re Re: MDDM Washington & Gershom

[Doug Millison]

Gershom serves drinks, cooks, steps 'n' fetches things, and entertains with
jokes -- a few of the work opportunities that whites traditionally felt
comfortable making available to African-Americans in the US.

"Gershom fetch us if you will some Pipes and a Bowl of the new-cur'd Hemp.
And another gallon of your magnificent Punch.  There's a good fellow."
(M&D 278)

If you don't think Stepin Fetchit and Sammy Davis Jr. help understand
Pynchon's characterization of Gershom, please don't worry about it.  I'm
not establishing rules for the way Pyncnon's texts must be interpreted,
read them as you like.


Speaking of "refusing to engage", in addition to abandoning quite a few of
the laughable assertions you've made earlier in this thread, you've left
these questions hanging:


jbor:
 <Gershom following GW to Raleigh's Billiard-Room in
>Ch. 58, and intervening there on George's behalf,


How does Gershom "intervene on George's behalf"?   After Washington says
"That voice, Mason! 'tis my Tithable, Gershom!" (p. 572), Pynchon doesn't
show Washinton doing or saying anything, nobody is pursuing him or
addressing him in any way, Gershom continues to tell jokes. Washinton
literally fades from the scene.


jbor:
>But in his texts there are also white Americans and
>Europeans, such as GW, who aren't racist,


If Washington isn't racist why does he keep black people as property?  I
don't think treating the term "racist" as an anachronism works either,
Washington is a key player in a social, political, economic structure that
values Africans as property not as humans (and Native Americans as vermin
to be eradicated so the settlers can occupy their land) -- his actions and
beliefs are racist to the core.


jbor:
>I note again that Doug has flatly refused to engage with these eight
>excerpts from the novel _Mason & Dixon_, which exemplify the kinds of
>liberties which Gershom enjoys in GW's house and under his "nominal"
>mastership.


Hogwash.  They are quite easy to explain. I've said I consider them
examples of privileges that Pynchon's Washington grants Gershom (what he
grants he can take away), a certain level of casual behavior and
intimacies, no less and no more. The sort of thing you'd find in households
where the master wanted to enjoy regular sex with a slave without having to
forcibly rape him or her,  being "nice" and dispensing favors in order to
secure that kind of ongoing cooperation.

By insisting that M&D shows Washington
granting "absolute liberty" to a human being he owns as property, you force
an interpretation that veers far from what the novel shows, and depend on a
hairsplitting definition of liberty that the novel does not provide or
endorse. I don't think you can fit Pynchon inside that particular political
box, without throwing away most of what Pynchon has to say about slavery in
Colonial America and stripping away the many layers of nuance and irony,
that Pynchon builds into this novel.


jbor:
>not once in Pynchon's text is Gershom actually labelled as "a slave"

Earth to jbor:
Do you seriously contend that Gershom is not Washington's slave?