re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Paul Mackin]

Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle.

No end to the degradation.



Doug Millison wrote:

> 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.