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 ...

   "Throughout the chapter ['Mondaugen's Story,' V.],
Pynchon hints that the story of Southwest Africa that
we are readiung is but a version of the story of teh
American South: Mondaugen, from Leipzig and thus a
Northerner, has a 'basic distrust of teh South,
however, relative a region that might be' (230);
Foppl's farm is actually a 'baroque plantation' (231);
and the African natives are occasionally referred to
as 'niggers.'  Perhaps these valences are the result
of the story's Stencilization [...].  But, fixated as
he is on the question of V.'s identity, Stebcil never
seems to be inetrested in thinking through the
ideological implications of Mondaugen's story; Pynchon
leaves that task to his reader, providing a final clue
in the segue between chapters 9 and 10.  The final
image of 'Modaugen's Story' shows us the mutilated
Bondel singting a song 'in Hottentot dialect,' which
Mondaugen can't understand; the opening lines of the
next chpater focus on the African American jazz
musician McClintic Sphere 'half listening' to his
'horn man ... soloing' but actually thinking about the
racism of the white people in his audience: [see V.,
pp. 280-1].  Joined by the text across gulfs of time
and space, these two moments each picture a black man
whose music is an assertion of identity that cannot be
understood by the whites who hear it.  Paradoxiacally,
the ostensibly bleak image of a mutilated black man
and a debilitated white man crossing a devasatated
lanbdscape conveys a feeling of hopefullness and
possible harmony after the racial hatred that has been
described to us, but the feeling is short-lived;
McClintic Sphere's thoughts indicate that any apparent
harmony between the races masks an abiding
difference." (p. 91)

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