MDDM: Pynchon's Washington & Gershom

[Doug Millison]

jbor :
>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.


That's what's been so confusing about your argument.  You've pointed to the
historical Washington and brought up the positive fact that he treated his
slaves relatively well, used that to support your interpretation of  that
Pynchon's Washington and Gershom, but at the same time you have insisted
that the historical record was not relevant when it came to unflattering
information about Washington-- such as the fact that he contributed  slaves
to the Great Dismal Swamp Land Company instead of selling shares in that
company to his slaves so they could profit from the venture.  Why is it OK
to point to positives in the historical record for your interpretation, and
ignore negatives in the record that support an alternative interpretation?
This is the inconsistency that I find so amusing in your discourse.


Everything I've pointed to in the historical record relates specifically to
what Pynchon portrays in the novel,  and if  you read back through this
thread with an open mind, you'll also see that I have considered a range of
facts, positive and negative, from the historical record, your brain-dead
denials notwithstanding. I can understand why you don't want to admit that,
however.


>Where
>is the evidence that the slaves working on the GD Swamp project were
>poorly-treated?


You need special historical documentation to know that the back-breaking
manual labor of draining a swamp would cause a slave to suffer?   That is,
as our French friends say, really to cut the hairs in quarters (couper les
cheveux en quatre).  Perhaps you will have the opportunity some day to
observe manual labor being performed in a hot, steamy climate, by people
who have not chosen to do that work in the first place but instead are
forced to do so, and thus you will be able to call upon a common human
experience that I believe Pynchon understands very well.  I've seen chain
gangs working in such conditions in Louisiana, it's not a pretty sight.


>And where 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


You continue to ignore the key distinction that M&D makes -- the axmen work
for Mason and Dixon as employees, they are not forced to do so as slaves.
If they get tired of the work or their treatment, they can leave whenever
they want to.  If Washington's slaves get fed up and leave, we learn from
Washington's own papers that he advertises for their return, exercising his
property rights.  But, you don't  have to go outside of M&D to learn the
difference between slave and employee, the novel distinguishes between
employees like Mason and Dixon, and the slaves they observe in the
colonies, Mason and Dixon talk about it.


>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.


That's just your opinion.  Pynchon here may well refer to a rather
well-known history of such American con jobs that involve two or more
flim-flam men working together to interest and then cheat their
unsuspecting victims -- a common element in novels, jokes, movies, etc. in
the American tradition.  Pynchon underscores the theatrical nature of the
scene that Mason and Dixon encounter:  Pynchon, via Wicks' diary, calls it
a Folly.

"follies (used with a sing. or pl. verb) An elaborate theatrical revue
consisting of music, dance, and skits."
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=folly)



>    [...] Washington meanwhile trying to wave Gershom back into the house.
>    Gershom, however, has just taken the Pipe from Mr. Dixon.


This could be part of the act they're putting on, Washington pretending
that Gershom has, as you said earlier I think, spilt the beans about an
investment opportunity that Washington ostensibly wants to keep secret from
Mason and Dixon -- thus hoping to heighten their interest in it.  Dixon
says they've been warned of something like this.  History tells us that the
Great Dismal Swamp Land Company was a boondoggle after all, and Washington
never did collect payment for his shares in the venture that he tried to
sell later on.  I find it funny that Pynchon brings this up at all -- it is
very like the way W.C. Fields portrays a flim-flam man in some of his
movies, and Pynchon recalls that theatrical tradition by making his
Washington talk like W.C. Fields.


The really poignant aspect of this discussion (putting aside fyour
hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty) is that in your insistence to read
Gershom the slave  as enjoying "absolute liberty" while he remains legally
a slave, and as subject to Washington's whim as any of Washington's other
slaves,  you ignore the really radical work that Pynchon does here.


In this scene at Mt. Vernon, Pynchon focuses on a slave whose work and
actions recall a very familiar,  limited range of work opportunities that
have always been accorded to African-Americans in the US.  Pynchon gives
Washington a slave who  serves drinks, cooks, steps 'n' fetches things, and
entertains with jokes.  (By the way, it is worth noting that Gershom takes
master-slave jokes and turns them into king-fool jokes -- I suspect that's
because he knows what Washington and his fellow white Virginians in the
bars where he performs want to hear, they don't want to be reminded of the
master-slave situation, but instead laugh at a bumbling King.)  We know
from the historical record that most, if not all of Washington's slaves,
led far different lives -- some of them slaved away in that swamp for
years, for example -- and I believe that Pynchon expects us to know that,
or to learn it when we turn from M&D to the historical record.


At the same time, Pynchon shows a Washington who adopts African-American
speech patterns and slang, who enjoys "soul" food:  Pynchon might be seen
to bring into play a whole realm of contemporary historical discourse, that
focuses on recognizing the contributions that Africans made to American
culture.


"... Africans who came to the Americas constituterd not merely a "labor
force," which in the context of slavery in the Americas connotes physical,
not intellectual labor. The transatlantic slave trade also involved the
very deliberate selection of Africans on the basis of their specific
knowledge and skills that were needed for the development of the Americas.
Thereforce, this largest human migration also constituted the world's first
_massive brain and transfer of technology_ from Africa to the Americas,m
which establishedthe bgasis for contemporary power relations in the
Atlantic world." (_African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation
of the Americas_, Sheila S. Walker, ed., 2001)


Pynchon shows this sort of transfer -- you alluded to something like this
in an earlier post in this thread -- happening, as it did historically,
within the context of slavery. Clearly, Washington is learning from
Gershom, and Gershom is learning, too.  But Gershom remains a slave in M&D.
And as Walker and her colleagues show in the book I just quoted (and there
is a large, rich body of work in the same vein), the contributions of
African slaves has been minimized if not outright ignored in the way white
America has written history.


Pynchon's portrait of Gershom restores some balance.  But, his portrait of
Washington reminds us that the cruel institution of slavery stayed intact
even as the Founding Fathers were plotting revolution to win their own
liberty. Washington is the master and he knows it (his wife knows it, too,
as Washington appears to expect her service as a matter of course, the way
he does Gershom's;, lucky for Gershom that Washington is one of the slave
holders who treated his property with care.


I find it odd that you're so concerned to rehabilitate Washington, and by
extension the rest of the Founding Fathers I assume, by insisting that M&D
shows him granting "absolute liberty" to his slave -- an interpretation
that veers far from what the novel shows, and depends on a hairsplitting
sort of definition of liberty that the novel does not provide or endorse.
In trying to force Pynchon's text into this particular political box, you
strip away multiple layers of nuance, and irony,  you ignore the many
elements in the novel that create an accurate picture of slavery as the
inhumane institution that we know it to be, and that so many of
Washington's contemporaries knew it to be.