Giving Destruction a Name and Face

[Dave Monroe]

... and finishing up 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, we are told, lives in a "country where there
were drinks to be mixed and bon mots to be tossed out
carelessly" . . . (189). By the end of the story,
however, the reader understands that the careless use
of language (the very crime that Pynchon has been
accused of), or the refusal to use it at all, can lead
to disaster. But if Siegel's moral failure boils down
to his careless use of language, the reader's moral
failure can be attributed to careless reading. Loon's
moral failure stems from his Windigo psychosis, a
condition that causes him to identify with a
mythological figure who feeds on human flesh. Few of
us
are in danger of identifying with either Loon or this
mythic monster. Yet most readers, despite Pynchon's
warnings, identify with Siegel, who is simply a more
clever cannibal. Like Loon, then, the reader also
suffers from a form of Windigo psychosis. To blame
Pynchon for this unflattering diagnosis--or simply to
refuse to acknowledge it--is itself a moral failure. 

In the introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon observes
that "[w]hen we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction
ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward
death--how characters may act in its presence, for
example, or how they handle it when it isn't so
immediate" (5). 

Siegel's attitude toward death (and life) is
repugnant. But Pynchon's real subject in "Mortality
and Mercy" isn't Siegel's attitude toward death but
the reader's. Pynchon, one imagines, must have been 
disappointed by both of the critical positions
outlined earlier. Keesey, Slade, and Seed minimize
Siegel's culpability. Faced with the presence of
death, they make excuses and equivocate. And while
White responds appropriately in the "presence" of
death, he doesn't do nearly as well when "it isn't so
immediate." He 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.

[Notes]

Despite the stridency of these comments, White also
observes that "Mortality and Mercy" "is one of the
finest short stories published since the war" (55).
While most critics may not be willing to go that far,
there is a general Consensus that "Mortality and
Mercy" is one of Pynchon's best short stories. 

Pynchon's first published short story, "The Small
Rain," appeared in the March issue of the Cornell
Writer. "Mortality and Mercy" was published that same
spring in Epoch, another Cornell publication. 

I will suggest that other portions of the preface
demonstrate that "Mortality and Mercy" meets Pynchon's
own criteria for serious or responsible fiction.
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.

Although Keesey is careful to note that Siegel "is
never without some remaining freedom of choice," this
freedom seems negligible when compared to the
hereditary and environmental forces that shape his
life (5). Moreover, Keesey responds to the charge that
Siegel's indifference is a product of Pynchon's own
confused liberalism by characterizing the story as a
dramatization of liberal ideas about crime--hardly an
effective strategy.

The other possibility, of course, is that Siegel
himself wishes to engage in this bloody melee. But, as
I will argue, Siegel is motivated by his desire to
remain above the human fray. While Siegel doesn't
participate himself, he has the satisfaction of
"knowing it was he who had set it all in motion"
(200). He finds, in other words, that it is more
satisfying--and safer--to "manoeuvre" others" (183). 

Siegel does think of Loon's assault as a "miracle,"
but there is no indication that Siegel believes that
this miracle will save the his new friends or purify
this modern-day Gomorrah (200). Loon's act is a
miracle only in the sense that it saves him from
caring about or, worse, taking responsibility for
Lupescu's guests.

Jacqueline Smetak contends that "the process of
reading or interpreting a text" is "the central theme
of his [Pynchon's] fiction" (66). Unfortunately,
Smetak never fully develops this idea. John Dugdale,
one of the few critics to consider fully the moral 
implications of the story, contends that "Mortality
and Mercy" "is liable to implicate its readers" in two
ways. First, the text immerses the reader "in the
complex reticulation of the surface text and to some
extent in the (psychoanalytical, literary, political)
latent text" (36). Second, the story explores "a moral
sickness and paralysis shared with the characters, and
a complicity in the destructive impulse, or in
national
crime" (36). Dugdale primarily focuses on how the
thick pattern of allusions in "Mortality and Mercy"
forces readers into a "textual and ethical" "jungle"
where they must establish how the references to an
assortment of texts illuminate the characters and
their actions (36).
 
While Dugdale examines how the act of reading
Pynchon's text implicates the reader, I am interested
in why readers misread the early indications
of Siegel's moral indifference and how Pynchon uses
this gaffe to illustrate the moral cost of misreading.


The fact that Siegel is (partially) governed by a
Jesuit voice suggests that matters of conscience are
important to him. Yet this voice accounts for his
inability to feel guilt; and, as we have already seen,
the Jesuit half of Siegel actually relishes the
thought of orchestrating Loon's attack. Although his
Jewish half is described as more "gentle," when Siegel
must decide between warning the guests or saving
himself, "[i]t took no more than five seconds for the
two sides to agree that there was really only one
course to take" (200,201). 

Siegel is only 13 when his cousin dies, but his
aversion to caring for others remains a part of his
character. "In the army," for example, "he had lived
by a golden rule of Screw the Sergeant before He
Screweth Thee"; and "later in college he had forged
meal tickets, instigated protest riots and panty
raids," and even "manipulated campus opinion through
the school newspaper" (183).

We know that this boy is Siegel because at Miriam's
funeral he sits in a room over the Grand Concourse and
stares "at the symbolic razor slash halfway up his
black necktie . . ." (182). 

Until this moment of weakness, Grossman "had remained
unmarred, majestically sneering" and "happy-go-lucky"
(188). This is precisely the pose that Siegel wishes
to maintain. Warning the guests of (or trying to
stop) Loon's attack would force Siegel to abandon his
Olympian indifference. 

And just as those suffering from Windigo psychosis
dehumanize others so that they can consume them
without guilt, the reader misperceives Siegel's
parishioners. Until the very end of the party, both
Siegel and the reader see this long line of misfits as
comic or pathetic annoyances. But when Pynchon allows
Siegel to go sailing out of that room, condemning
Harvey, Lucy, Debby, Brennan, Loon, and the others
to their deaths, the reader is forced to admit that
these misfits deserve a more compassionate reading. 

Five years after the publication of "Mortality and
Mercy," John Hawkes, in a now famous interview,
described his own work in similar terms.
Characterizing his "comic method," he explains that
one of its "functions" is to provide "a means for
judging human failings as severely as possible; it's a
way of exposing evil (one of the pure words I mean to
preserve) and of persuading the reader that even he
may not be exempt from evil" (146). 

WORKS CITED
 
Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables
   of Power. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. 

Hawkes, John. "John Hawkes: An Interview."
   Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6
   (1965): 141-55. 

Keesey, Douglas. "The Politics of Doubling
   in 'Mortality and Mercy.'" Pynchon Notes 24-25
   (Spring-Fall 1989): 5-19. 

Pynchon, Thomas. "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna."
   Epoch 9 (Spring 1959): 195-213. Rpt. Stories from
   Epoch, the First 50 Years, 1947-1964. Ed. Baxter
   Hathaway. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1966. 181-201. 

------. Slow Learner: Early Stories. New York:
   Little, 1984. 

Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas
   Pynchon. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988. 

Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon.
   New York: Lang, 1990. 

Smetak, Jacqueline. "Thomas Pynchon's 'Mortality
   and Mercy in Vienna': Major Themes in an Early
   Work." Iowa Journal of Literary Studies 4.1
   (1993): 65-76. 

White, Allon. "Ironic equivalence: a reading of
   Thomas Pynchon's 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna.'"
   Critical Quarterly 23.3 (Autumn 1981): 55-62.


		
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