re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention
Doug Millison
millison at online-journalist.com
Thu Jul 4 20:55:45 CDT 2002
jbor:
>disattached utterances"
A euphonious eupemism for, "no way to know who's speaking the lines in
question." Dance around it as you will and dress your opinion up in
whatever jargon you like, but you can only guess at who speaks the three
quotes (572.23 -with the N word; 572.26, "Civility, Sir! [...]; and 572.28
"Excuse me, do I hear that word again?") prior to Pynchon's unambiguous
identification of Washington as the speaker at 572.30 and Mason of the
following line, then work backwards to invent facts to fit your story.
> strategy to identify who the other speakers are in the scene
Obviously you have to come up with some way to try to make the case that
Washington speaks the lines necessary to support your argument. But,
Pynchon leaves it thoroughly ambiguous and indeterminate.
>readers
>who are intimate with and responsive to Pynchon's work, and with the way the
>characters have been presented in this novel in particular, are equally
>able, and prompted, to recognise the other speakers in this scene.
Wishful thinking, and perhaps the most grandiose self-projection you've put
forth in this forum to date!
It's tough for a lot of people to face the truth that Washington and the
rest of the Founding Fathers, despite some good intentions, recreated the
same kinds of inequality and oppression they sought to escape in Europe;
it's much easier to grasp at the myth that somehow they managed to avoid
doing that. But that's a myth that Pynchon shatters in M&D.
Making Washington an avatar of the antebellum myth of the benevolent
slave-holder is absurd in the face of Pynchon's relentless undercutting of
that particular myth. Slavery is degrading for both slaves and their
owners in M&D, a fictional world in which slave owners range from dangerous
buffoons like Pynchon's Washington (whose delusion ignores the true
dimensions of the pain that results from turning a person into one's
personal property, and which leads straight to the US civil war, the Watts
riots, to the injustices and hypocrisies of the present day), to sadists
like the slave driver that Dixon disarms later in the novel.
Pynchon has written this scene with enough ambiguity to permit many
readings, as several of us have noted. I remain surprised that you claim a
definitive reading here.
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