Re: re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

Though I need my head examimed I think I'll answer this practitioner of cultivated
ignorance point by point.

Doug Millison wrote:

>  Mackin :
> >If I read the passage correctly
>
> Pynchon does leave it wonderfully ambiguous, doesn't he.  Your guess is as
> good as anybody's.

Can't say as much for your guesses.

>
>
> >there are two reasons Washington couldn't be
> >the author of the "nigger" sentence.
> >
> >One, after the lead in text saying that "more and more arrive at Raleigh's
> >Billiard-Room," it would be terrible narrative style to let only one of these
> >"more and more" speak.
>
> Take it up with Pynchon, since he's responsible for the way that dialogue
> is identified or not in the text.

Oh , so you are saying Pynchon isn't a very good writer.

>
>
> >
> >Secondly, the N word sentence is uttered by someone of lower rank and
> >circumstances than Washington,  whom we know to be a well off landowner and
> >quite incapable of being bollixed by being equated with a slave.
>
> Washington doesn't like being treated as lower class than British subjects,
> and I think what galls him is precisely the fact that the British see
> themselves in a legal relationship with him that too closely resembles the
> legal relationship way he has vis-a-vis the slaves he owns.

There's a lot Washington doesn't like but he has no reason to think he is being
treated like a slave. Many colonists did have such reason.


>
>
> >
> >The "civility, sir" sentence is of less certain origin, perhaps intentionally
> >be because it doesn't matter which one speaks it. The reader is meant ot find
> >it quite beyond belief that an 18th Century free white man could ever possibly
> >object to the N word in the way we all do today. Another example of projecting
> >20th Century sensibilies onto people living 200 plus years ago, which P
> >obviously thinks is humorous and possibly instructive.
>
> Maybe, but I still don't think that Pynchon finds anything comfortably
> funny about slavery, except perhaps in that
> grit-your-teeth-and-laugh-or-else-commit-suicide black humor that snuggles
> right up next to despair.

Not the topic of slavery that's funny but your opinions on how to write about it.

>
>
> >IMHO. of course :-)
>
> How could it be otherwise?

OK.

>
>
> By the way, Pynchon's Washington does seem quite in harmony with the
> practice of tokenism, given his fond recollection below, and the song that
> follows, which might be seen to link his tokenism (Gershom's extraordinary
> treatment) to "Hell" (284):
>
> "And that Transit-of-Venus Pudding?  Same thing, a single black Currant
> upon a Circular Field of White,--" (283)

You'll need to elaborate on that one.

P.