Re: My Reddit comments on Webb’s funeral

[Ian Livingston]

Mmhm. Nice, David. Very nice. Fine job of catching the nuances of the individualist as a union man. Webb’s complexity as a character and the historical scenes that aligned him with the working stiffs of the American west during the bad old days is a particularly captivating ‘chapter’ in the larger narrative. What happened to the unions, I hear P asking rhetorically, they forgot who they worked for responds the family left behind to wander adrift through the fragments of the world. Commitment is a cesspool in the workers’ world, and labor is the turdpile of commerce. Flush after scented flush. The union, to pull a little Norris into the mix, is an arm of the octopus. Given enough time and space I could run out metaphors to mix into the mess. 


Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 28, 2021, at 5:13 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> --
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