re Re: MDDM Ch. 62 Stig

[Doug Millison]

 jbor :
>The novel _Mason & Dixon_ refers to the manuscript
>which Bishop Brynjolf presented to the King of Denmark, and that manuscript
>is (almost certainly) the Elder Edda. I suggested that I'd like someone who
>has read this particular text to confirm whether it does indeed detail
>"murder" and "slavery" practised by Native Americans, as Stig indicates,
>before I commit to the opinion I offered. In fact, one of the songs might
>well indicate that the Vikings *were* the perpetrators of slavery and murder
>in North America, as you suggested, but that seems very unlikely.


Here you describe a project of going outside of M&D to get more information
to guide your interpretation of Stig's tale -- you want to confer with an
expert to comment on a document which may be the one Pynchon refers to
here.


>Pynchon's text does refer to
>aspects of the historical record, and historical opinion and judgement, and
>I welcome references to relevant historical details and personages and have
>been doing so myself all through the MDDM.


Yes, we've both been doing this  (and I did quite a bit of it on the first
Pynchon-L reading five years ago, which is in the archives and some of
which has resurfaced in the group reading this time around), which is why I
have been so surprised to hear you insist, in our recent discussion, that
the historical record of George Washington outside of M&D is not relevant
to understanding Pynchon's Washington inside M&D.


As you say, and I do agree,  the novel _Mason & Dixon_  refers to many
outside sources  (works of art, history, music, etc.) -- another good
example being the novel's reference to the Great Dismal Swamp Land Company
in Ch. 28.  Just as you propose to go outside the novel to find out more
about the manuscript mentioned in Stig's tale on p. 612, I went to George
Washington's own papers to see what he had to say about the Great Dismal
Swamp Land Company. There I  learned that Washington put some of his slaves
to work at years of back-breaking labor in the Great Dismal Swamp Land
Company venture; the papers  mention nothing about Washington selling
shares to his slaves in the company.  In this case, the historical record
confirms the irony I saw in  Pynchon's text:  in the move from M&D to
Washngton's papers, we see the disconnect between what the historical
Washington did and what Pynchon's character does.


[That got me to thinking about why Pynchon would create a Washington who
would act the way he does in M&D, and as I  view these passages through
Gershom's perspective, Washington appears quite creepy and corrupting-- the
Father of Our Country offering one slave a chance to profit from the
back-breaking labor of other slaves.  The historical record of course shows
nothing about Washington offering to sell shares in  the Great Dismal Swamp
Land Company to Mason and Dixon, so I started thinking about why Gershom
makes the obviously exaggerated confidence and developed another
interpretation -- that Pynchon's Washington and Gershom  put on a flim-flam
routine designed to get Mason and Dixon to invest money in the Great Dismal
Swamp Land Company, (a possibility the two men have been warned against,
apparently, based on Dixon's reaction -- it would be one of those routines
where one person lets slip a bit of information, apparently accidentally,
to whet the appetite of a potential investor who will then be the target of
a third person's sales pitch), a routine that fizzles when  they all get so
stoned on pot and punch and fail to follow through.]


Pynchon's text, rich and ambiguous as it is, read against the historical
record as Pynchon appears to invite us to do -- in Stig's tale, as you
observe, in the Washington/Gershom material, as I observe -- offers many
possibilities, another reason it seemed so funny that you continued to
insist that the novel shows only Washington "granting absolute liberty" to
Gershom (when Pynchon offers no such scene), and your refusal to consider
alternative interpretations to explain these passages, interpretations
developed with the benefit of information from outside the novel.


Your plan to go to an expert source outside of M&D to better understand
what Pynchon is doing with Stig's tale of the first Northmen -- does the
source outside of M&D confirm that those visitors introduced murder and
slavery, or found it existing when they arrived? -- amounts to the same
thing.  It gives you information that is not available in the novel itself,
which you can then use to guide your interpretation of this part of the
novel.


As I said, there's nothing particularly wrong with such inconsistency, but
it is interesting to watch you apply different interpretative criteria for
yourself and others, as you choose to look outside M&D to interpret Stig's
tale  after saying that's not relevant for the earlier passages concerning
Washington and Gershom.


jbor:
>>>All you did was to bring in stuff from outside the text, like that 1796
>>>letter, and other historical judgements, in order to support an argument
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0207&msg=68248&sort=date