MDDM Stig's tale & Powers (663) WAS Re: Gudrid's vision

[Doug Millison]

"Listen to me, Defecates-with-Pigeons. Long before any of you came here, we
dream'd of you. All the people, even Nations far to the South and the West,
dreamt you before ever we saw you,-- we believ'd that you came fro some
other World, or the Sky. You had Powers and we respected them.  Yet you
never dream'd of us, and when at last you saw us, wish'd only to destroy
us. Then the killing started,-- some of you, some of us,-- but not nearly
asmany as we'd been expecting. You could not be the Giants oflong ago, who
would simply have wip'd us away, and for less. Instead, you sold us your
Powers,-- your Rigles,-- as if encouraging us to shoot at you,-- and so we
did, tho' not hitting as many of you, as *you* were expecting.  Now, you
begin to believe that we have come from elsewhere, possessing Powers you do
not.... Those of us who knew how, have fled into Refuge in your Dreasm, at
last. Tho' we now pursue real livesno different at their Hearts from yours,
we are also your Dreams."
(M&D 663)

This pairs nicely with Stig's tale, and offers a scalding rebuke of the
claim of superiority  that comes just before, "They who control the
Microskopick, control the World" (663),  exposing imo the Europeans for the
second-rate devils that so many of them are in this novel.

In M&D, at least, Pynchon gives the Native Americans  deep insight into the
nature of their relationship to the Europeans.  Pynchon does not show Mason
and Dixon responding to this observation. Perhaps they don't understand it
-- although Dixon had a similar  insight re the relationship of European to
Slaves back on p. 68, there's no sign he recalls it here on p. 663.  How
can Mason and Dixon respond?  They've seen a massacre, what the Paxton Boys
have done, and they've heard tales told to justify the violence that's been
visited on the Native Americans (the Ferryman's tale, which Pynchon would
seem to mock by turning it into a sob story in the _How the West Was Won_
justifying the genocide of the Native Americans as an inevitable result of
Manifest Destiny genre -- and in that instance Mason and Dixon realized
they were being manipulated and  called the story-teller on his Disneyfying
tactics), but they don't respond here.   Shamed silence, it seems to me.





At 9:32 AM -0400 7/25/02, Bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
>[...] that passage (which
>I can't seem to locate at the moment) wherein
>the native confides the concern that while the
>they were able to find in their dreaming a space
>for the europeans yet to come, that such possibility
>was not mutual.