MDDM Ch. 73

[Doug Millison]

This sort of reading tends to attenuate the meaning of
"slave" to the point that it's not much of a
distincton.  Sure, Mason and Dixon are "slaves" to all
sorts of thing, M to his melancholy, Dixon to his
appetites (there are 12-step programs for those and a
million other enslavements, "addictions" they call
them nowadays), etc.

But Mason and Dixon certanly aren't slaves in the
sense that the enslaved Africans in the novels are. 
Nobody is using The Driver's Whip on Mason and Dixon,
they can quit when they want to, nobody is going to
track them down if they go away the way George
Washington tracked down, quite vengefully in some
cases, his slaves, , nobody owns them in the sense
that people like Thomas Jefferson own their slaves
(and can use them sexually or in any number of other
ways), hold them as property. 

M and D are captives of any number of systems, no
doubt, beginning inside their own heads and continuing
outwards, ring after ring -- but they are not "slaves"
the way the enslaved Africans are.  No leg irons. No
metal-braided lash of the Whip (unless they choose
some playful S&M game version of same -- and that's a
completely different story...).

Regarding the "what might have been" for America in ch
73, I agree, Pynchon here depicts the most depressing
sort of globalized cocacolonized multinational
Manifest Destiny Malling of the world, not very
different from what global culture was beginning to
look like in the 80s and 90s as Pynchon was nearing
the end of this multi-decade project, it hardly looks
prophetic now, writing satire is difficult these days,
when a place like Shanghai is becoming one big Mall at
the other end of that trans-Pacific line, with KFC and
Starbucks where Red Guards and PLA once fought and
tormented their fellows in factional madness.  

But, Dixon gives the best look at "what might have
been" when he seizes The Driver's Whip  and frees the
slaves, managing to restrain his violent urges -- he's
freed himself from the vow to violence (he swears he
will kill the slave driver but he chooses not to
follow through) , Dixon's act (unlike the killing of
the Lambton Worm, there's a "hero" for you, he needs
the power of the supernatural to kill the Beast, andhe
has to make a bloody bargain to do it, an Old
Testament-style vow that leads to tragedy because he
has promised blood for blood) won't lead to nine
generations more of suffering  -- "what might have
been", had righteous men and women stood up when they
saw humans driven to market in the street (like
William drives those pigs to market in GR) and just
set them free, without further bloodshed:  "what might
have been".  Yeah, this is a sad book, and Pynchon
seems, at times, a sad and angry artist -- yet he
manages to parse it with such wit, emotion, insight
into the tragedy of humans caught up in this sadness. 






jbor:
[...]
> 
> So Ch. 73 sets up a "what might have been" for the
> intrepid duo, a
> subjunctive vision of what they could or should or
> might have achieved if
> they had defied their orders and gone on westwards
> as they both, at various
> times, desire to. The results for America, Pynchon
> seems to be saying, would
> have been pretty much the same. 
>But the surveyors
> have been liberated from
> their history here, and I think it sets up something
> of the tone and purpose
> for the novel as a whole too. The Mason-Dixon Line,
> their Line, and their
> main or only claim on posterity, on our memory, is
> itself "slave" to the
> slavery issue, to the Civil War. Pynchon's novel
> goes quite a ways towards
> liberating or resurrecting the Line, and the two
> men, from that bondage imo.


Only in fantasy, of course.  Close the covers of
Pynchon's novel, the results of the Line remain -- at
the most fundamental level, what happens when we draw
a line, a national boundary, between myself and Other,
between one human with money and another human who is
the property to be used as the one with money wills. 
The art fails to redeem the, what's P's phrase,
something like the spilled broken world, something
like that. Nothing changes unless you take a stand --
but They love to keep us busy with those mindless
pleasures, asking the wrong questions, while they
survey and subdivide and franchise and mall it all
away.



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>
<http://www.dougday.blogspot.com/>
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