MDMD: Dixon's nonviolence

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Doug Millison wrote:

> Try as you may to change it, Pynchon clearly writes that "Dixon places his
> fist in the way of the oncoming Face"), he  holds his fist stationary, does
> not throw a punch.  (My interpretation:  Dixon absorbs the force of the
> slave driver's charge with his body, in a manner similar to the way a line
> of protesters might passively await the charge of a line of police.) You
> reverse what Pynchon wrote, when you say " a punch
> lands forcefully in the slave-driver's face"  when Pynchon is unambiguous
> in writing that the motion belongs to the slave driver, "the oncoming
> Face." You're changing Pynchon's phrase, replacing his passive sentence
> structure with your own an active sentence construction.  Call my
> interpretation what you will, at least I'm dealing wth the text Pynchon
> wrote, I'm not rewriting it to make my point. You can make it mean whatever
> you want it to mean if you want to start changing his verbs and sentence
> structure, but I prefer to deal with the text that Pynchon writes.

Thanks, Doug. I laughed my ass off reading that one...