MMV: Context

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 1:01 PM
Subject: Re: MMV: Context


> King, Vincent. 'Giving Destruction a Name and a Face: Thomas Pynchon's
> "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"'. Studies in Short Fiction 35.1, 1998, pp.
> 13-21.
>
> > King says that there is a "general
> > consensus" that 'MMV' is "one of Pynchon's best short stories",

It would've been a good thing if King had mentioned the other stories he
considers to be good ones. His claim of a "general
consensus" is a weak argument.

>
> King states his case in a footnote: "Pynchon's decision to omit 'Mortality
> and Mercy' from _Slow Learner_ may be attributed to the *perception*,
voiced
> by White, that the story validates Loon's violence." (14) They're his
> italics, and he's referring to Allon White's 1981 article in _Critical
> Quarterly_.
>
> It's a thoroughly illogical claim. There are no grounds at all to say that
> Pynchon had read Allon White's essay or that he was cowed by it into
leaving
> 'MMV' out of the compilation of his early short stories.

But King doesn't say so. He says very carefully: "may be attributed to the
*perception*, voiced by White (...)." I disagree that the story validates
the ending. For me it just says that this could happen to careless people if
there's an immoral catalysator like Siegel.

> If it were the case
> that White and other readers had misunderstood or misinterpreted the story
> (which starts to open up various other cans of worms regarding authorial
> intention and reader response,

If the story indeed opens these "cans of worms" it would be a good argument
that it isn't such a bad story after all, the "intentional fallacy" isn't
what interests me.

> and whether or not the quality of a story
> might have something to do with how well, or whether, it communicates what
> the author intended it to), surely Pynchon would have included the story
in
> _SL_, or at least mentioned it and its reception (as he does with
'Entropy'
> for example), in order to try to disabuse the reading public of the false
> "*perception*" they hold, or which had been foisted upon them.
>

A futile exercise.

> Worse than this, King's argument lacks internal consistency, because part
of
> his conclusion is that in the story Pynchon has deliberately manipulated
the
> reader to come to this "wrong" perception, that "it is the *reader's*
> indifference to these signs [i.e. that Siegel is a psychopath] that makes
us
> an accessory to Siegel's crime and allows Pynchon to explore his actual
> subject: the moral cost of misreading." (16)
>

Here's the part that you should've quoted:

"He (i.e. White) misses the early signs of Siegel's amorality as well as
Pynchon's implicit criticism of Siegel's behavior. Most important, White
fails to recognize that we misread Siegel because we tend to read,
especially in the absence of death (or some equally dramatic situation),
indifferently. And indifference, Pynchon shows us, is deadly, both in
extreme cases (Loon's attack) as well as in less dramatic ones
(evaluating Siegel). In White's haste to distance himself from Siegel's
position, he overlooks the fact that it is Pynchon who nudges the reader
toward the moral high ground.[sup13]"

Yours truly

Otto