My Reddit comments on Webb’s funeral

[David Morris]

I’ve cleaned it up a bit, but my conclusion is the same:  Pynchon’s
portrayal of Unions in ATD is not even close to an endorsement.  Also, the
funny thing is that (with these sections being discussed in this and last
weeks’ reading schedule) no moderator even commented on Webb’s being
shuffled away by the Union when he started showing neediness, or the Union
not even sending flowers to his funeral.  I think that says something about
modern-day perceptions of the usefulness of unions.
—————————-

Lately there’s been some “side” attention being paid to ATD over at the
P-List as they pursue their group read of Bleeding Edge. As they try to
understand Late Capitalism in BE, speculations are being made about why
nobody from the Union attended Webb’s funeral, and somebody remembered
Mayva and Reef’s exchange:

p.215 They stood huddled together in Lone Tree Cemetery, the miners’
graveyard at the end of town, Mayva, Lake, Frank, and Reed, beneath the
great peaks and behind them the long, descending trace of Bridal Veil Falls
whispering raggedly into the cold sunlight. Webb’s life and work had come
to this.

She [Mayva] was quiet [...] “Thought the Union would’ve sent flowers at
least.”

“Not them.” It is just the meanest kind of disrespect, Reef thought, and
fuck all these people.

That seems like a pretty harsh portrayal by Pynchon of the Union. Webb
literally gave his whole heart and soul to the Union. And for his love of
the Union, he was brutally, slowly, and sadistictly tortured, and finally,
unmercifully allowed to die, his body dumped and displayed at for ridicule
in an earthly Hell. And, then, at his funeral in the miners’ cemetery, he
is show “the meanest kind of disrespect” by the Union.

So, “over there” at the BE group they are asking “Why?” Had Webb’s
unsolicited terrorism over the years soured the Union on him (now that they
were “established?”) Maybe everyone was afraid to show up, to be put on
“their” list of funeral attendees? But the text doesn’t hint at any of
those reasons. We’re never actually told if the Union knew Webb was that
secret bomber, or if any Union had ever (in either real or fictional life)
publicly opposed bombings supporting the Union. But that seems like
grasping at straws.

Backing up a bit with Webb’s story, we learn that Mayva had recently left
Webb, hoping to watch over Lake, who seemed to be personally floundering.
After his death the two discuss Webb. Mayva regrets not having gone back to
Webb, the three of them leaving together for “some place those people don’t
go, don’t even know about, down out of these god-damned mountains, could
have found us a patch of land —.”  But Lake reminds her, “We were never
that important to him, Mamma. He had his almighty damn Union, that’s what
he loved. If he loved anything.”

And immediately the narrator tells us:

P.192. “IF IT WAS LOVE, it was less than two-way. With no more respectable
family-man dodge to hide behind, Webb sought the embrace of Local 63,
which, alarmed at the vehemence of his need, decided there ought to be some
distance between him and the Union, and suggested he shift over into the
Uncompahgre for a while, to the Torpedo workings."

Again, the Union is shown as completely uncaring about Webb, finding his
neediness “alarming,” and shuffling him away, out of sight. But,
importantly, Webb admits here that he’d been hiding behind all that time
behind a “respectable family-man dodge,” now gone away with Mayva and Lake.
But who was he hiding FROM behind that dodge?

Well, Webb tells us what IS HIS TRUE LOVE with this confession: Now that
Webb had lost the last two of “his own family, the ones [the women] that
ought to’ve mattered most,” it now seemed “as if with the boys all out
there in the wind his place was now [now, having been left alone without
the women] out there in the wind too.” And he figures that his “chances of
running into each other [with the boys] again were better out there than in
some domestic interior” [as he’d been all those years with Mayva].

In this context, his having played the “respectable family-man dodge to
hide behind” was him *dodging from himself*, not the Company. And thus Webb
admits that his “real love” WAS the Union, and it WAS being a free and wild
man “out there in the wind” like his sons. One could ask which of *these
two* were his real love, his being out there free in the wind, or his love
of the ideals of Union brotherhood, and clearly the answer would be the
former: his freedom. But if the Union was also a dodge, it at least
represented his attempt to maintain *some* personal agency and self-respect
while living in this capitalist world.

But then we see “Webb’s life and work had come to this.” This is truly a
sad end. And it’s FAR from a ringing endorsement of Unions as the solution
to a person’s delemna in these Late Capital Days.

David Morris