MMV: Windigo

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2004 1:28 AM
Subject: Re: MMV: Windigo

> on 21/8/04 4:41 AM, Ghetta Life wrote:
>
> > And the use
> > of this "cannibal" to exact this judgment is almost racist. At the very
> > least it is an overwrought contrivance.
>
> Indeed. To designate "the Windigo", which is a Native American spiritual
> belief, as "a moral failure", is very much a type of religious
> discrimination. (Note how the exalted state is labelled by the Western
> anthropologist as a "psychosis", where within Western mythologies such
> divine visions would be called "miracles".) Throughout the story Pynchon
> identifies "the Windigo psychosis" with the Christian Eucharist, and that
> is the spanner in the works which King has chosen to ignore.
>
> best

King doesn't do so:

"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."

This "stems from" is clearly different from "designate...as".

His moral failure isn't his psychosis but the fact that he takes the gun
and kills them all. This is caused by the psychosis. He's not starving
from a lack of food but from a lack of soul. In the proper context the
Windigo isn't a moral failure but something that guarantees the survival
of the fittest. In the Washington D.C. context it won't help Loon at all.

Spanning your thought further I come to the conclusion that divine
madness is still madness. Whether it is called "miracle" or "psychosis"
doesn't change the thing.

That Pynchon "identifies "the Windigo psychosis" with the Christian
Eucharist" is very clever, isn't it? One of those "ostentatious and often
gratuitous references". As you've said, and I absolutely agree to it: "No
one religion or perspective is privileged over any other as "the One True
Faith" in the story (...)." Read carefully nobody can identify with Siegel
or any other character in the story, Grossman maybe being the only
exception.

Otto