Giving Destruction a Name and Face

[Dave Monroe]

... continuing from Vincent King, "Giving Destruction
a Name and Face: Thomas Pynchon's 'Mortality and Mercy
in Vienna,'" Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 35, No. 1
(Winter 1998), pp. 13-21 ...


Siegel's responsibility is easy to establish, for he
not only anticipates the attack but actually
instigates it. Having discovered that Irving Loon is
suffering from Windigo psychosis--a type of paranoia
that leads to murder and cannibalism--Siegel
deliberately prompts Loon's attack when he says
"Windigo" to him. And in the "sixty seconds" he has to
decide whether to try to stop Loon or just walk away,
we learn that the "still small Jesuit voice" inside of
Siegel is "vaunted with" a "sense of exhilaration"
(200). Indeed, Siegel's only regret is "that Irving
Loon would be the only one partaking of any body and
blood, divine or otherwise" (201). In other words, the
only thing that would be more spiritually satisfying
than Loon shooting a roomful of innocents would be a
roomful of Loons shooting each other. Not only does
Siegel not want to stop the massacre; he actually
wants everyone--except himself of course--to join in
this bloody communion. According to Slade, Siegel
actually believes that Loon's massacre will redeem
this Washington wasteland. As these passages
illustrate, though, Siegel is under no such delusion.
Instead, he relishes the godlike feeling that comes
from holding the lives of others in his hands.

But Pynchon also appears to be implicated in Siegel's
crime. After all, the horror of Siegel's unholy vision
is magnified by the fact that the reader has been
encouraged to believe that Siegel may be a
Christ-figure who can save this "Sick Crew." Siegel is
Jewish, 30, and had once "regarded himself" as both a
"healer" and a "prophet" (182). His college roommate
even calls him Stephen, a name that links him to the
Christian martyr. Furthermore, Siegel becomes (like
Lupescu before him) a "father confessor" for the "bent
souls" of the apartment (99,193). Having planted the
idea that Siegel might reject the "intradepartmental
scheming and counterscheming" of his job at the
Commission to "work for these parishioners a kind of
miracle," Pynchon then fails to meet this expectation
(183,199). This authorial teasing leaves readers like
White with the impression that Loon's massacre is a
merely a plot device, one that not only shocks and
makes fun of the reader but also underscores Pynchon's
own indifference to human suffering. Yet while Pynchon
teases the reader by hinting that Siegel might be a
messiah, there are more convincing signs that he is a
psychopath. And it is the reader's indifference to
these signs that makes us an accessory to Siegel's
crime and allows Pynchon to explore his actual
subject: the moral cost of misreading.

One of the first and clearest indications that Siegel
is a monster rather than a messiah is a comment by
Grossman, his college roommate. Grossman, we learn,
"taunted" Siegel for having a "small Jesuit voice
which kept him from being either kicked around or
conscious of guilt or simply ineffective like so many
of the other Jewish boys on campus ..." (183). Since
Siegel is the subject of Grossman's taunts, Siegel
automatically has the reader's sympathy. Furthermore,
Grossman's critique actually sounds like a compliment:
Siegel does not allow himself to be kicked around, and
he is an effective force on campus. 
But by sandwiching the fact that Siegel does not feel
guilt between two positive comments, Pynchon
encourages us to overlook what a gross man Siegel
actually is. Only psychopaths do not feel guilt. Thus,
Siegel's provocation of Loon is only a shock if the
reader glosses over this crucial piece of evidence.
Siegel's actions, deplorable as they are, are
consistent with the fact that he is incapable of
feeling remorse. Moreover, by allowing Grossman to
note that his roommate lacks a conscience, Pynchon
establishes his implicit disapproval of Siegel and his
fatal shrug.

There is further evidence, however, that Siegel could
never be the savior that the guests--and readers--long
for. In addition to being unable to experience guilt,
he also lacks the capacity to care for others. When
Siegel was thirteen, his cousin Miriam died of cancer.
Siegel "still remembered Miriam's husband cursing Zeit
the doctor, and the money wasted on the operations,
and the whole AMA, crying unashamed in this dim hot
room with the drawn shades" (182). Later, when
Siegel's
brother goes "to Yale to take premed," he orries "that
Mike whom he loved would turn out to be only a doctor,
like Zeit, and be cursed someday too by a distraught
husband in rent garments, in a twilit bedroom" (182).
As before, this passage initially seems to paint a
positive portrait of Siegel. Struck by the pettiness
of Miriam's husband (who appears to grieve for the
lost money as much as his dead wife), Siegel wants to
protect his brother from the untidy world of human
emotions, a world where pettiness, anger, and genuine
grief can coexist in one dim hot room. But surely the
curses of a grieving husband do not outweigh the
benefits of a life of service. Seen in this light,
Siegel's concern over his brother's career choice
looks more like a manifestation of his own fear of
being burdened by the "trodden-on and disaffected"
than brotherly love (190).

This hypothesis is confirmed when Siegel identifies
Miriam's funeral as the first time he felt the strain
of caring for others. As he tires of playing father
confessor at Lupescu's party, he reflects that he
"often thought that if all the punks, lushes, coeds in
love, woebegone PFC's--the whole host of trodden-on
and disaffected ... were placed end to end they would
surely reach from here back to the Grand Concourse
and a timid spindle-shanked boy in a slashed necktie"
(190). Siegel's language reveals a fierce disdain for
those in need and shows that he is uniquely unsuited
to offer anyone a "tangible salvation" (199).

Moreover, Siegel's worry that his brother "would turn
out to be only a doctor" (italics added) should remind
us that he, on the other hand, desires to be a
prophet/healer (182). This sounds like a laudable
goal, but in Siegel's case it is simply a further i
ndication of his hubris.

Siegel's reluctance to face the spectacle of human
suffering makes him want to operate on a higher realm.
According to Siegel, for a prophet/healer "there is no
question of balance sheets or legal complexity ... the
minute you become involved with anything like that you
are something less--a doctor, or a fortune-teller"
(182). In short, Siegel has created a role for himself
(prophet/healer/god) that allows him to avoid "the
badlands of the heart" (192). This is a region, Siegel
explains, 

in which shadows, and crisscrossed threads of
inaccurate self-analysis and Freudian fallacy, and
passages where the light and perspective were tricky,
all threw you into that heightened hysterical edginess
of the sort of nightmare it is possible to have where
your eyes are open and everything in the scene is
familiar, yet where, flickering behind the edge of the
closet door, hidden under the chair in the corner, is
this je ne sais quoi de sinistre which sends you
shouting into wakefulness. (192) 

This fear of descending into the "foul rag-and-bone
shop of the heart" prevents Siegel from interceding on
the behalf of Lupescu's guests.

--to be cont'd ...



		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush