MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[Doug Millison]

Tending the garden seems a noble enough occupation -- it's the gardeners
who protect the fruits from the real pests, after all. Better than fouling
it with the wastes of a petrochemical-based military-industrial complex as
full-size humans seem to spend so much time doing elsewhere in Pynchon's
fiction.

Whatever Pynchon is doing here is a bit more complex, I imagine, than
simply parodying the Bible, although that  might be part of it, I don't
mean to rule that out in the least. The absent owners of the garden also
bring to mind the enormous angels of GR (which chain to Rilke's angels...),
of a piece with other references in M&D to architectural artifacts on the
surface of the earth that form shapes that have meaning only when viewed
from high above, and in that sense Pynchon seems to be having a bit of fun
with the alien-visitors-from-outerspace believers, too.

Cain's garden?  That could be what enslaved Africans  in America are
tending for Washington and his peers, given the racist religious traditions
that interpret "the mark of Cain" (after his murder of Abel) as dark/black
skin.


At 9:31 PM -0400 8/4/02, Bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
>Is this a subversion of the biblical eden, humankind
>in a secondary role to the garden itself, de-noblized
>from tragic heroes to pests, tolerated but less than
>important? I hope so.
>
>Could it be Cain's garden? Make me even happier...