MDMD Ch. 40 p 406, 407 & a bit more re Dixon's nonviolence Ch. 72

[Doug Millison]

Funny, I thought jbor was tired of talking about this...

Why insist that Dixon thrashes the slave driver with the whip when Pynchon
has obviously chosen not to include this in the episode he's written and
published in the novel? Call me old-fashioned, but I just don't see the
need to add elements to the text that Pynchon chose not to add, just to win
an argument in an email discussion group.  Of course jbor can re-tell the
story any old way, and an entertaining interpretation it may be, but it's
not the story Pynchon has written as told by Cherrycoke.

(This is pretty funny, actually. Usually it's jbor trying -- and not always
or even very often succeeding --  to shoot down somebody else's argument by
asking to see the textual evidence, but now it's jbor ignoring Pynchon's
text and bringing in a bunch of stuff that Pynchon didn't write in the
passage in question, in order, apparently,  to get the M&D Dixon jbor
wants.  Well, I've seen funnier stuff happen when one P-lister or another
gets into the habit of automatically contradicting whatever I write here. )

OK, back to chapters 39, 40, and 41. In addition to the posts I already
contributed to the discussion of those chapters, I'm interested in the
American revolutionaries' discussion of "Degrees of Slavery" and their
analysis of Mason's class situation as a "Slave" on p. 406.  In addition to
being the sort of progressive politics that the American Revolution is
destined to disappoint as the "revolution" merely shifts power and control
from one set of property owners and proto-capitalists to another (the
Founding Fathers that Pynchon seems to have such fun mocking throughout
the novel),  it's an analysis that seems to cut deep and slice into
emotional baggage from Mason's relationship with his father, going to the
heart of the story of his choice to work for the government that was
brutalizing his neighbors.  (I suspect that now, in this New York encounter
with these vibrant young revolutionaries, Mason is really beginning to
realize what a bind having to choose sides put him in, feeling the
emotional burden of having chosen "Bradley's world, when he should instead
have stood by his father, and their small doom'd Paradise" p. 407). And
this scene would seem to set up yet another major character reversal,
Pynchon (via Cherrycoke, I guess) painting Mason here as a British loyalist
who will later abandon his native land to call America his home, a
country/concept/project Mason seems, here in chapter 40, to dismiss as a
utopian dream (p. 406, "You believe Christ's return to be imminent").

Also, there's nothing specific in the text to support this conjecture but
when I first read Cherrycoke's comment at the bottom of 407, "Who are they
[...] that will send violent young troops against their own people?" when
the novel came out in '97, I thought of Deng Xiao Ping's brutal repression
of the democracy movement in Beijing in '89 -- that phrase, sending violent
young troops against their own people, was used quite a bit in the news, at
a time when Pynchon would have been moving into the final phase of his work
on M&D; and I suspect he might have had in mind the way various police and
military forces fired upon protesters during the civil rights and anti-war
struggles of the '50s, '60s, and early '70s in the US.