MMV: Windigo (recap)

[jbor]

King, Vincent. 'Giving Destruction a Name and a Face: Thomas Pynchon's
"Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"'. Studies in Short Fiction 35.1, 1998,
pp. 13-21. 

King notes, inaccurately, that "there is a general consensus that 'Mortality
and Mercy' is one of Pynchon's best short stories." (13) I'm assuming he
agrees with this "consensus" he has invented.

He also argues that "Loon's moral failure stems from his Windigo psychosis,
a condition that causes him to identify with a mythological figure that
feeds on human flesh." (20) Nowhere does the story judge Loon's state of
mind or his actions as a "moral failure", and certainly not a "moral
failure" which is the product of his Ojibwa cultural heritage and beliefs.

best

on 24/8/04 8:18 AM, jbor wrote:

> Summing up, it appears the only way for some readers to make the case for
> 'MMV' as a "good" story is to transform Siegel into a "monster" and a
> "psychopath", promote Grossman as some concealed moral yardstick within the
> text, judge a non-Western culture as a "moral failure", and speculate that
> Pynchon omitted it and any mention of it from _Slow Learner_ because readers
> and critics didn't, and don't, get it, as Vincent King tries to do in his
> essay.
> 
> I don't buy any of it. While there are some nice turns of phrase and
> provocative and interesting ideas, and moments of glib humour, I can
> certainly understand why Pynchon chose to discard it when he was putting
> together his collection of early stories.