MDDM Washington, Gershom, Great Dismal Swamp

[Doug Millison]

jbor:
> Again, it is George's
>(religious/ethnic) tolerance and liberalism which is foregrounded in this
>historical detail, and which Pynchon's text might be alluding to in building
>up the characterisation.

That's possible. It's difficult to say with for sure where in the
historical record Pynchon might have begun, or what he might have intended
with the name Gershom.

Pynchon's choice of Gershom could also point to the sometimes troubled
history of the Jews in America, considering the connection between
Washington and rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas
(http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/Seixas.html) that I mentioned
in an earlier post.

Or, giving the name Gershom to Washington's slave might allude to the
history of tensions between American Jews and African-Americans, which were
particularly visible in the race riots of the 60s, about which Pynchon
wrote a well-known magazine article.

I imagine there are many other possibilities.

Whatever else it might do, Pynchon's depiction of Gershom and Washington
draws attention to the disconnect between the ideals promulgated by
Washington and the other Founding Fathers -- personal liberty, religious
freedom -- and America's falling short of those ideals.



FYI, an interesting quote in the NYRB issue that came in the mail today:

"Form, however, for Schwarz as for the Lukács of The Theory of the Novel,
is not an abstraction and it doesn't elude time and history. It means: "(a)
a rule for the composition of the narrative and (b) the stylization of a
kind of conduct characteristic of the Brazilian ruling class." On this
model, literature not only represents history as a set of discrete or
accumulating events, it inhabits and articulates history, speaks the
language that any given age talks to itself. Machado's breakthrough is
simultaneously aesthetic and political, an understanding of how to
eavesdrop on the upper classes without seeming to be different from them,
and how to get them, as Schwarz says at one point, to indict themselves
without knowing that they are doing it. This, we might say, is what
unreliable narrators are for: there is always an indictment, although not
always an indictment of a class."

--"Master Among the Ruins" by Michael Wood
The New York Review of Books, July 18, 2002