MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Doug Millison]

At 7:18 PM +1100 7/2/02, jbor wrote:
>[572.14-32, Raleigh's Billiard Room, characters' names added]
>
>[Anonymous colonial revolutionary No. 1]: "Even as clearings appear in the
>Smoke of a Tavern, so in Colonial matters may we be able to see into, and
>often enough thro', the motives of Georgie Rex and that dangerous Band of
>Boobies.... Henceforth, it seems, the Irish and the Ulster Scots are to be
>upon the same terms with them as the Africans, Hindoos and other Dark
>peoples they enslave,-- and so, to make it easier to shoot us, with all
>Americans,-- tho' we be driven more mystickally, not by the Lash and the
>Musket, but by Ledger and Theodolite. All to assure them of an eternal
>Supply of cheap axmen, farmers, a few rude artisans, and docile buyers of
>British goods."
>
>[Anonymous colonial revolutionary No. 2]: "Not only presuming us their
>Subjects, which is bad enough,-- but that we're merely another kind of
>Nigger,-- well that's what I can't forgive. Are you sure?"

OK, but I read Washington as the speaker of the previous line and the
following as Mason.  Assigning the following two to Washington and  Gershom
is equally arbitrary on jbor's part.

>[George Washington]: "Civility, Sir! The word you have employ'd, here in
>this quiet Pool of Reason, is a very Shark, which ever feels its Lunch-Hour
>nigh."
>
>[Gershom]: "Excuse me, do I hear that Word again? In this Smoak, 'twould
>seem, so are we all."

>M&D_'s George Washington has already acknowledged and accepted
>the fact that they *are* the "intellectual equals" of whites, the *human*
>"equals" of whites, in fact, which is why (and how) Pynchon accords him far
>greater acclaim and respect in his text.
>

Wishful thinking  is what I call it, given that there's no evidence ,
historical or in M&D, that Washington believed this.  The notion that
Pynchon "accords him far greater acclaim and respect in his text" is
misguided , in my view, because it forces you to ignore so much of what
Pynchon actually writes about Washington in M&D, along with the cascade of
intertextual connections to similar material in all of his other writings,
and because it goes against the grain of so much Pynchon criticism.  But,
whatever floats your boat.

>Pynchon, as always, is concerned with plumbing the depths of the human
>condition.

That's certainly true.  It's also true that Pynchon appears to have a
special desire to return again and again to one particular aspect of the
human condition -- the tendency of humans to treat one another as objects
and institutionalize that objectification in specific social/economic
institutions, in  slavery and in the factory system as epitomized in the
Nazi slave labor/death camps, as he specifically tells us in an essay.