third time's the charm Re: correctio

[Doug Millison]

Oh, well. Busy and distracting day here.

At 10:32 AM -0700 7/12/02, Doug Millison wrote:
>correcting another dumb editing mistake, sorry:
>
>I think it's pretty clear that Pynchon is aware of this perspective as he
>presents  Washington and Gershom  in M&D, creating a character, Gershom,
>who ,despite being enslaved by the Father of Our Country, manages to turn
>the tables (not because of some special grant of "liberty" by Washington,
>but because of Gershom's own resourcefulness and talent) on his "nominal
>Master"  -- a phrase that I suspect Pynchon chooses, not because he wants to
>point out that Washington is not Gershom's master, because we know very
>well that
>Washington's slaves were his property, but instead because Pynchon wants to
>honor the experience of the enslaved Africans (Walker's term) in America
>who managed to
>make the best of a very bad situation -- part of Pynchon's irrepressible
>Preterite.
>Gershom stands at the beginning of a long line of African Americans who, as
>Walker notes, "succeeded in defining themselves _on_ their own terms, in
>spite of all the powerful, colonial and national government-enforced
>efforts to make it impossible for them to do so".  Pynchon's Washington
>might in some ways be seen as situated  on the "nice" end of the enslaver
>spectrum, permitting (for reasons Pynchon does not explain) Gershom some
>privileges that most enslaved Africans didn't enjoy -- but Pynchon's
>Washington remains a white enslaver (Walker's term).   Pynchon hasn't
>altered that fact in his historical >fiction, where he creates
>fictionalized version of the historical Washington who was  in fact  one
>of
>those masters who considered enslaved Africans  "their chattel, whom they
>included not on human census rolls but rather on property inventories along
>with their tables and chairs, with their cows and pigs."

A similar perspective may help in reading the parts of M&D that deal with
Native Americans, too, by focusing on what they managed to do despite the
horrific situation in which they find themselves due to the Europeans'
imperialistic, genocidal program -- Pynchon creates at least one Native
American character who manages to exhibit some black humor, despite the
carnage that the Europeans have brought to the land.