Negative Liberties

[Dave Monroe]

>From Cyrus R.K. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrison,
Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2001), Ch. 3, "Unenlightened
Enlightenment," pp. 82-140 ...

"Slavery turns people into things.  For Pynchon,
slavery is but one form of dehumanization among many
in Western culture.  Unlike Morrison who ... is
inetrested in the particular hsitory of U.S. slavery
and its aftermath, Pynchon generalizes his depiction
of slavery.  This willingness to use slavery as a
trope is one of the ways in which the difference
between Morrison's and Pynchon's subject positions
proves to be significant.  Usingh slavery as a trope
is a luxury that Morrison cannot afford.  For Pynchon,
however, this narrative strategy is an integral part
of the critique that he mounts against the
Emlightenment origins of both U.S. individualism and
Emersonian liberalism.
   "A seemingly insignificant bit of slapstick in the
opening pages of V. shows us how this works in
Pynchon's fiction.  A 'gargantuan Negro' sailor 'named
Dahoud' prevents a little white engineman named Ploy
from committing suicide.  ploy,m it seems, would
rather jump off the side of his ship, the 'mine
sweeper Impulsive,' than wear the full set of dentures
that the navy has gien him after removing all his
teeth:

[see V., p. 12]

"The first thing to notice here is that Dahoud the
'Negro' saves Ploy the white man and leads him to his
freedom: Dahoud's story cures Ploy of his despair,
allowing him to 'go on liberty' again. [...] what is
being depicted in shorthand form is the historical
link between individualism and slavery in U.S. culture
and even in Western culture as a whole, a link that
Pynchon dramatizes in 'Mondaugen's Story' later in teh
novel.
   "There is more, however, to the scene than a
critique of the links between negative liberty and the
tandem od slavery and racism. [...] that life itself
is a possession and, tehrefore, that who you are
depends on what you own.  Dahoud's words give voice to
the possessive individualism [...] expressed in
Locke's Second Treatise of Government: 'every Man has
a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any
Right to but himself.  The Labour of his Body, and the
Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.'
[...]  In other words, to be an individual endowed
with rights means to be acknowledged as the proprietor
of your own person and your capacities: you own
yourself and all that you can do.  Life itself is
classified next to food, clothing, land, and other
goods as property, something to be owned.
   "Like Emerson, Pynchon worries that this is a
danegrous way of thinking about individuality because
it leads us to think that we have detrmined who we
are.  Ploy's identity becomes intimately associated
with his prostehsis, a possession that functions
simultaneously as synecdoche and metonymy: [...]
either as part of a whole or as an object that is
substituted for another.  He thus becomes one of the
'walking monsters' that Emerson describes in 'The
American Scholar' [...].  As a result, 'man is
metamorphosed into a thing' and 'the soulis subject to
dollars.'
   "The transformation of people into things is one of
Pynchon's abiding subjects...." (pp. 92-3)




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