MDDM Ch. 24 Labour vs Management (vs ... ?)

[jbor]

on 15/1/02 4:04 PM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

snip
> Recall that St. Paul's is
> compared with the gallows and the gallows is compared with the cross.
> And the church, the gallows, the cross, are all considered in terms of
> labor (free, slave, organized).  M&D is a labor novel.  Pynchon has been
> interested in the history of labor since V.

The thing that interested me in that eerie Tyneside scene when the fog sets
in and Mr Snow's keel is suddenly subjected to taunts and attack is the way
that the faces of the workers' ghosts are silent and "unmovingly resentful"
once the fog lifts. It seems to me that they let Mr Snow's keel pass,
grudgingly, but willingly even so, as though he isn't the real enemy. Like
Jere's dad, it seems as if Snow's is also "a wildcat operation", and that he
too is "some crazy Enterprizer". (239.16) In other words, these two are
independent entrepreneurs, mining and transporting the coal themselves; not
indentured labourers, but not mill-owners or "proprietors" either. The
ghosts of the men hung and transported for striking against unfair
conditions and oppressive labour laws resent men like Snow and old man
Dixon, because they (probably) worked through the strikes and certainly did
not suffer the same hardships, and the harsh consequences for revolting. But
on the other hand old Dixon and Snow were not directly responsible for any
of it either. They were not the "masters".

My point is that in the world of work that Pynchon depicts the sympathies
aren't all one way traffic for "the worker" and against "the businessman".
There's this other category, an "excluded middle" perhaps, the "wild-cat"
operator or "crazy Enterprizer". And there's an ambivalence towards this
type of self-made man, both in the scene on the Tyne, in the depictions of
both Mason's and Dixon's fathers, as well as in the current chapter focusing
on George Washington's wheelings and dealings in real estate, non-staple
crop-farming, and share trading. (There are examples in the other novels
too, particularly in _Vineland_.) And I'm not sure (and I'm not sure whether
Pynchon is clear) on where or whether the lines can be drawn between the
"wild-cat" entrepreneur and the exploitative "proprietor", when the one tips
over into becoming the other. Later on, with the slave-owner, a line is
definitely drawn. Other than that, however, it's a more difficult - or
elusive - distinction.

And, after all, the role of the successful artist in society is more akin to
those "wild-cat" entrepreneurs than to either blue collars or white collars,
even though her or his livelihood is integrally dependent on the labour and
patronage of both these classes.

best