summing up Re: MDDM hist. refs re non-Intervention, W & G & Martha

[Doug Millison]

Samuel Moyer:
>I think "none of you" refers to all present... meaning that she does serve
>Gersh, though who can know... he does get to smoke and converse... so why
>not eat?

Maybe.  jbor always makes such a fuss about what Pynchon actually includes
in his text or not, I thought it worth observing that P doesn't actually
depict Martha personally serving Gershom -- and given what the historical
Martha appears to have been, that's understandable.  Maybe Gershom helped
himself from the tray after she left it (if he is eating, which P doesn't
show either), Pynchon doesn't give us that information.

It's also worth remembering that the men are all getting stoned on pot and
buzzed on punch in this scene, letting their hair down (Washington
literally flips his wig at one point), it's a party. That doesn't mean W
considers G an equal, imo, only that he doesn't mind having him around to
party with. In that respect, P's W resembles the masters who permitted or
even encouraged other kinds of intimacies with slaves, especially when they
used them for sex.  Consider the office party, when the boss lets his hair
down with the staff -- does that mean he considers them equals?  Or is it
more on the order of _noblesse oblige_?
(http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=noblesse%20oblige)

I disagree with your larger point and don't think it's so easy to divorce
Pynchon's Washington from the Washington of history, instead I think that
forcing us to consider the two is exactly what Pynchon expects wants his
readers to do, judging from the way he freely mixes historical fact in with
his fiction -- although I don't know Pynchon's intentions, nor do we need
to know them.  What's in M&D?  Historical facts _and_ fiction. (Both/and,
not either/or -- a Pynchonian constant if there is any.)  I don't see a
Washington who considers or treats Gershom as an equal, nor do I see a
portrait of the Father of Our Country that's positive or flattering.  I
suspect Pynchon worked pretty hard on his Washington, in an effort to
elicit from his readers a tangled web of responses, and by doing so to call
into question the various myths we tell ourselves about America and the US
and the history of black-white relations and politics therein. As others
have noted, P usually does a good job of undercutting reader expectations
-- and the same goes for readers who want M&D to show Washington as
unquestionably "benevolent", or treating Gershom as an "equal", or, heaven
forbid, as an illustration of some philosophical construct in which slavery
equals liberty (same goes for anybody who wants to rewrite Pynchon as a
two-dimensional '60s rebel/counterculture critic of America -- obviously
he's far more complex than that). I do think that if you read through M&D
-- and the rest of Pynchon's works -- and see what he actually writes about
slavery, genocide, imperialism, black-white relationships, you'll have a
difficult time demonstrating definitively that Pynchon erases distinctions
between slavery and freedom, or that he wants to affirm the official myth
of the Founding Fathers as creators of democracy who managed to break free
of the inequalities and contradictions of the empire against which they
revolted. But that's just my opinion and of course others may disagree,
just as it's my right to disagree with the opinions that others express.
Do I sufficiently support my interpretation?  Maybe, maybe not. I do think
it's OK to ask that sort of question about anybody's reading of Pynchon,
especially in this forum. I'm glad I took the time and made the effort to
work through these issues, in response to jbor's posts.  He may have a
different conclusion, but in the final analysis, what he thinks of me is
none of my business. Digging into this Washington/Gershom/Martha material
in M&D also demonstrates, to my satisfaction at least, that the closer a
reader looks, the more obvious it becomes that Pynchon has brought so many
threads together in this novel, it repays re-reading and a return to
sources many times over -- but that's just my opinion, too.   Not everybody
feels this way about this novel.

It would be nice to be able to have this kind of conversation without all
the hard feelings and name-calling, and so on, but, as we learn from
looking at Pynchon's Washington, we're only human after all. I don't mind a
bit of strenuous discussion -- and if the foax in the peanut gallery need
to chime in to make themselves feel good, what a wonderful opportunity for
them to enjoy a sense of particicpation even if they don't have the time or
whatever to add something more substantial.  "It's all gravy," as the kids
say.