End of the Line

Well, I finished it. And it was great. Trying to think about the book in a comprehensive way, I can't help feeling that everything was executed in a much...maybe "softer" way? than Gravity's Rainbow. I don't know, maybe the best way to articulate the sense would be to say that GR seemed written by a mad scientist, whereas M&D's author seemed like more of a careful craftsman.

I'm compelled to make these comparisons, I guess because they're the 2 books in the syllabus that seem to compete the most directly: length/scope, early vs. late, which one is "better," etc. But the distinct impression that I kept getting during "Last Transit" was that there was a very serious concern for the relationship between fathers and sons. Someone suggested it had something to do with Pynchon's relationship with his own father, after the birth of Jackson Pynchon. I'd buy it. The scene with Doc Isaac at Dixon's grave was just so beautifully rendered and unexpected; it was almost powerful enough to suggest its own centrality in the task of the novel...an awfully roundabout way to get there, but hey.

As for the Underground stuff, I'm beginning the process of paging thru my notes and highlighting some candidate-episodes for inclusion in the paper. Concurrently, I'm starting to see the edges of the thesis-region on the horizon. I think I want to say something along the lines of the Underground -- in all of its associations with the Night, with revolt, with folklore, with hiding, with magic, etc. -- being not just a haven for Counterforces/-ers, but also a node of potentiality, oftentimes a dangerous one (a la the way Dixon fears that whatever lives in the Cave will one day seek revenge on the Anglicans that use it as a church). I think Pynchon also creates "Undergrounds" at the level of the texts themselves, systems and shapes that in our discovery of them as readers, and subsequently in our discovery of their often contradictory and "incomplete" natures, which subvert/reimagine the act of reading. I think that under that same controlling theme, I would also have room to comment on Pynchon's reappropriation of scientific language, which creates levels of meaning (in this sense, it creates an "underground" level of meaning below the surface level) in language that is supposedly "strictly factual" -- perhaps using the epigraph from Cherrycoke about what exactly "History" is, in relation to fact and memory.

Lately, I've begun to wonder if Pynchon might object to the idea of academic papers being written on his novels. Each of the 4 novels I've read for the course so far have been at least partly a polemic against the idea of humanity being "used." I think at some earlier point, during the posts on GR, I made a reference to Oscar Wilde's intro to Dorian Gray: "All art is quite useless." I think I wanted to say that it seemed to me, Pynchon was in agreement here, and that the idea of "uselessness as resistance" and as a method of survival in our world greatly informs his aesthetic vision. Does it follow that to "use" his novels for a grade in the (dare I say it) overwhelmingly bureaucratic and commercial education system would be antithetical to their message? Obviously, I only half-think this, because otherwise, I probably wouldn't be posting on the site. Actually, now that I think about it, the form of the class (blog-post, independent reading/thinking, etc.) is pretty removed from all that stuff that gets in the way of education. I guess it's just the idea of using Pynchon in the standard "college paper on literature" fashion. This is also probably very closely related to a rationalization of my rising vernal laziness.

So this post is shorter than normal, and not really full of close-reading like the others, but don't worry, I'm keeping busy. At this point, I think a lot of it would probably just look like annotating and asterisk-izing the notes that are already mostly annotation and asterisk. I am kind of excited to get working on this paper though.

A few clarifying questions.

1. What is a "Ley"? I have a sort of idea (read: I have read the Wikipedia article on "Ley lines") but I didn't know if you might be able to give me a more simplified definition?

2. How am I supposed to read the inflection in Dixon's voice when he ends a statement with "...?" Is it just a sort of inquisitive rise in pitch? Just looking for your preference here.

3. Would you say Against the Day is "worth reading"? Trying to put together a little summer reading list. Very unrelated, I'm sorry.

4. Even more unrelated, but...I remember reading a story in your Short Fiction class about a weird creature that lives on the stairs in some man's house and its presence is a source of weird unresolved anxiety. It was by either Borges or Kafka (strange not to be able to figure out which one) and I can't remember the title.

