orient.



“the Friday Hangings”



Murder on schedule, routinized, rationalized



“where he was soon chatting up Hangmen and their ‘Prentices”



Obviously recalls Pirate from GR





“’There’s nothing like it, it’s London at its purest,’ he cries. ‘You must
come out there with me, soon as we may.’”



Here we see the kind of perversely macabre state the novel finds the
semi-recently widowered Mason.



“So Dixon for the second time in two minutes finds himself laughing without
the Motrix of honest Mirth[…] feeling it his Duty to set them at Ease.”



Dixon’s more homegrown, folksy gentility and manneredness—in addition to
learning about the two astronomers, do we start to see some of the symbolic
seeds of regional difference that will bloom into the north and the land of
Dixie?



Dixon’s mannered obsequiousness here also stands in stark contrast to his
outraged apotheosis with the slave-driver and whip toward novel’s end. He
comes a long way.







p. 16

“The two are staring, one at the other, each with a greatly mistaken
impression,--likewise in some Uncertainty as to how the power may come to
be sorted out betwixt ‘em.”



One of the many moments in the book where P is speaking beyond merely this
scene and outward to the future and all the novel’s historico-thematic
resonances.



p. 17



“Surveyors are runnin’ about numerous as Bed-bugs, and twice as cheap, with
work enough for all certainly in Durham at present, Enclosures all over the
County[…]”



Note here that in Kafka’s *The Castle*, K is a surveyor. Feels
semi-relevant given the increasing importance of The Castle in the next
~150pp. Also, given some of the themes of the earth’s abiding and
mysterious potency, important to note the context of land enclosures
happening simultaneously—an important detail alongside the commodification
of enslaved human labor and the astonishing land hunger that’s going to
drive colonial—then American—politics, global trade, war, etc.



More personality differences noted here as expressed in fashion: M’s almost
puritanical solemnity with all things sartorial, D’s flamboyance, Edenic
abundance of bad taste (reminiscent of Slothrop, Sportello, etc.). This one
of many instances of the tendency of humans to tend toward extreme
binaries—or at least of people (readers) to interpret human behavior
according to binary categories. But this is important because this will
eventually lead to the American civil war that will give such weight to the
line our astronomers—and then massive-scale surveyors—will oversee the
drawing of.







p. 18



“the two sorts of drinking Folk this implies, thah’ is, Grape People and
Grain People.”



Another binary



“chimney-smoke perambulates into the Christmastide air”



This brings me back to the Christmas evensong section in the first ~200pp.
of GR. That section is full of different kinds of…material continuity.
Toothpaste tubes being reused for aluminum, yes, but also kinds of
continuity that exist outside the realm of the human, outside the War.



There, as here, there is a continuity in the movement of water, snow,
vapor, air, wind…

This kind of continuity will also be important in M&D—and of course there
is continuity between the two books in these and other ways.





p. 19



“With no appetite for the giant Mutton Chop cooling in front of him, Mason
mopishly now wraps it and stows it in his Coat. Looking up, he notes Dixon,
mouth cheerfully stuff’d, beaming too tolerantly for his Comfort.”



M’s ironic melancholy, D’s earnestness



“’Why mayn’t there be Oracles, for us, in our time? Gate-ways to Futurity?
That can’t all have died with the ancient Peoples. Isn’t it worth looking
ridiculous, at least to investigate this English Dog, for its obvious
bearing upon Metempsychosis if nought else,--’”



Pre-figuring a lot of the irrationality to come.



Also, to my mind, “Metempsychosis” rings of Joyce’s *Ulysses*. Another
parallel is that the telling of this novel is somewhat occasioned by
Mason’s funeral, as *Ulysses *action is precipitated by Poor Dignan’s
funeral.



p. 20



“There is something else in progress,--something Mason cannot quite
confide. Happen he’s lost someone close? and recently enough to matter,
aye,--for he’s a way of pitching ever into the Hour, heedless, as Dixon
remembers himself, after his father passed on….”



Right after Mason mentions modern oracles, Dixon is able to read into
Mason’s heart. How much of the novel’s magick is the workings of the human
mind, human affection, human intimacy, in ways we don’t know how to
rationalize?



“upstart Chapels”



The Great Awakening is part of the background and occasional foreground



-The miraculous dog stopping to piss—Pynchon ever subverting his loftiest
themes, bringing the heavens back to the grotesque body





p. 21



“’I’ve been out more than once to the Indies,--there’s a million islands
out there, each more likely than the last, and I tell you a handful of
Sailors with their wits about them, and that talking Dog to keep the
Savages amused, why, we could be kings.’”



Important to note that amid the apparent onslaught of the Age of Reason,
there is also this background emphasis on paranormality, religious
revivalism, harebrained schemes, travelling sideshows, etc.—all of which
feed deeply into the American character



p. 22



“’are you a human Spirit, re-incarnate as a Dog?’”



More continuity; Death is not the end. Or is it?



“holy Insanity”



cf. Cherrycoke’s holy insanity in Ch. 1—are all insanities holy in the Age
of Reason?



“’I may be praeternatural, but I am not supernatural. ‘Tis the Age of
Reason, rrrf?’”



Setting up preternaturality vs supernaturality—does this book contain
examples of both? Or only the former?



“’Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and Unicorns. What there are, however,
are Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick.’”



This is a fairly mysterious line, in my reading. Does preternaturality
emerge/obtain in the world as a means of shepherding the spirit through
this Age of Reason?



“’So we know how to evoke from you, Man, one day at a time, at least enough
Mercy for one day more of Life.”



This is a beautiful reading of the man-pet relationship, I think, and
suggests maybe that anything that evokes human mercy is itself kind of
preternatural in the sense I mention just above. Dogs also as Scherehazades
of Mercy—that is, using Mercy to keep themselves alive, using themselves to
keep Mercy alive (in the human), using Mercy to keep the human alive (in
the human). Cf. the definition of Mercy given pp. 171-2, speaking of
Rebekah Mason’s ghost: “those refusals, among the Living, to act on behalf
of Death or its ev’ryday Coercions,--Wages too low to live upon, Laws
written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death’s thousand Metaphors
in the World[…]”
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