"What,-- seek the Truth and not tell it! Shameful."

Excuse the ensuing schizophrenia.

I haven't yet reached the Ghastly Fop sub-text -- I stopped for the night at Ch. 40, and that episode apparently occurs somewhere in the early 50's. With any luck, I'll hit it tomorrow night, Thursday at the latest. I think the only mentions made of it thus far have been as insults directed at Dixon by Mason. Possibly one other time of which I can't recall a context. Either way.

Since this is kind of an outdated thought at this point, I'll get it out of the way first: I'm stuck thinking about how it feels to read this novel, as compared to how it feels to read, say, GR. There are certain pairings/assemblies of characters and certain conversations that I feel primed to read a certain way (not even analytically -- just on a base, experiential level). I do what I can to shake off that influence when it seems particularly manipulative, but it has yielded some interesting trains of thought too. The most succinct and relevant train having to do with Mason & Maskelyne out at St. Helena, "doing each other's charts," etc. These interactions had a totally pre-informed shape while I was reading those chapters, and I think it's the shape of Roger Mexico and Pointsman. You have the old doctor, obsessed with the integrity of his science, so totally self-involved and self-righteous, to an almost villainous effect (moreso for Ptsman). Then you have the young melancholy protegé, and it almost feels right to make Jessica and Rebekah analogous in this context. The most blatant difference, I think, is that Maskelyne's "evil" is so immediately transparent and comedic, whereas Pointsman, barring the toilet-bowl-foot incident chasing the dogs, retains a nefariousness for a pretty substantial portion of the novel.

So I guess the question is that if Mask&Mas are Old Tom's version of Young Tom's Ptsman&Rog, what happened between '73 and '97? Or maybe the better question is, "What happened between 1761 and 1944?" The progression seems to be from "occasionally-weird-but-essentially-harmless loony" (Maskelyne) to "weird-and-sinister-but-when-it's-all-said-and-done,-essentially-harmless loony" (Pointsman). In the end, I'm reminded of Pointsman's final scene out on the promontory, face to the wind -- much like how Maskelyne is left in M&D. [Side note: after writing this, I'm struck with the uncanny sense that my facts are wrong, but GR is hiding from me right now...]

As for more "contemporary" stuff. You brought up the notion of people becoming things, as in V., and I was thinking about that while Cherrycoke, snowed in with M. and D., the German girls, the French chef, etc., is thinking about the nature of the Eucharist. He is revisiting questions of whether "the Body and Blood of Christ are consubstantiate with, or transubstantiated from, the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist." (385) I think this dilemma is pretty well-tied-up-with that (maybe original?) Pynchon problematic of animate-becoming-inanimate. Does living flesh become "non-living" foodstuffs? (If so, which is implicit in the vocabulary of the liturgy, the Christian mass would hinge on this very transition from "alive" to "not alive" -- and back to "alive" again? although I guess that last transition isn't directly reflected in the ceremony of the mass...) Cherrycoke posits at last that "the outward Forms are given to bread and wine as an act of God's Mercy, for otherwise we should be repell'd by the sight of real human Flesh and Blood." (385-6)

This hypothesis of his seems to resonate with and expand upon the ways Pynchon has already identified that people live with the fact of violence done to other people. It is given forms that seem more humane to mask a "terrible reality" -- something of GR's old "paper death"?? The violence is still there, but in a digestible form (or at least a form we've learned to digest without much trouble). It's really interesting that (a) Cherrycoke settles on an answer that is actually heretical, and that (b) this heresy is pushed one step further to imagine that even the Body and Blood might only be digestible metaphors for an "Ultimate Carnality." Seems bleaker now than the passage had initially let on...

With that in mind (or without it: probably doesn't matter), I want to get to that long epigraph from Cherrycoke's book that begins Ch. 35 (pg 349). I think it's a fairly famous passage in the novel; most I've read about the book has at least made mention of it, no doubt because of the way it seems to be, almost too simply, a clear definition of "History" in Pynchon-terms. "History is not Chronology," but "nor is it Remembrance....[It] can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other." That's just straight-shooting: history can't be the factual record that Uncle Ives insists upon, but neither is it memory, because "[that] belongs to the People." So if History belongs to someone other than "the People," it must belong to the Historian. Later, in the argument with Ives, Cherrycoke asserts that "It may be the Historian's duty to seek the Truth, yet must he do ev'rything he can, not to tell it."

On the one hand, I think it's pretty easy to say, "This is Pynchon's artistic goal! This is how we should read Pynchon!" and I don't think that's entirely wrong either. I think in a lot of ways, he did intend this passage to be a clear explication of some previously vague distinctions between terms that Pynchon had secretly reappropriated decades ago. There is definitely an analogy between why "Aesop was oblig'd to tell Fables," and why Pynchon is "oblig'd" to write historical fiction of this variety. (350) The truth is in the fiction.

On the other hand, which is not really in contradiction to the first hand, I think there is also something here that deals with the voice Pynchon uses to narrate his novels, as opposed to his authorial imperative: the technique vs. the motivation. In that same epigraph, Cherrycoke* says that "Practitioners [of History, i.e., Pynchon] must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit." Now I won't pretend I didn't have to look up "quidnunc", but apparently, a quidnunc is a gossip. Spy is obvious. "Taproom Wit" to me, seems the most complex component; in my mind, its a sort of blend of stand-up comedy and lewd drunken humor. All of these things, when considered retrospectively, are pretty directly at play in Pynchon's prose. Gossip, espionage, and inappropriate comedy. The syntax of the second half of the epigraph was a little more difficult, but I essentially interpreted it to say that holding on to this "tangle of Lines" that together make up "History" (as opposed to a "Chain of single Links") is our best chance at avoiding the collapse into the abyss. If we held onto a chain of single links (read: "facts") the debunking of one so-called "fact" would be too traumatic and destructive to bear.

Chapter 39 ends with a cryptic look forward to the problem of slavery in the Americas, which I know is something you want me to keep an eye out for as I keep moving. For Mason, "In all Virginia, tho' Slaves pass'd before his Sight, he saw none. That was what had not occurred." (398) To be honest, I really don't feel like I have much of a clue as to how to read that second sentence. Hopefully, some illumination follows.

Realizing now also that I forgot a semi-major point about Pynchon being a "subjunctive" historian ("what may yet have happened") that I guess I'll relegate to the next post.

Till then.