Matt

P.S. -- I'd be really interested in that stuff about Shakespeare and dolphins that you mentioned...? If I've got to wait till it's officially published, that's cool, but it just struck me as really interesting.

"a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition"

Endings get interesting in late Pynchon, starting with the bizarre funding-cut deus ex in Vineland.  M&D has a few different endings, including the sentimental final pages.  But the one I like most is the fantasy that, for project #2, the Ley-borne boys will "inscribe a Visto on the Atlantick Sea" (712).  First it solves longitude & navigational problems, then it gets co-opted by real estate developers and other disreputable capitalists: "Too soon, word will reach the Land-Speculation Industry, and its Bureaus seek Purchase, like some horrible Seaweed, the length of the Beacon Line" (712).  Love that image of seaweed as industrial predation...

But the close of this great mini-scene is M&D on this new salty Line --

'Tis here Mason and Dixon will retire, being after all Plank-Holders of the very Scheme, having written a number of foresighted Stipulations into their Contract with the Line's Proprieter, the transnoctially charter'd 'Atlantick Company.'  Betwixt themselves, neither feels British enough anymore, nor quite American, for either Side of the Ocean.  They are content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-keepers, ever in Ubiquity of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition.  (713)

Great stuff there -- political / national refusal, an ability to play capitalism's structures against itself, a commitment to "flow" and "transition."

Is St Brenden's Isle an underground place, in the terms you're putting together?

I used some quotations from this section in an article I wrote last year on dolphins and humans in Shakespeare & other 16-17c writers (out next year, perhaps, in a collection called The Indistinct Human).  But really it's part of a larger project, about fantasies of human-ocean mixing and collaboration.  There might be a chapter on Pynchon's ocean someday...

Under Draco, Above the Sha

Well I took a second to look at the placement of my bookmark in M&D today, only to find I’m much further along than I thought. Only about 200 pages left to go I guess…what is that, 4-5 days of reading? I guess I’ll be done with M&D by the end of next week at the latest. Crazy really, which gives me a week before Easter break to sit and stew on it. I think I’m going to take those 3-4 days to do a rough outline of the paper, before sort of breezing through Inherent Vice the next week, while I’m writing. I’m imagining that the posts might get a bit more bare-bones once they move toward outlining the paper, so…just a word of warning.

I’ve pretty much decided that I want to focus on notions of the “underground” in the whole oeuvre, with the emphasis being placed on GR and M&D (although I envision using Lot 49 and Vineland for their more social executions of the Underground). Don’t really have anything that even resembles a thesis right now, but I’m hoping one will appear during those outline days before Easter.

So with that in mind, I want to direct this post on recent instances of Underground significance in M&D, since after all these are essentially what are pushing me toward the paper topic. Something I’ve been struggling to understand is just exactly what Dixon’s relationship is with “the Tellurick.” In Chapter 48, at Harland’s Farm, Mr. McClean tells M. & D. about some “Iron deposits” they might meet, which are “underground mountain-ranges … burning down there for centuries, known to the Indians, perhaps us’d as well in connection with their mysterious Lead Mines in the Mountains. Right up your Street, Mr. Dixon.” (468) That, in conjunction with a comment in Ch. 51 about Ben Franklin and Dixon being understood as “magicians” because of their understanding and use of Magnetism. That, and the flying over Ley-Lines with Emerson’s school of Witches in Durham. The list goes one.

