M&D CH 4 Notes

[Smoke Teff]

CHAPTER 4



p. 30



“to keep before him every day death, exile, and loss, believing it a
condition of his spiritual Contract with the world as given?”



This is the second mention of a contract one makes with the world
around oneself (p. 14 “yet another Term in the Contract between the
City and oneself) and there will be others (Mason speaking to Dixon
about Maskelyne’s motivations on p. 182: “Has he in the Strangeness of
his Solitude, reach’d a Compact with the Island, as if ‘twere
sentient, has he in some way come to belong to it in Perpetuity?”).
The juridical relationship of the soul to the world: is this some new
kind of conception in the world? Certainly Cherrycoke hints at it with
his thoughts on anonymity, names, and ownership in Ch. 1—and Ives
reminds us of the law throughout.



 “the Muzzle’s iron breath”



Reminds me of the notion of mineral consciousness from GR, also in
general of the notion this book offers of there being sentience to the
inanimate and inorganic world



“how had these daily devotions, he now wondered, ultimately ever been of use[…]

“To the children, he remarks aloud, ‘Of course, Prayer was what got us
through.’”



Cherrycoke is a kind of tragic figure, who has glimpsed revelation and
loss of self, but is occasionally still contractually bound to
ego-identification. I wonder to what extent his (Christian) vocabulary
of worship is really his only means of understanding his Faith, or
whether he is somewhat conscious of it simply being the socially and
historically appropriate one—THIS is, I think, something we might keep
an eye out for.



Also note from above quote: the idea of things like faith being OF USE
is of course part of the idea-poison of usefulness, efficiency,
quantification that we will see in fuller bloom and closer narrative
focus as the novel progresses.



This is a big thread to look out for, I think, the corruption of the
spirit by the emphasis on worldly purpose, on use, on efficiency, on
rationale.



“amiaby pollicates the Revd”



pollicates, internet tells me:



to gesture with the thumb

·       1997: ‘Disgusting? this is Tea, Friend, Cha,– what all
tasteful London drinks,– that,’ pollicating the Coffee-Pot, ‘is what’s
disgusting.’ — Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon



>From Latin pollex "thumb, big toe".





p. 31



“Mr. LeSpark made his Fortune years before the War, selling weapons to
French and British, Settlers and Indians alike”



This kind of duplicitous (or you might say disinterested, though it’s
hard to justify that perspective with something like arms trading)
entrepreneurship brought a lot of people profit in that war



“If there are Account-books in which Casualties are the Units of
Exchange, then, so it seems to Ethelmer, his Uncle is deeply in
Arrears.”



Lots here. First, reminds me of, as one prominent and extreme
expression of this kind of thing, the hyper-rational quantifying of
the Nazis toward their final solution



But also another example of the confluence of quantification (and the
language of the marketplace) and the greater mysteries—judgment.



Also, more emphasis on the individual sin of murder.



GR has a great deal to do with the categorical leap that happens with
weapons/war happening on the scale of the V2 program—when murder
becomes increasingly depersonalized. Many suffer it at once, but who’s
responsible? The machine of war, the collectivized efforts of the
hypnotized cult of death. M&D happens, historically, long before then,
when the forces and will of death could move through many people at
once, but there was still something more individualistic about the
kind of killing one does in, say, war. Also, the novel is much more
about individuals—investigates and identifies with individual egos
(M’s and D’s) much more deeply than P’s other novels. And with slavery
happening EVERYWHERE, individual complicity is a very potent question
(whereas the ubiquity of death in GR, for example, makes individual
survival perhaps the more important question)







“Ethelmer has heard tales of past crimes, but can hardly assault his
Host with accusations. Ev’ryone ‘knows’”



Again reminiscent of Nazis (and GR’s off-stage treatment of Jews), but
also a good opportunity for our novel’s first family to remind us that
no one in this enterprising country is totally uncomplicit and
innocent—but what of the twins, and their cheerful war games?



“Tho’ young, he was shrewd enough to smoak that what they were after
was his Plainness, including an idea of his Innocence, which they
fail’d to note was long, even enjoyably, departed.”



