antw. re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Doug Millison]

Mackin :
>All right, it's INTERESTING even though irrelevant.

Irrelevant to bring the Old Testament into a discussion of a character that
Pynchon names Gershom?
Wow.

Mackin:
>You DO love to argue from myth, fiction, and the movies.

Since Pynchon brings it into play, why not?

Mackin:
>Passing judgement on eighteenth century persons by current day standards
>is OK in
>the sanctimony department (where you hold forth)  but poor practice in
>historic
>analysis.

You've lost me here.  Rushton, who in this letter castigates Washington,
wrote the letter to Washington in 1796 that I've quoted, one 18th century
man talking to another --  as Otto correctly observes, Rushton is "one of
Washington's contemporaries."

 http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/slavery/index.html
 " There is no reason to think that either man [ Jefferson or Washington]
thought that Africans, if free and given opportunities to advance, could
have become the intellectual equals of whites. At least a handful of
 Americans saw that as a possibility, including Alexander Hamilton and
Benjamin Franklin.  [...] In 1796 George Washington received a letter from
 Edward Rushton, a prominent English antislavery advocate.  [...] My
business is with George Washington of Mount Vernon in Virginia, a man who
 not withstanding his hatred of oppression and his ardent love of liberty
 holds at this moment hundreds of his fellow being in a state of abject
 bondage-[...] "

If Pynchon was writing "historic analysis" Mackin's criticism might be
appropriate, but Pynchon offers instead a complex fiction that mixes 18th
and 20th century elements, fictional and historical, throughout, an open
invitation (my opinion, I don't pretend to  know what Pynchon actually
intends?) for readers to compare the two (that is, compare the fiction and
the history, the present and the past).

Otto's post suggests what I consider an important question:
Which portrait of Washington is Pynchon playing with?

Even elementary school students are generally taught (it was the case for
my son, at least, and it was so for me n my grammar school days) that the
cloying, romanticized portrait of the Washington who cut down a cherry tree
and could not tell a lie is not accurate -- they get a "revised" history,
compared to the edifying fairy tale taught in the 19th century:
http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/weems/index.html.

High school students are likely to learn (my son is learning some of this
now; I did, too, back in the mid-'60s) about some of the contradictions
inherent in the Founding Fathers -- that Washington and Jefferson kept
slaves despite enshrining personal liberty in their personal philosophy,
etc. Still, there's a tendency to gloss over the human dimension of their
slave-keeping (with an insistence that they were "benevolent" slave owners,
"humane" even), and a failure to probe deeply into what that slave holding
might have felt like from the slave's point of view. (Hence the uproar over
the recent, further revision of the history of another of the Founding
Fathers, Jefferson, on the occasion of the apparent confirmation of what
his African-American descendents have long known and what many of his white
descendents have staunchly denied:  Jefferson fathered children by his
slave mistress; a lot of Americans just didn't want to believe that, it
brought into sharp relief what remains a very deep split in the way
African-Americans and white Americans view slavery in US history.)

Pynchon creates his depiction of Washington and Gershom against this later,
already revised understanding of the Founding Fathers (I like to keep the
capitals because they remind me that these figure continue to retain
mythical status), that's the portrait that Pynchon further revises,
subverts, plays with in M&D.

It's worth thinking about what Otto says, "the image of the Freak Brothers
smoking reefer and eating sweets*,
bringing down all social hierarchies, in my opinion Washington is given
some kind of exculpation here."

"Exculpation" is not the word I'd choose.  Comparing Washington to those
lovable, stoned hippie icons seems on par with the way the text compares
him to the hapless, drunken W.C. Fields --  "exculpating" perhaps, but  the
way that drug abuse provides an excuse for their behavior is not
particularly flattering, in my opinion. And I don't see this portrait in
any way " bringing down all social hierarchies" --  we laugh, but it leaves
the master-slave hierarchy intact:  as Otto correctly observes, Washington
remains a "slave-master", albeit one "who even smokes reefer with his
house-slave."

This reminds me of the way Pynchon uses another character in another novel
to pass judgment on an earlier generation whose revolution failed in part
because of his elders' surrender to another addiction:

"Whole problem 'th you folks's generation," Isaiah opined, "nothing
personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out
there for it--but you sure didn't understand much abot the Tube. Minute the
Tube got hold of you folks that was it, thjat whole alternative America, el
deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to yoru real enemies, and
even in 1970 dollars--it was way too cheap. . . ." (Vineland 373)

Is the Tube addiction that Pynchon portrays in Vineland  equivalent to the
use of alcohol and pot to filter reality in M&D,  to pacify and sedate
people who might otherwise continue the revolution they started? (I
understand that Pynchon also affirms marijunana as a "useful substance" --
I think that's the word from the Slow Learner intro -- and that some
readers see him contrasting marijuana as something positive where synthetic
narcotics and perhaps LSD carries a more negative charge in the moral
economy of GR. Readers can disagree about that, and have, vigorously, in
this forum in the past.  Pynchon seems to leave the question open to
various interpretations.)  I don't imagine that Pynchon aligns Isaiah (a
rather significant Old Testatment Prophet, by the way) perfectly with his
own views, but Pynchon does put a rather harsh judgement of the '60s rebels
in the mouth of this critic of a later generation, reflecting a perspective
that casts a large shadow in a novel that illuminates many facets of
"addiction".

I think M&D does something similar with Washington and Gershom.  Washington
gets  stoned and lets Gershom entertain him, not with jokes that make fun
of the master-slave relationship that is an important source of
Washington's personal wealth and power (and which is simultaneously the
source of pain for so many of Gershom's fellow slaves), but instead making
fun of the king-subject relationship that frustrates Washington and so many
of his contemporaries (humor that attacks a class relationship at least one
big step removed from the one that most intimately oppresses the slaves in
the American colonies -- something like the difference between Bill Cosby
and Richard Pryor perhaps, the one stuck in American sit-com land leaving
power relationships and hierarchies untouched, the other making fun of the
underpinnings of American sit-com existence).

Having been there myself, I observe that this (Washington laughing at and
with Gershom as the two of them use alcohol and marijuana to numb
themselves, together with Mason and Dixon who have earlier in the novel
been sharply critical of slavery and who later find themselves in danger
after Dixon helps a group of slaves escape from a cruel slave driver)
resembles nothing more than a bunch of "hippies" sitting around the TV
smoking pot in the 60s, watching the Rat Pack with Sammy Davis Jr. while
Nixon crushes a Counterforce that never really manages to get off the
ground.

It's enough to make a guy want to smoke a joint.