The R Missionary Soc: Tantivy & Mother Teresa

[Seb Thirlway]

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>


[snip]
>  I also like the way
>Pynchon affirms small humanitarian gestures such as Pokler
placing his gold
>wedding band on the finger of the dying woman in the
concentration camp --
>a gesture not all that different from Mother Teresa's loving
care of the
>dying untouchables in those mean streets.
>
got to the start of "In the Zone" again, and missing Tantivy as
much as Slothrop does.

"shy, decent impulses to conspire, wherever possible, against
power and indifference" (209)

That's Slothrop's own obituary to his friend, though he doesn't
know it yet.  Tantivy is such an attractive character because
this is about as much as we ever get to hear about him - an
obscure good guy, too self-effacing for outright war against the
bad guys, or even for anything approaching heroism (note that
"wherever possible").

Parallels with Mother Teresa?  What would people's opinions of
her be if the first anyone had heard of her was someone posting
on the list "...well I was in Calcutta last summer, and I came
across this quite extraordinary woman...."?  Not claiming any
great knowledge of the history of the Mother Teresa media circus,
but isn't it possible that she was, originally, a Tantivy?  If
this is in fact not true in MT's case, it still seems a plausible
and illuminating parable to imagine.
What seems illuminating is to wonder what would become of a
Tantivy acknowledged, not just by a pang of affection from
Slothrop - a very low-intensity, momentary salute to what Tantivy
stands for - but by universal adulation, endless column inches:
Tantivy the Humanitarian Phenomenon - Tantivy the Moral Example -
Great Tantivy the Shining Light of Love and Altruism.  None of
those shy decent impulses would survive.
Whatever Tantivy actually _did_ to merit that tribute from
Slothrop, he wouldn't do any more - or he would do, but from a
different place, psychologically - the rhetoric would feed back
into him, and have some probably quite unpleasant effects on his
personality.  consciousness destroys the act, or however it goes.
How many of the reported unpleasant sides to MT were created by
the overheated, hysterical approval offered to her, a salute
grown monstrous, a blundering, ultimately destructive attempt to
say, simply "we love what you do"?  (please don't attack this
contention by telling me I've got my facts wrong: this riff is
not about the historical Mother Teresa)  Would it have been
better to leave her there unknown, put a few banknotes in the
collection box on the way out, salute her quietly, with a whisper
between friends?

That whole thread in GR about Slothrop missing Tantivy is an
incredible bit of writing (yep, another - when will this book
stop surprising me?) from ole' TRP.  A bad night for Slothrop,
missing his old friends, a thought now and then, a fantasy of
Tantivy's return, later, in the Zone - these are insignificant
tributes: and so they fit, they match Tantivy's own
unselfconscious, small-scale, shy decency.  No larger tribute is
possible, however much you'd like to offer one - what Tantivy
stands for survives by being obscure, and it just isn't possible
to give him his full due.  Though when reading that passage where
you realise they've killed him, you wish Slothrop did throttle
Bloat, storm Shell-Mex, mow down the whole lot of them in cold
blood with a slow burst of submachine gun fire...and then TRP
twists the knife a bit further - there's no one there to take
revenge on...




seb