more re MDMD Dixon's nonviolence

[Doug Millison]

jbor:
"It's not a passive sentence structure at all. "Dixon places his Fist" is in
the active voice. Dixon is the subject of the sentence and the agent of the
punch. He "places" his fist deliberately, and obviously with force."

The sense is passive, of course, despite my misstatement -- I place
something there and it stays there --  the "oncoming Face" is moving, in
Pynchon's text if not yours.

The mover places the 10 foot Bosendorfer grand in the room where it awaits
the oncoming pianist.  That piano is not going anywhere after it's been
placed there.  She places the dinner plate in front of me where it awaits
the oncoming fork.

jbor reverses what Pynchon wrote, in jbor's phrase "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"
crashing into Dixon's fist.  jbor thus changes Pynchon's phrase, and builds
an interpretation on the rewrite.  When jbor say Dixon "places his fist
deliberately, and obviously with force" jbor takes the rewrite a step
further.  Pynchon writes nothing in this passage about Dixon's placement of
the fist being  "with force," that's jbor's addition pure and simple.

Again, there is no end to what jbor -- or anybody --  can claim Pynchon is
saying, once you untether yourself from his text and substitute something
else.  Be my guest, but it's not Pynchon you're interpreting in this
instance, it's your own rewrite of his text.


Michael:
"I still don't quite
understand why it is so important to you to deny Dixon's possible
failings as a representative Quaker. "

Of course this is of no importance to me as I haven't written anything
about "Dixon's possible failings as a representative Quaker".  By
moderating his use of force and heeding his conscience, leaving the slaves
safe and the slave driver alive, he's lived up very well to his Quaker
roots, in my opinion. He's only human after all, and the slave driver has
baited him well.  As I mentioned before, Dixon did what nobody else on that
street did, prevented the slave driver from harming these slaves on this
occasion and setting them free.  He's done an admirable job of performing
his Christian duty in this situation.

The question none of you has answered satisfactorily is, if Dixon is such a
violent man and so prone to betray his Quaker upbringing, why didn't he
beat the slave driver with the whip or kill him as he desired to do?  The
answer, I suggest, is that he discovers (a major development in the arc of
his character development in the novel) his conscience won't let him,
precisely as Pynchon describes it in the passage in question.  But if you
want it to say something different, please feel free to rewrite Pynchon's
text to meet your interpretive requirements.