Is personality (in opposition to plainness) emergent out of lost
innocence? Here we see women trafficking in/preying on innocence—not
totally unknown in P’s work, but certainly less common than men doing
so, for whatever that observation is worth.





p. 32

“motes of wig-powder jigging by the thousands in the candle-light”



P does such great work creating sensual scenic texture in this book.
Here, as is often his tendency, these textural details come in long
lists.



“in the Royal Navy, a Ship of War’s Captain is expected to pay for his
own victualing.”



Something very capitalistic about this notion—and an obvious example
of how a system that necessitates acting in one’s own self-interest
leads not to greater harmony for all but to, for many, exploitation,
murderousness, barbarism



“’Alas, Gentlemen, one of many Sacrifices necessary to that strange
Servitude we style ‘Command’”



Conflation of servitude and command—coming off of the quote just above
this one, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a system that degrades
the dignity of the powerful and the oppressors as much as it does the
victims—they are all enslaved.





p. 33



We see the loneliness and servitude of command in the captain’s
Expectation: “the fancy of a Heart unschool’d in Guile,--that they
would of course all three be messing together, Day upon Day[…]”



“’I assum’d, foolishly, that we’d go in equal Thirds, and meant to ask
but your Share of what I hop’d to be spending, out of my personal
Funds, upon your behalf”



He IS unschooled in guile—even his conception of how this obvious
pay-your-own-way system works involves people somehow sharing
expenses—though presumably to an end that involves everyone ultimately
paying what they would otherwise?



The captain’s semi-innocence here is very interesting



“Dixon and the Captain, as if in Conspiracy, beam sweetly back till
Mason can abide no more.”



Interesting to use that word (Conspiracy) here. I looked it up—it
looks like the usage goes way up just after 1750, where it peaks for
the next ~75 years or so.



But also illustrates Mason’s emotional distrust, depressiveness,
distaste for sentimentality, paranoia.





p. 34





“’No one else is going there to observe,’ Mason says. ‘Odd, isn’t it?
You’d think there’d be a Team from somewhere.’

“Capt. Smith looks away, as if embarrass’d. ‘Perhaps there is?’ he
suggests, as gently as possible.”



The paranoia starts to materialize in real questions about their
mission. Which are awkwardly handled by a man unschool’d in Guile.





“’Aye, and that’s the Tail of the Bolt,’ a sailor informs them, ‘where
the Ramillies went down but the year February, losing seven hundred
Souls.’”



The year of Marvels!





“Capt. Smith has lived in a tidy corner of Hell previously unfamiliar to him.”



Salvation and damnation are lived places, are experiences of (or from,
in salvation’s case) the ego? Fits with the novel’s general schema of
closer ego identification (relative to P’s other work).





p. 35



“Yet, yet,…through the crystalline spray, how gilded comes she,--how
corposantly edg’d in a persisting and, if Glories there be, glorious
light…and he knows her, it must be from a Dream, how could it be
other? A Light in which all Pain and failure, all fear, are bleach’d
away…”



To me, this brought Iceland Spar to mind. In AtD Iceland Spar is
suggested as somehow bifurcating not only light but time. The standard
forward-motion (and reducing to a single certain line) of time in M&D
is also stepped outside, but in different ways. Crystalline
spray…almost as if the outside-time properties of Iceland Spar have
been rendered diffuse, atmospheric…



…and it is outside time (and time-telling self) that we achieve
deliverance from Pain and failure?



Also cor·po·sant

ˈkôrpəˌsant,ˈkôrpəsənt/

noun

archaic

1.    an appearance of St. Elmo's fire on a mast, rigging, or other structure.





 “’He wishes to be taken as a man of Science,’ opines the Revd upon
first meeting the Astronomers.”



Here we see, in the Age of Reason, also the age of scientism—being
seen as belonging to the scientifick/philosophickal is the new way of
being one of the Elect.



“The Vessel herself, however, enjoys a Reputation for Nerve, having
proved it at Quebec”



More 7-yrs War stuff happening in the background, but also the idea of
Nerve, of sentience, belonging to inhuman things—land, cities,
corporations, now also ships?



“Thenceforward is her Glory assur’d. She has done her duty in the
service of a miracle in that year of miracles, 1759”



The Year of Miracles/Marvels again.



Also, as I noted, around the time the word conspiracy experiences a
vast uptick in usage according to Google’s ngram. Coincidence?



