MDDM Washington

[jbor]

on 2/7/02 12:59 AM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:

> Isn't there a line somewhere: "(...) only degrees of slavery." - I think of
> my own "lot (as) a white wage "slave"" who only gets money if there's work
> to do.

I couldn't find this quote, but I looked back at my notes from the first
time I read the novel and found the one where Dixon laments the "common
Element" to all their adventures together (692-3):

    "Slaves. Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our Faces,--
    more of it at St. Helena,-- and now here we are again, in another
    Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers,
    and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to re-encounter thro' the World this
    Publick Secret, this Shameful Core.... "

And so forth, a series of impassioned rhetorical questions decrying the
shameful condition of *all* humanity. And there's even a belated pang of
remorse about "certain houses South of the Line" - like Mt Vernon, he no
doubt means - where they were waited on by slaves without having "objected".

Pynchon, as always, is concerned with plumbing the depths of the human
condition. For Dixon, Mason's demur - "Yet we're not Slaves, after all,--
we're Hirelings" - is hollow comfort, a euphemism only.

best