What complicates this image of Dixon as the Earth in the analogy “Mason : Dixon :: Sky : Earth (Astronomer : Surveyor, obv)” is that elsewhere in Chapter 51, when Mr. Shockey takes M. & D. out to the “remarkable Cave beneath the Earth” that even “the Indians…stay’d away from,” we are told that “the Cave oppresses [Dixon].” (496-7) Well, at first this confused me, because I figured Dix. Should be embracing this place. But after some thought, I’ve decided that it actually does make sense for Dixon to feel oppressed by this Cave of sub-earthly secrets, precisely because he is the one of the pair more in-tune with the Earth. M&D’s Field-Book submission from this episode asserts that the Cave is “the abodes of Death,” and Dixon’s primary apprehension stems from “trying to imagine what form of Life might be calling something as spacious as this Home.” (497) Eerie stuff.

Dixon’s anxiety is only reinforced when Captain Zhang shows up, and tells the pair about the Sha, or “Dragon…within, from which the Land-Scape ever takes it form.” (542) This must be the presence oppressing Dixon, and it makes sense that Zhang’s description of the Sha leads into a discussion of the unnaturalness of the tendency of American “political” borders to ignore Nature: “to form a Line upon the earth is to inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash…How can it pass unanswer’d?” (542)

The thing is that once Dixon sort of makes sense in these contexts, what does it mean to say that Mason, after visiting the same Cave, is super-excited and going on and on about “‘Text.’” He says that “‘it is Text,–– and we are its readers and its Pages are the Days turning. Unscrolling, as a Pilgrim’s Itinerary map in ancient Days. And this is the Chapter call’d ‘The Subterrenean Cathedral, or, The Lesson Grasp’d.’” (497-8) Is it worth it to say that a “text” is made up of “Lines” upon a page, which are attempts to represent unnamable thought (making it an “unnatural” impulse, as all language)? I don’t know, that seems pretentiously pomo, especially in the light of what’s been side about M&D as a turn toward wonder and awe. I really just don’t know what to make of the “subtitle” of Mason’s proposed chapter, “The Lesson Grasp’d.” What lesson did he learn?

I did want to say that I’m finally beginning to understand the phrase “against the day,” which is exciting. As I’m seeing it, a “day” is a concept which, astronomically, incorporates both time and space – the Earth physically rotates on its axis, but it also marks the passage of a period of twenty-four hours (i.e., actions occur and immediately begin their move into the realm of “the past”). To move “against the day” would be to move East perpetually. It’s all pretty much spelt out at the beginning of Ch. 48, but hey, it felt good. The next move I guess is to see the day as a “text” and one could theoretically “read the text of the day” right to left (East to West) like a Kabbalic text. Insert tie-in to Tarot here (“‘We are Fools,’ proposes Dixon one night.” 478). Anyway.

So at this point, are you in support of having the Underground be the focus of my paper, or do you think there are more relevant, erudite things I could be investigating? I think that with what I’ve been told is to come in M&D, the Mittelwerke, the W.A.S.T.E. system, 24fps, and that’s just off the top of the ol’ Dome, I should have a lot to work with. I’ll try over the next few days to assemble a more complete list of entry-points, and then maybe you can remind me what I’m overlooking.

Until then.

Along the Visto

My favorite lines from M&D, & possibly from Pynchon's tout court --

Newcomers to the Ley-borne Life are advis'd not to look up, lest, seiz'd by its proper Vertigo, they fall into the Sky.--  For 't has happen'd more than once, -- drovers and Army officers swear to it, -- as if Gravity along the Visto, is become locally less important than Rapture.  (651)

The obvious thing to say is that he's meta-speaking his own shift from GR's paranoia to a more capacious sense of wonder & amazement.  "Rapture" is also a theological term, & perhaps we see a shift in old Tom's attitude toward things unseen.  I also would emphasize the new value of communal experience, the shared "swear[ing]" of the drovers and Army officers who feel and know the new American Visto-world, against the solitude and solipsism of the Zone.


Maybe he's trying to write a sequel to the song that ends GR: "Now everybody--"?

I'll post later about my other favorite episode, St Brenden's Isle (712-13), about which I've recently written in an article about early modern ideas of dolphins and the ocean. 

We should also start thinking pretty seriously about your final paper project.