For miracles cf. pp. 151ff: “Perhaps miracles are still
possible,--both evil miracles, such as occur when excesses of Ill
Treatment are transform’d to Joy,--quite common in this Era,--and the
reverse, when excesses of Well-being at length bring an Anguish no
less painful for being metaphysickal,--Good Miracles”



This section tells us of the ambivalence of Miracles. What are they,
then? Events that occur without rational explanation? Or that happen
outside the apparently rational laws of the universe? Well from a
certain standpoint, then, it makes sense that miracles would increase
in the earlygoing of the Age of Reason.





p. 36



“In return for freedom to range upon the Sea, one was bound by a Code
as strict as that of any ancient Knight.”



Yet another instance of one making a contract with one’s space—except
here it’s not an overt contract but an informal Code, all the stricter
because it allows the freedom of informality. Is it still freedom,
then?



“’Now, Eques[…]means “an arm’d Horseman.”’



“’Later, in old Rome, it came to mean a sort of Knight,--a Gentleman,
somewhere between the ordinary People and the Senate.’”



My mind flashes briefly, to Der Springer from GR. But also, something
about the BETWEENness here. People : Senate :: Preterite : Elect? Or
is that a fallacy of the modern mind? Why do they need something
between them? Is it a consequence of greater social stratification?



“Lieutenant Unchleigh”



I hear the word Lunch in Pig Latin





p. 37



“They have grown up, English Boys never far from the Sea, with Tales
of its Battles and Pirates and Isles just off the Coasts of Paradise.
They know what ‘below’ promises.”



In addition to the early-ingratiated sense of topographical hierarchy
(which conflates of course with, obviously, Christian
heaven/earth/hell and the Great Chain of Being)…



Cf. 151ff again: “After they are gone passes a silent period, an
enshadowment which, prolonged past a certain point upon the
Clock-Face, begins to rouse apprehension among the filles, for they
know their Night has begun, and who is coming for them now, and some
of what will be done to them.”



These kinds of ideas about the world are inculcated in everyone.





--Lots of stuff about dealing with the wind in the run-up to battle here.



“’Blood flowing in the scuppers!’ cries Pitt.”



So much for the kids’ innocence, the ineffability of blood…



“One reason Humans remain young so long, compar’d to other Creatures,
is that the young are useful in many ways, among them in providing
daily, by way of the evil Creatures and Slaughter they love, a Denial
of Mortality clamorous enough to allow their Elders release, if only
for moments at a time, from Its Claims upon the Attention.”



Cf. p. 22: “Once, the only reason Men kept Dogs was for food. Noting
that among Men no crime was quite so abhorr'd as eating the flesh of
another human, Dog quickly learn'd to act as human as possible,— and
to pass this Ability on from Parents to Pups. So we know how to evoke
from you, Man, one day at a time, at least enough Mercy for one day
more of Life.”



So we see the idea that the function of non-adult-humans is, to some
extent, to help prolong and give flower to the life of the spirit, of
innocence, etc. Or at least, that is their function as conceived by
the egos of adult humans (who, in this era, come to regard things
exclusively for their utility?).



For children, denying mortality is natural. For adults, denying
mortality is, in some sense, just denial—in another, it’s a
deliverance from the self and a return to innocence



ALSO—I’ve been reading this Lovejoy book about the Great Chain of Being.

He notes that Aristotle’s thinking introduces this complication to
man’s conception of life and being. Namely, that post-Aristotle people
conceive of being as being both totally continuous and categorically
stratified.



And Aristotle DOES come up with a method of organizing those strata
into a hierarchy. His heuristic is that the higher kinds of life are
those whose newborns spend the longest periods in
immaturity/development (which puts humans at the top for him, natch)





p. 38



“By the end of the Engagement I was left with nothing but my Faith
between me and absolute black Panic. Afterward, from whatever had
happen’d upon that patch of secular Ocean, I went on to draw Lessons
more Abstract.”



The passage to death is depicted as oceanic in this book several times.



Also, the idea of faith as intermediary, something BETWEEN. There are
other such intermediaries (Rebekah’s ghost is, for Mason, an
intermediary.) And p. 36: ““’Later, in old Rome, it came to mean a
sort of Knight,--a Gentleman, somewhere between the ordinary People
and the Senate.’”



