placed as punch WAS re Re: Pynchon's reconciliation of apparent opposites WAS Dixon's

[Doug Millison]

Have it your way if you like, but I'll have it Pynchon's way, the way he
writes the ambiguous "places"  and not the definitive "punches". Call it
ridiculous, but that's the text Pynchon gives us all to deal with.  Maybe
"places his Fist" in German means "punches"  but I don't believe that's the
case in English -- didn't Dave Monroe provide a dictionary definition of
"punch" the other day?

I agree with Keith, that sometimes we say "His fist ran into my face" as a
funny way of saying "I punched him," but that's not what Pynchon writes in
this passage either;  it's not Dixon relating, in the first person and
after the fact, "His face ran into my fist", it's Pynchon writing (and
giving to Cherrycoke to say), in the third person,  "Dixon places his Fist
in the way of the oncoming Face".  You don't have to leap immediately from
"places" to "punches" either, you can just as easily assume (even though
Pynchon doesn't say it this way) that Dixon has thrown his arm out to block
the driver's charge, a purely defensive move, with the fist formed as
Dixon's hand grips the whip handle.  But, if that's what Pynchon meant, why
didn't he write it that way instead of using the ambiguous "places" with
its curious mix of active and passive meanings, where the doer of the
action moves the object to a place where it then rests?

This insistence that Dixon couldn't have managed the encounter the way
Pynchon writes it would seem to close off an important interpretive opening
that Pynchon has deliberately created. Through Cherrycoke's observations on
what constitutes history and through the discussion/argument at the end of
chapter 72 among Cherrycoke and his listeners about how to interpret this
story of Dixon taking the slave driver's whip, Pynchon appears to urge a
variety of stories and interpretations, each of which becomes a thread in
the larger tapestry of History.  Pynchon would seem to be urging his
readers to keep an open mind as well as attend to the consequences of
events unfolding one way instead of branching in a different direction.

That's what I'm trying to do, at least. I've entertained  the possibility
that in M&D even though it doesn't appear to happen this way Dixon may
actually charge across the street and assault the driver as jbor would have
it, I understand that the history of the Dixon family that we can read
outside of M&D appears to relate the incident that way, but inside the
fiction of M&D I also realize that this seems highly unlikely, given that
Cherrycoke/Pynchon tell the story completely differently, describing Dixon
calmly walking across the street and demanding the whip (Pynchon writes
that Dixon "accosts" not assaults the slave driver) and then being attacked
by the slave driver, defending himself with the minimum force necessary,
calmly proceeding to free the slaves,  suppressing the urge to kill the
driver. The historical record says one thing, Pynchon says another in M&D,
and Pynchon has Cherrycoke say it's all History anyway, so  everybody wins.

Moving outside the novel, what can this episode of Dixon and the slave
driver say, in a larger US history perspective?   Both stories are true,
aren't they? Some Quakers -- and others -- opposed slavery and acted nobly,
without violence, to end slavery or mitigate the suffering it caused, but
they didn't prevail.  Other people who were opposed to slavery eventually
yielded to the urge to violence, lost patience, used violence to try to
stop violence, and this lead to a terribly bloody civil war fought across
the the Mason-Dixon Line (and of course many other factors combined to
cause the civil war).  Pynchon's apparent fabrication here of Dixon's
nonviolent approach, of an encounter in which Dixon suppresses his urge to
kill and frees the slaves without further harm or bloodshed, might be seen
to represent the road not taken.  Certainly many people wished then, and
wish now, it had happened that way (and those desires and alternate
scenarios can be seen, as Cherrycoke says, as part of US history, too):
the violence of the civil war in many ways has cursed the land for many
generations afterwards...as the use of violence to kill the Lambton Worm
leads to more violence, suffering, and a curse on the land that lasts for
generations.


Thomas:
"I think it is ridiculous to believe that the paragraph under
discussion does not clearly express that Dixon punches the slave-owner
in the
face (and he has my applause for doing this)."