MMV: Windigo

[jbor]

BTW I'm not at all clear about how it's possible to judge Siegel as an
"asshole" and a protagonist with whom no-one, including the author, could
possibly identify, flatly asserting that this is the only correct way to
read the story, and then suddenly turn around and say how "clever" the
connection between the Windigo ritual and the Christian Eucharist is. It's
through Siegel that Pynchon is making that connection, of course.

best


on 23/8/04 4:54 AM, jbor wrote:

> 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
>> 
>