re I Want The Whole Tooth And Nothing But The Tooth

[Doug Millison]

Keith,

Pynchon doesn't give us enough information to properly account for the
broken tooth, for starters -- to get to the broken tooth, we have interpret
Pynchon's text, guess what's happening in between the cartoon frames that
Pynchon draws, so to speak.

Speculating in between P's lines, why don't we step back and decide where
the whip handle is at this moment?

The whip is in Dixon's hand (Dixon "seizes the whip" p. 698), that we know.
Which hand?  Pynchon doesn't say. Which Fist does he place in the way of
the oncoming Face?  Pynchon doesn't say that either.

We could, if we wished, and I think without violating Pynchon's text nearly
as much as some other readers have done, speculate that the fist is Dixon's
hand wrapped around the whip handle, that it's the whip handle that breaks
the driver's tooth when the driver "comes after it".  The whip handle
would, in this reading, could provide the hardness necessary to damage a
tooth (and I guess that we could also examine to what degree the tooth is
broken -- is is chipped, cracked, hanging by a bloody thread, what? Pynchon
doesn't say, does he? and there's always the possibility that the slave
driver, a rather nasty fellow, might be lying about the tooth in an effort
to rouse the watching townspeople to intervene on his behalf, similar to
the way he whimpers about his charming children in a bid for sympathy)
while Dixon's "fist" (+ hand + arm + body) remain stationary, as P's text
suggests. So, in this reading, the force of the driver's charge connecting
with the whip handle in Dixon's stationary fist should account for the
"broken" tooth.   Cut! It's a wrap...

Of course, it could also happen another way:  Dixon "moving directly,
seizes the Whip" with one hand, drags the slave driver who refuses to let
go, then uses the other hand "places the Fist in the way of the oncoming
Face" as "the owner comes after it." This is conceiveable, too, given the
way that Pynchon writes the sequence as one sentence punctuated with ,-- to
break it up into four frames.  This reading makes Dixon more active and
deliberate with regard to the fisting (I guess I've still got that second,
sexual definition of "accost" in the sewer of my mind).

But, if it did happen that way, would that mean that Dixon has betrayed his
pacifist roots, that he is not an adherant to a nonviolent approach?  This
is the part of what I've been saying that nobody else seems to want to
address.  Current nonviolent practice -- current during the entire period
Pynchon could have been working on M&D and continuing to the present day,
that is -- would consider scenario #2 above to be within bounds, as I
understand it. Nonviolent protesters do not shrink from confrontation, from
accosting the powers that be and demanding justice, from putting their
bodies on the line to passively prevent acts of injustice or war, from
using all manner of verbal and physical tactics to raise a ruckus and
expose injustice and prevent it if they can and at the least shame the
authorities and tarnish their legitimacy.  This sort of nonviolent protest
has at its core the sort of intensely personal struggle -- between a
person's violent urges and the conscience that says more violence is not
the answer -- that Dixon appears to go through her as he resists the urge
to beat the driver with the whip or kill him.   I'm a violent person
struggling to be nonviolent, says Walter Wink, one of my favorite authors
these days, a man who marched with King at Selma and who has spent 30 years
or more writing and thinking about nonviolence in a Christian context.

Now you can answer a couple of questions for me, OK?

Does "places" mean "punches"? Really?

Is taking the whip from the slave driver a violent act? (Not what comes
after, just the taking of the whip.)

If Dixon takes the whip, and the slave driver decides to come after it, and
the force of his impact with Dixon hurts him, can you really say Dixon is
responsible, even if it's the slave driver's choice to charge?

If Pynchon wanted to paint a picture of Dixon unambiguously assaulting and
deliberately injuring the slave driver, why do you think he uses a word
like "accost" instead of assault, or "places" instead of punches, and leave
out an explicit and perfectly clear description of Dixon executing said
assault? Diction is important after all, in this Dixon matter.

OK, incoming mail, back to copywriting....