antw. re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Paul Mackin]

In case Doug didn't notice I was criticizing  him, not Pynchon or Rushton, for
judging eighteenth century persons in accordance with latter day enlightened
thinking.  Doug has indentification problems like this of long standing.

My depiction of Washington's thinking on the lower classes as normative is
probably pretty accurate.

Specifically with regard to slavery,  rather than with the lower orders in
general, there WERE  of course antislavery advocates, often religiously
motivated (only God can own one of us), but they were not much competition
against King Tobacco and King Cotton. Then as now, it's the economy stupid.

Also I might add that what I've written on Washington wasn't meant to have any
particular bearing on whether P treats George with favor or with disfavor.  I
see P as mainly trying to have a bit of fun, which in the end falls rather
flat. Therefore the rest of the nonsense in the post I'd rather let others
handle.

P.





Doug Millison wrote:

> 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.