A week has passed, I’m somewhere around 150 pages into the novel, and it’s still mostly slow going for now. It kind of feels like there are hundreds of threads being identified in this opening exposition and I’m not entirely sure which to prioritize, or something like that. So I took to seeing what I could find in terms of scholarly criticism, etc. on the novel: articles, essays, you know. After reading through most of one, I’ve got a little bit better of an idea of where this book is going, but I almost feel like I’m cheating myself out of the reading experience. I don’t know. Stop being so sentimental, is probably the answer to that.
I was also reminded of that article Pynchon wrote in 84, “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” which one critic (David Cowart?) identified as a sort of precursor to M&D so I was able to find that article and I’ll read it over the weekend.
Something cool he got me keen to in the article was the notion of a black hole. I’ve already come across that first reference to “The Black Hole of Calcutta” incident (154), of which I don’t know any more at this point than the little that’s provided within the novel. But regardless, this night when supposedly 120 Englishmen were tortured and killed by their Indian captors – apparently this event is widely known as the “Black Hole”…not just by Pynchon – has the metaphorical effect of seeming to be a vacuum-y form of cultural punishment. All the rationality and supposed pragmatism of British colonialism in a much more spiritual (mystical?) land is like the collapse of a star. I’m still working on why it’s part of the “menu” at Cornelius’s preferred brothel. Gotta be something of the old death/eroticism dynamic here.
I have skimmed the Luddite article, though, and Cowart quoted it a few times, so I have a general understanding of where it goes (and of the closing epigraph – Byron identifying the Luddites with American revolutionaries…seems almost too fitting). So from what I do know, the image of the black hole looks like it might have roots in this article. Pynchon calls the medieval era that preceded the Age of Reason the “Age of Miracles,” because – according to the article – people still believed then that the miraculous and the fantastic were possible, if only because it hadn’t been reasonably disproved by science. “Giants, dragons, spells,” he says. More specifically, this magic had “degenerated into mere machinery.” There’s an early play on this in M&D in the form of the Learnéd English Dog, who should totally be seen as miraculous, but who, in his own words, is just indicative of “provisions for survival in a world less fantastic,” “the end of a process.” (22) Mason & Dixon themselves being men of science, relying quite heavily on machinery, they seem to be kind of stuck in the middle of this split, which I think comes through in Mason’s worrywart-edness, for example, the way he is trying to achieve a spiritual revelation at the Vroom house (88-ish), but demands from Dixon a precise scientific method to achieve it. Or more grandly, in his varying efforts to communicate with Rebekah.
Anyway, I’m getting moving here. Still dealing with a lot of exposition I think, especially reading some of that essay and getting a glimpse at a few of the avenues on the visto. (Hyuck, hyuck) So far in the syllabus, there’s always been something about the Night, and there’s always been something about underground (usually literally) and I’m definitely catching whiffs of those scents again here. Will probably try to follow those trails as I finish up Part 1 over the weekend.
Matt
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