mdmd(5) - Running Amok

[Brian D. McCary]

Eric ups the ante for future mdmd moderators, including this:

148.21   "this running amok business"

I have no further info at this time on the Malaysian traditions, but
this query prompted me to go back and re-read the (non-anthologized)
"Mortality and Mercy in Vienna", wherein Cleanth Siegel diagnoses
impending Windigo Psychosis in Irving Loon, an Ojibwa indian
temporarily displaced into Washington, DC.  After careful
consideration, Mr. Siegel decides to leave without attempting to either
warn the other guests (actually, his inherited guests) or to stop the
indian, who proceeds, it appears, to slaughter everyone left in the
apartment.  Windigo Psychosis is supposed to be a trait of the Ojibwa,
conditioned into a sense of paranoia by continuous low grade
starvation, where they suddenly, and possibly simultaneously, go on a
rampage, killing everything is sight.  I always thought, and still
suspect, Pynchon made this one up.

I was struck by several things.  First, it brought home how much his
writing has matured in the last 35 years - although the issues of
sanity, insanity, reaction to modernity, paranoia, and the preterite
are all clearly part of M&MV, the episode ends far to abruptly and
neatly.  He's more willing to let the characters live now, to find
their reactions to the recent stress.  (In fact, M&MV seems to be one
of his most gratuitously violent pieces of writing)

But also, this theme of running amok is one he returns to time and time
again, in V (for instance, the crowd at the Ballet premier in V in
Love, also arguably also suck hour on christmas eve and the stories in
Fopple's Seige Party) Dr. Hillarius in COL49, the Paxton Boys in
Lanchaster later on in M&D, ect.  Sometimes it's a single person,
sometimes it's a group of people, sometimes it's targeted and sometimes
it's random, but on a regular basis some minor character will lose it
and run around, rioting or killing folk.

So I think that the Maylasian traditions or roots wrt running amok may
be secondary to Pynchon's use of running amok as a destroyer of order:
let things become too regular, too ordered, too civilized, and there
will always emerge some nuts just crazy enough to make you question the
order in the first place.

Brian McCary

When walking out in Ludlow,
you'll hear the young men cry
"Let's go and kill a neighbor!"
and t'other answers "Aye!"
so this one kills a neighbor
and that one kills his dad
and as they hang, by dozens,
in Ludlow, lad by lad
each of them one and twenty,
each of them murders, 
the hangman mutters "Plenty,
even for Houseman's verse."

  - Author forgotten