NP (was Re: MDDM, but ...

[jbor]

on 12/7/02 12:19 PM, Doug Millison at millison at online-journalist.com wrote:

> 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.

No, what I actually wrote, and what you have half-quoted twice now, was that
you only cite the bits of the historical record which support *your*
opinion, while conspicuously ignoring those which don't, and that you
rarely, if ever, link any of the stuff you do cite back to the novel. Of
course, you don't refer it back because you can't, because the stuff you
cite doesn't relate to the text at all. Generally speaking, that is.

> 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.

Yes, I did understand your argument the first time around, and I still think
it's a crock. It connects something that isn't in the text to a notably
one-sided interpretation of the documentary evidence relating to GW. Where
is the evidence that the slaves working on the GD Swamp project were
poorly-treated? And where, in either the primary sources or the novel, is
the labour of GW's well-treated slaves shown to be any different from the
labour of, say, well-treated axmen working for Mason and Dixon on the Visto?

Your reading of the exchange at the bottom of p. 279 doesn't match up with
the way it's presented in the text, either. There's no evidence to say that
George and Gersh are putting on a "flim-flam routine" at all. In fact, the
narrator is very explicit in describing how Gershom does *not* comply with
George's expectations here:

    [...] Washington meanwhile trying to wave Gershom back into the house.
    Gershom, however, has just taken the Pipe from Mr. Dixon.
 
This is in fact the narrator describing the action in the scene.

And this description is echoed and amplified in the way that Gershom does
not comply with George's expectations elsewhere in the novel, explicitly at
280.18-21, 282.5, 282.29-30 and 572.28-32, and implicitly at 278.12-3,
279.5-6, 281.33, and 286.36-287.2.

And, speaking of "inconsistency", "hypocrisy" and "contortionis[m]", it was
actually your "rule" about reading only what Pynchon "presents for us on the
page", and your "refusal to consider alternative interpretations to explain
these passages", not mine at all.

millison at online-journalist.com wrote:

> I
> assume that Pynchon knows what he's doing here and am content to base my
> reading on what he presents for us on the page without adding elements he
> chose not to add.

I did consider your interpretations, and I found them to be weak and
unsupported by the text, while the extratextual stuff you provided I found
to be often irrelevant and mostly biased, or presented in a biased way. You
seem to think the same of my notes and comments, which I don't have a
problem with at all. We disagree, which is fine with me. And that should
have been, and should be, the end of it.

As I said, please do ignore my posts from now on if they upset you so, and
I'll be extremely pleased to ignore yours.

best