"You might as well head for the deep jungle and talk this over with the trees, for in this town that kind of thinking won't go, nosir not at all."
* * * * * * * * * *
Currently everybody in Cleveland is so rational that the cops keeping sweeping up a bunch of them and throwing them in the insane asylum so Roswell Bounce's point might be a bit less strenuously grounded than he believes.
I think I'm, just now, sixty-one pages in, realizing how heavily this book differs so drastically from the first sixty-one pages of Gravity's Rainbow. Against the Day's narrative relies on science and rationality as a background to the characters' lives and motivations. Gravity's Rainbow begins almost exactly the opposite way (which shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, being that it begins with the Wernher von Braun quote, "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."). In Against the Day, technology is moving people forward out of darkness, leaving behind superstition and ill-formed scientific beliefs. In Gravity's Rainbow, technology is moving people toward death and genocide, madness and enslavement which drives them toward the supernatural and a search for something more, something greater, something beyond the zero of this life.
How does Mason & Dixon fit in then? Something about the measuring of the world changing the way people have been driven spiritually for so long? I'm not as familiar with that book having read it only once when it was first published (and the slight amount I've done on my Mason & Dixon One Line at a Time blog).
Wasn't Pynchon supposed to do four great novels? Am I too stupid to realize what his fourth great novel was or has he not done it yet? If not, he'd better get to work already!
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