M&D Deep Duck 7-9: Why doesn't Mason sleep with Austra?

Tue Feb 3 12:55:46 CST 2015

I'm not sure she comes across as submissive and compliant. She, along with the three daughters, seems genuinely horny - even giving Mason a quick hand-job, as she promises to lie about her inability to wake him. It seems more easy-going sexuality than scary submissiveness.

Again, it's the tone of this portrayal that's surprising (along with the far campier portrayal of Washington and his slave romping among the cannibis crops that comes up later). It's been a while since my first reading, but I don't recall any descriptions of slavery in the book akin to the horrors of Mondaugen's story in V. Almost as if Pynchon assumes his readers get it, and wants to discuss other aspects of slavery - the purely commercial, maybe?

Laura

-----Original Message-----

From: David Morris 

Sent: Feb 3, 2015 11:04 AM

To: "kelber at mindspring.com" 

Cc: P-list 

Subject: Re: M&D Deep Duck 7-9: Why doesn't Mason sleep with Austra?

I think the most powerful aspect of the Mason-Austra meeting is Austra's complete submission.  She is so willing that she becomes almost scary, because you know that there's a real person inside, but that independent soul has completely, almost enthusiastically, taken on the role of compliance.  Austra is the real star of this show.
David Morris
On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 4:29 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
I apologize for the long-winded, rambling nature of this post. Just to fill the silence …

M&D isn't a historical novel, in the sense that Pynchon's not out to recreate as faithfully as possible an event in time. He does seem to have very different attitudes towards math and science, on the one hand, and history on the other. He would never knowingly misrepresent, for creative purposes, math or physics – he knows how to double-check his facts. He also conducts rigorous historical research. I'm sure that not only did he thoroughly read and re-read Mason's sea-log, but he must have (no way to confirm this, but I still feel absolutely, adamantly certain)taken all the nautical notations therein, to reconstruct, day by day, the Seahorse's progress, including the likely day it crossed the Equator. Given what he knew, he must have found it plausible that the Seahorse "could" have crossed during the equinox, resulting in Cherrycoke's lack of shadow.

He must also have researched thoroughly the culture in Cape Town in this period, and felt comfortable describing the sexual and racial situation in a somewhat humorous tone (certainly compared to Mondaugen’s Story).

My read (which could be a misread, I acknowledge) is this:

Mason and Dixon take their meals at the Vroom household, which consists of Cornelius, a comically conservative and clueless Burgher, kind of an Archie Bunker of his time and place, and his sex-starved wife and daughters. In addition, there's the slave-girl Austra. Everyone's quick to write Dixon off as suitable for, presumably marriage, but also sex. He's happy to go "native," like a current-day yuppie/hipster/gentrifier, hanging with the locals and raving over their cuisine. Mason, though, is fair game for the wife and daughters, who all but rape him, though the daughters seem also to maybe want to marry him. One night Austra appears in his bed. She tells him that her mistress (Joanna) has sent her there so that he can impregnate her – the lighter-skinned baby fetching a higher price in the slave market. She tells him that Joanna and her daughters have been throwing themselves at him just to keep him horny so that he'll have sex with her.  In fact, she's the only one who will actually have sex with him. Mason, horrified by this commercialization of Austra's sexuality, demurs. Eventually, he starts sleeping with Joanna (at least I think so. Am I wrong there?). Austra herself is very matter-of-fact about the scheme, noting that white women are forced to bear excessive numbers of children merely to please their husbands' vanity.

OK, so there are lots of scholarly papers and less-scholarly articles about the position of slaves in that time and place. I’ve skimmed through various sources (many of which use letters and court-proceedings of the day), and though much of it is contradictory, there's general agreement that slaves were mostly imported, originally from West Africa, then from East Africa, but also from India and other parts of Asia. There weren't the large-scale plantations that existed in places like the West Indies. Most households, even poorer ones, had at least one slave, but few of the wealthiest had all that many, and masters and slaves tended to live in the same house. Various sources have somewhat contradictory info:  that inter-racial sex was criminalized, that the VOC (Dutch East India Company) ran its own slave-brothels, and that in 1766, a law forbidding the sale of mixed-race slave children fathered by Christians was enacted. Men, both free-white and enslaved – out-numbered women 4-1. Mostly male slaves were imported by the VOC, and the ranks of white men were swelled by visiting sailors and other VOC employees. White women, being in demand, were quickly married off, sometimes as young as 13 years of age.

So The Vroom girls probably wouldn't have been single, and lighter-skinned slave kids were probably pretty common. Joanna certainly didn't need to recruit Mason into impregnating her slave, given the abundance of unattached white men available for the task.

All of this casts some doubt on Austra's explanation for her presence in Mason's bed. Is she an unreliable narrator? What exactly is Pynchon doing here? Why wouldn't stodgy Mason simply sleep with Austra, to avoid entanglements with Cornelius over his women?

Pynchon doesn't want Mason, as a good-guy protagonist, to be the archetypical European colonialist, feeling he has a right to the bodies of indigenous women in Africa and the Americas. Dixon's out there canoodling with women of various races on (we're left to surmise) some sort of non-commodified basis. Mason is too uptight to do the same, but he refuses to play the Colonialist card. Reading this, it struck me as highly unlikely that a man like Mason wouldn't bed down an offered slave. Slavery was legal in Britain at the time, though of different character than that of the colonies. It's an ahistorical rendering of his likely behavior (well, I think so). Pynchon's not trying to be accurate here. He's making it clear that Mason (and Dixon), a-historically or not, are NOT colonialists. They're Men of Science, divorced, in some sense, from history and culture. But can anyone really be that? As the Tom Lehrer song says: "Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Can any author get away with portraying a purported good guy as harboring the racism of his time, without appearing somewhat racist himself? There was a good discussion here a few years back about whether or not Raymond Chandler himself was racist, given the casual racism he depicts in his books. It's hard to imagine Pynchon doing anything but taking the author-ially easy way out of this dilemma.

LK

A couple of sources:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/modules/lesson7/lesson7.php?s=11

http://www.sahistory.org.za/south-africa-1652-1806/history-slavery-and-early-colonisation-sa

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