MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon and the slave driver

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/24/02 7:35:18 PM, millison at online-journalist.com writes:

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

Doug:
>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 jbor's reading was very well done. I had
missed the implications of the italisized "you's" 
the first time. It was a key pick up.

Doug:
"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.

jbor:
>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.

Doug:
"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."

Me:
Except that reading ignores Dixon's merry "Now Then!" [699.13]
after he has freed the slaves and is now getting back to business,
i.e., slaking his thirst for the Driver's blood. It is not his
conscience, christian, quaker or otherwise which restrains him.
It is the "sound Counsel" of the slaves. Duxon's breaking voice
is more suggestive of the internal struggle between his desire
to kill the Driver, and his recognition that the counsel is indeed
sound, as evidenced by the growing numbers and hostility of the
crowd, then of his conscience, although that may be operative
at this point as well.

regards