MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon and the slave driver (Italics)

[Doug Millison]

>    " ... Now be a man, face me, and make it easier, or must I rather work
>    on *you* from the Back, like a Beast, which will take longer, and
>    certainly mean more discomfort for *you*." (699.2-4)


Two you's and no blows yet -- Dixon's still telling the slave-driver what
to do to get *prepared* (italics mine) for the thrashing Dixon apparently
still plans to give him, as indicated by the use of the future tense
("which will take longer"), no thrashing happening yet, no lashes of the
whip with these italicized you's...in that same future (subjunctive, still
a possibility, but it hasn't happened yet) in which Dixon says "I'm going
to kill *you* (no lash of the whip yet here, either), but doesn't, as that
subjunctive collapses into the mundane indicative, when (my interpretation)
Dixon realizes he can't  prolong the cycle of violence, probably for two
reasons, there's not time the law is coming, and the people on the street
will soon intervene.   Certainly he doesn't strike the slave driver with
the whip later when  he  "shakes" it, as his voice breaks , "if I see *you*
again, *you*...dead *you'll* be" -- all threats, bootless (oops,
whiplashless), here Dixon moves back into that future, that pleasing
prospect of subjunctive hopes, again.

Besides the weakness of this interpretation that emerges upon close reading
of the text, it's very difficult to imagine, imo,  that on this street, in
a colony where the rights of slave-owners and merchandisers are so highly
esteemed, where Dixon and Mason do feel threatened, that nobody would rush
forward to defend the slave-driver and his property rights  if Dixon were
actually beating him with the whip.

Pynchon's choice) to describe the whip (through his narrator, Wicks) as an
"instrument of God" is the capper:  "the evil thing [...] its purpose
purely to express hate with, and Hate's Corollary"  now rests in the hands,
then pocket (and later, home)  of Dixon, a righteous man who refrains from
using it in this instance -- to his own surprise, the moral fiber asserting
itself unbidden -- to express hate, but instead  prevents the
slave-driver's using it to express more hate.  The only good purpose such
an instrument can serve is to remind others that it must not be used, to be
displayed ("in a Quaker Home") as a reminder, a lesson, "and never more be
us'd" as Dixon says before he pockets it and steps away from the slave
driver.

I suspect that some of the voyeurs among us just won't be satisfied unless
we can watch  Dixon whipping that man, -- but that doesn't seem so strange,
knowing how the S&M content is what attracts certain readers to Pynchon in
the first place.

In this scene,Pynchon would seem to undercut what I've heard many a Pynchon
reader insist, that Pynchon "foregrounds" the role S&M plays in subverting
Their power structure.  Instead, as Dixon demonstrates, you only win that
game by not playing it, by walking away (just as the Lambton Worm story
would have turned out differently without that vow to kill in order to stop
the killing -- destroying the village to save it, so to speak, he got the
Worm but only at the cost of nine generations of pain and suffering), by
taking away the weapon and putting it somewhere where it can't be used any
more to express hate.

>From a certain religious point of view, Dixon does the slave-driver a favor
-- an act of love (but not the S&M act of love that's been proposed here)
-- by helping him to cease expressing the hate and inflicting the harm he
has done with this Whip, giving the slave-driver the opportunity to repent,
to change his ways.







<doug millison>
<http://dougday.blogspot.com>
<http://www.Online-Journalist.com>