MMV: Windigo

[jbor]

Vincent King says that "Loon's moral failure stems from his Windigo
psychosis" (20). King is indeed designating this aspect of Irving Loon's
cultural identity as a "moral failure".

By contrast, the story does not state or indicate or imply that Loon, or his
actions or his culture -- which are all one and the same thing in the
context of the narrative -- suffer from a "moral failure". That is entirely
King's construction, a product of his own cultural biases. The closest the
text comes is in Siegel's recall of Professor Mitchell's attitude, "a
permanently sarcastic smile twisting one side of his mouth", that "all
cultures were equally mad, it was only the form that differed, never the
content." "Psychosis" and "moral failure" are two very different things, of
course, and Loon is presented by Pynchon as just doing what a young Ojibwa
male naturally does.

It's very apparent that Pynchon will later come to reject the facile and
spurious connection he attempts to forge in this story between the Windigo
ritual and the Christian Eucharist, and that this is another aspect of the
work that prompted him to omit it from _SL_, virtually disowning it in the
process. The difference is illustrated clearly in _Vineland_, where the text
resists any identification between the Yurok belief in Tsorrek, "the world
of the dead" (VL 386), and Western mythological constructions of "Hell".

best

> 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
>