MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon and the slave driver

[Doug Millison]

jbor :
>It's only my reading, which I offered in good conscience, and backed up with
>textual evidence when Doug challenged it.

Yes, you did.  I've provided textual evidence, too, of course. As has Dave
Monroe, s~Z, and the rest of the participants in this thread.


 >I think it's perhaps the most
>climactic scene in the novel

I see the scene this way, too.


>framing historiographical disagreement between Ives and Wicks (695-6).

We agree that Wicks is telling this story, of Dixon's encounter with the
slave-driver?  (It seems we do, I just want to make sure.)

Wicks may be needling his host a bit, by telling it thus.  This episode in
M&D's frame story (that is, the story of Wicks as house guest entertaining
his hosts with the story of Mason and Dixon and the Line) reminds me of
certain family discussions back in the 60s, often-aborted efforts to bridge
a generation gap, or to cross the lines of entrenched and very different
sets of values held by various people in the room, stemming from one or
another topic of the day's news -- civil rights demonstrations (or riots or
police brutality), the war in Vietnam, etc.

Wicks -- assuming he's narrating here -- emphasizes the fact that the Whip
expresses hate, and, by extension, might be heard, by a sensitive ear in
that room, to be saying that's the case with all weapons, they serve no
good purpose, but only evil. That's the kind of statement that will almost
always make a gun-owner's (or gun dealer's) blood boil.

Whatever else Pynchon may be doing with this scene, he lets Wicks tell it
in a particularly sort of way, for Wicks' own ends.  It's obvious to some
of his listeners that he's "embellishing" the tale  -- I suspect this is a
way that Wicks has of tapping a sore spot in the household, getting his
digs in, in a roundabout way, he's a guest after all.

Back to what I've said about Wicks' abilities as an oral storyteller --
it's possible that Wicks doesn't have to specifically say that Dixon is
whipping the man because he, Wicks, is acting out the motion of lashing the
whip as he tells the story.  Pynchon doesn't provide enough information,
imo, for us to decide that conclusively.  The reader must deal with what
Pynchon left on the page here in M&D, fill in the gaps as best we can, and
I think it makes more sense, for the Dixon that Wicks is creating for his
listeners, and for the Dixon that Pynchon creates for his readers, that
Dixon not whip the slave-driver but instead manage to resist his desire to
do so.



>the way he acts against his
>Quaker inclinations, has to in fact to effect the release of the slaves from
>their unjust and brutal captivity, but then feels remorse and doubt about
>this resort to violence.


I think it's more powerful to read Dixon as stopping himself before he
fully releases his violent urge, managing to channel his rage into the
positive act of freeing the slaves, releasing the need to satisfy the
violent urge and replace that with the satisfaction of knowing (a knowledge
that continues to unfold and surprise Dixon during and after the encounter)
that he hasn't contributed more violence to that which disgusts him when he
encounters it in this street.

>where it was long regarded as a family treasure

Wicks' (and Pynchon's)  alternate history -- omitting, as I think it does,
the legendary whipping -- offers the opportunity to imagine the Whip
treasured for another purpose, as the weapon that wasn't used, where the
Quaker ancestor managed to do a righteous thing (free the slaves so they
would suffer no further harm from this slave-driver using this Whip) and at
the same time do the best job he could in the moment to follow Christ's
model of non-violence.

ePS:

Mr T, I don't have "heroes" -- although I do admire some things that some
people have done -- but it seems to me that Pynchon, via Wicks, presents
Dixon as a hero to Dixon's family  (for reasons that aren't exactly clear,
as this thread makes evident), and Mason seems to consider Dixon a hero in
this instance.  I don't think Pynchon presents Dixon as a "hero", Dixon is
far too complex to be a simple hero, imo.