MMV: Windigo

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2004 10:28 PM
Subject: Re: MMV: Windigo
>

> 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,

What "positive" identification is possible?

> flatly asserting that this is the only correct way to
> read the story,

Nobody did so, not even King. He's offering his reading of the story
and is talking about what others critics had to say about it.
This sounds like reasonable critical reading. There is no "right" solution,
and we've had no chance yet to read the whole Allon White-essay. We've got
just what King and Seed say about or quote from it:

"Terms which under ordinary circumstances are mutually exclusive are forced
into a kind of identity where the one becomes a version of the other. The
form is rather like a metaphor in which we cannot see which is the vehicle
and which is the tenor -- there is no referential set which controls the
narrative . . ."
(Seed, p. 19, referring to White, p. 58)

> and then suddenly turn around

Nobody did so.

> 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

Yes, of course the author is putting his ideas onto his characters.

To see the obvious structural similarities between cannibalism and
the Christian Eucharist, "body and blood, divine or otherwise,"
doesn't characterize Siegel as a nice guy, only as a clever one:

"(...) the other, gentle part of him sang kaddishes for the dead and mourned
over the Jesuit's happiness, realizing however that this kind of penance was
as good as any other; it was just unfortunate that Irving Loon would be the
only one partaking of any body and blood, divine or otherwise. It took no
more than five seconds for the two sides to agree that there was really only
one course to take."

It is Siegel's Jesuit-side not Pynchon who's thinking that "this kind of
penance was as good as any other (...)."

http://ellensplace.net/dali4.jpg
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:LastSupper.jpg

Otto