re Re: MDDM Washington

[Doug Millison]

Otto quoted:
"Attended by a black slave who seems much smarter than he is, and of whose
exploitation Washington seems completely unaware, Pynchon's Washington is at
best ridiculous and at worst ominous."
http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/fischer24.htm


"Ridiculous" and "ominous" -- well-chosen adjectives.

Otto quoted another one:
DAVID W. LAWRENCE
COUNTERFEITING AMERICA IN MASON & DIXON
"Included in those conditions is, of course, slavery, and Pynchon's humanely
satiric portrayal of Washington places him in a peculiar relation to that
institution as well. Washington's farcical mimicking of black dialect as he
gives orders to his slave, Gershom, shrinks the distance between the
"Virginia gentleman" and the oppression that sustained his privileged
position. "

"Shrinks" but fails to eliminate "the distance" -- this is painfully
euphemistic language to disguise what many blacks consider a 400-year
Holocaust. We see Gershom's fellow slaves under the whip in M&D, don't
forget, along with Gershom's hijinks.


"That Gershom doubles as a Jewish comedian playfully invokes the
African-American adaptation of the Old Testament narrative of enslavement
and deliverance, which casts Washington as a kind of unwitting, good-natured
pharaoh. Further, in also playing the role of razor-sharp court jester--he
reels off King George jokes in smoky taverns--Gershom, like Pynchon, unmasks
the ideological pretensions of power."
http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/lawrence24.htm


Pynchon does indeed show African-Americans managing to subvert the
structures of power that attempt to enslave them totally, throughout his
fiction, especially in their rewriting of the narratives of their masters
as Lawrence suggests.  Pynchon also shows the power-elite managing to
resist this subversion, retain control, perpetuate the exploitation and
human suffering that is the cost of their domination.  In the American
version of the story, Pharoah wins, not the escaped slaves -- that's the
story that Pynchon's play highlights behind the scenes at Jim Crow Theater.

Thanks, Otto.