re MDMD: America

[Doug Millison]

Within the terms of discourse regarding non-violence, Dixon's act ("mythic"
or not) is non-violent.  He doesn't physically harm anybody; he puts his
body on the line to prevent the slave-driver from using his whip to harm
the slaves, and to let the slaves escape thus giving them at least the hope
of a better life. "Non-violent" doesn't mean passive or non-reactive, it's
action that stops short of  injuring or killing.  I wouldn't choose "nobel
or selfish" either -- I'd call it humanitarian, the act of a peace-loving
man who finally sees (as he didn't at the end of the chapter currently
under discussion) the institution of slavery for what it is and who chooses
to non-violently do what he can to prevent further suffering in the
situation he confronts. It's a principled, moral act, one that exhibits
bravery, and which opposes the received wisdom that it's OK to traffic in
human beings and exploit them as factors of production. I suppose you could
argue that people sometimes have selfish motives for their humanitarian
acts, but even in the worst of cases I don't see how that undercuts
entirely the good that accrues from the acts.  For Dixon, there's little
obvious upside to his action, after taking it he has to hustle to avoid
becoming he victim of violence himself.

Pynchon's use of this episode in the political and moral scheme of M&D is
nuanced. Earlier in the novel, Dixon appears to be driven more by his
physical appetites than anything else; he did nothing to stop any acts of
violence against slaves elsewhere, and he appears guilty himself of
sexually exploiting the local native girls in a way that's possible only in
the context of an imperial occupation or colony.  Thus Dixon's act has a
certain redemptive value, it makes him a more serious person, representing
a kind of moral awareness  that hasn't been present, and perhaps this is
why the story passes down through his descendants. As you note, it may be a
legend or fabrication, not demonstrable as a historical fact, but it
nonetheless points to a time in American history not many decades later
when men and women will take such a stand to stop the slave trade and end
the violence against slaves, when the "Maxon-Dixon Line" will have come to
represent a boundary between "free" and slave societies.  We can also read
it in the context of the treatment P gives to racial issues elsewhere in
his writings, where, it turns out, nothing is simply black and white.

re American exceptionalism, one of the virtues I see in M&D is that it
explodes the myth that America, the New World, is somehow different from
Europe.  America's nation-building has at its root Europe's commercial
impulses and apparatus. Present here in America are all the evils found
elsewhere -- slavery, environmental rape, religious feuds, etc. A dream it
may have been for the Old World, by the time Mason and Dixon get here
America has already been poisoned and is on its way to becoming the same
old European nightmare. Manifest Destiny is nothing more than the local
version of the imperial project that brought Europe to America in the first
place.  In the current circumstance, of course, the US is "exceptional" by
virtue of its wealth and military power, but it's still just the latest
purveyor of the same old terror, the latest in a series of rogue states
that have spread death and misery across the globe.


Rich:
But that act represents, it seems to me, a mythic act, one to tell the
young'uns or uninformed about right and wrong. And it's not really
non-violent is it?
Is it noble or selfish?