Intermediaries something like guardian angels?



Cf. p 40: “Some at the time said there had been another sail, and that
the Frenchman, assuming it to be a British Man o’ War, had in fact
broken off, and headed back in to Brest as speedily as her condition
would allow. Some on the Seahorse thought they’d seen it,--most had
not. (‘Perhaps our guardian Angel,’ the Revd comments, ‘—instead of
Wings, Topgallants.’)”





“I felt that with each fraction of a second, Death was making itself
sensible in new ways….WE WERE SOON CLOSE ENOUGH to hear the creak and
jingling of the gun tackle and the rumble of trucks upon the deck[…]”



More about Death REVEALING itself. When it reveals itself to Mason
through Rebekah, it comes teaching him about Mercy (and Mercy as
denial of death). Here it is revealed through human proximity and
density. This is in accord with the notion suggested elsewhere that
increases in human density create increases in violence and death.





“Each time the firing stopp’d[…]”

This passage is rather horrifying and terrific, I think. Also the idea
of awaiting your fate without being able to SEE it.





“Blows whose personal Malevolence was more frightening even than their
Scale,--the Ship’s hoarse Shrieking, a great Sea-animal in pain, the
textures of its Cries nearly those of the human Voice when under great
Stress.”



More assignment of typically human or at least animal things
(Malevolence, pain) to nonhuman/non-animal things.





p. 39



“in some Phantom realm they have had the bad luck to blunder into”



The notion of differing (and competing) realms (as real or as made by
human consciousness) is big in P. Cf. antechambers to the throne,
Iceland Spar, the missing days of the calendar later in this novel.



“as Blood creeps like Evening to Dominion over all Surfaces”



Just want to highlight this because it’s beautiful and seems dense
with P’s thematic concerns—also in M&D there have been other mentions
of night growing as if it has its own properties and awareness.



“corpses are steaming”



More vaporous continuity, also dark and beautiful.



“Had the Frenchman really signal’d, ‘France is not at war with the sciences’?”



I would love some discussion on the meaning this takes on here, and
how it will accumulate throughout the book.



“One of those French shrugs. ‘You must, and of course, may.’”



Funny, also a perfect encapsulation of the book’s focus on the
irreconcilable tension between freedom and slavery.







p. 40



“Some at the time said there had been another sail, and that the
Frenchman, assuming it to be a British Man o’ War, had in fact broken
off, and headed back in to Brest as speedily as her condition would
allow. Some on the Seahorse thought they’d seen it,--most had not.
(‘Perhaps our guardian Angel,’ the Revd comments, ‘—instead of Wings,
Topgallants.’)”



The divine manifests in the costumery of the secular.



Also: who would this other ship be? Does the novel give us any
indication of this later on?



I think we should keep this early battle in mind as we read on and try
to form an idea of the forces moving our Astronomers.





“the Invisible Gamesters who wager daily upon the doings of Commerce
and Government”

Reminds me of Faulkner’s transcendent passage about the Diceman in The
Sound and the Fury (and to some extent McCarthy’s ultimate explanation
of just what the Judge is judge of in Blood Meridian)



But also—the old mythology styled them as disinterested Fates, the new
mythology calls them gamblers (who seek their own profit, of course)





p. 41



“Long after Nightfall, Mason and Dixon, officially reliev’d of their
Medical Duties, reluctant to part company, go lurching up on Deck,
exhausted, laughing at nothing,--or at ev’rything, being alive when
they could as easily be dead.”



Lots here. First: war/violence/death may result from human proximity,
but they also lead to human proximity, as this is kind of a landmark
moment in the affection of our two astronomers.



Second: plays interestingly against earlier chapters notions of (Dixon
especially) laughing mirthlessly. Here it gets a slightly positive
(though ultimately counterbalanced (by death) to a kind of
ambivalence) spin, as it’s ultimately laughter simply at the mystery
of being alive.



“’’They knew the French had Bencoolen,--what else did they know?
Thah’s what I’d like to know.’”



Obviously we are meant to carry these questions forward. But also,
this is of course quintessential P: sensing the limits of your own
knowledge, sensing that others (must) know much more than you do even
about your own fate. A particular kind of paranoiac thinking.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l