a bit more re Pynchon's reconciliation of apparent opposites WAS Dixon's nonviolence

[Doug Millison]

I thought about this a bit more at lunch.  We don't really know -- Pynchon
or another narrator doesn't appear to comment specifically on Cherrycoke's
tale, although his listeners challenge its veracity -- how much of this
Cherrycoke might be making up in order to prove his own points.

We might assume that Cherrycoke has some sort of vested interest --
Christian that he is -- in presenting Dixon as a man who lives up to his
Quaker  background by heeding his conscience and resisting his urge to whip
or kill the slave driver.  Cherrycoke may somehow know the historical
record that we know of -- that reference Dave Monroe dug up -- and change
it to suit his purposes.  Pynchon doesn't tell us anything about this in
the text here, of course, and certainly it's Pynchon who writes the novel
and creates Cherrycoke and puts these words in Cherrycoke's mouth in the
first place. But it's conceiveable that Pynchon assumes that his serious
readers will mine the historical record and dig up the same info about
Dixon's history as Dave Monroe has done, that we will know that Pynchon
(via Cherrycoke) is rewriting the historical record re Dixon's encounter
with the slave driver -- Cherrycoke changing assault to "accost",
equivocating about a punch being thrown or pulled or not or what,
describing Dixon's threats and failure to follow through with same.

At any rate, Pynchon does give us quite a bit to consider, regarding
history and how it's made and transmitted and for what purposes, in this
episode.

-Doug

P.S.  Keith, I'll let you conduct that Rube Goldberg experiment with your
son and report the results, complete with the relevant physics calculations
-- my son is at school today, I don't own a whip, and I need to get on with
another project. Good luck, and don't forget:

"...Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in
Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within
the reach of anyone in Power,-who need but touch her, and all her Credit is
in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be
tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters,
Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide
her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep
her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government..." (p.350)

 
"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-Tops and Hoops, forever
a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History
is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,-nor is Remembrance, for
Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the
Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-her Practitioners, to
survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy and Taproom
Wit,-that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past
we risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever,- not a Chain of single
Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-rather, a great disorderly
Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the
Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common." (p.349)