re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Doug Millison]

 Mackin :
>If I read the passage correctly

Pynchon does leave it wonderfully ambiguous, doesn't he.  Your guess is as
good as anybody's.


>there are two reasons Washington couldn't be
>the author of the "nigger" sentence.
>
>One, after the lead in text saying that "more and more arrive at Raleigh's
>Billiard-Room," it would be terrible narrative style to let only one of these
>"more and more" speak.

Take it up with Pynchon, since he's responsible for the way that dialogue
is identified or not in the text.

>
>Secondly, the N word sentence is uttered by someone of lower rank and
>circumstances than Washington,  whom we know to be a well off landowner and
>quite incapable of being bollixed by being equated with a slave.

Washington doesn't like being treated as lower class than British subjects,
and I think what galls him is precisely the fact that the British see
themselves in a legal relationship with him that too closely resembles the
legal relationship way he has vis-a-vis the slaves he owns.

>
>The "civility, sir" sentence is of less certain origin, perhaps intentionally
>be because it doesn't matter which one speaks it. The reader is meant ot find
>it quite beyond belief that an 18th Century free white man could ever possibly
>object to the N word in the way we all do today. Another example of projecting
>20th Century sensibilies onto people living 200 plus years ago, which P
>obviously thinks is humorous and possibly instructive.


Maybe, but I still don't think that Pynchon finds anything comfortably
funny about slavery, except perhaps in that
grit-your-teeth-and-laugh-or-else-commit-suicide black humor that snuggles
right up next to despair.


>IMHO. of course :-)

How could it be otherwise?

By the way, Pynchon's Washington does seem quite in harmony with the
practice of tokenism, given his fond recollection below, and the song that
follows, which might be seen to link his tokenism (Gershom's extraordinary
treatment) to "Hell" (284):

"And that Transit-of-Venus Pudding?  Same thing, a single black Currant
upon a Circular Field of White,--" (283)