Pynchon's men

[Terrance]

I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my
earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in
me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands
here. 

--M-D

Ahab's dediance of lightning, his assertions over and against nature,
are claims to his American heritage--romantic individualism and manhood. 

Better to sink in boundless depths, than float on vulgar shores. 

--Mardi

"Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven." 

--Paradise Lost

And is it any mystery why the Romantics, who took Milton's Satan for
their hero, went looking for paradise in America? 

In Blake's visions America is cut off from the world, seperated by the
great seas. It is the isolated womb of Revolution (Orc) and it
represents Liberty (of the body from sexual repression, law, empire,
history's bad shit and its curses).  

On man Adam, one man Noah, one man Job, one man Abraham, one man John,
one greater man Jesus. This solitary individual  in the west is as old
as bread. Ayan Rand did not invent him or as some would say, try. She
tries to create the greater man, but fails. 
And Ayn Rand was an atheist and a women. 
And Rand condemned conservatism as a different form of collectivism, one
that attempted to validate its core philosophy with religion and
tradition. Of course conservatives, particualrly American ones,
condemned Rand for her atheism.
Pynchon has been critisized for the same weakness, he can't create
living characters. When he comes close, his characters are men,
solitary, individual men against the evil gods, at the mercy of the
conspiring gnostics, infected by the evils that men do and pass on in
their nightmares and in their genes. 

Herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the
rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virute of interioir
spaciousness. Oh Man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou,
too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without
being of it...Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great
whale, retain, O Man! in all seasons a tempeture of thy own. 

--M-D

But Pynchon and Melville wrote novels that Ayn Rand, being an Atheist
and a women, could not even imagine. All that testoserone, all that
hunting and questing, all that Don Juanism, all that rebellion against
the gods, all that isolated heroics, is the stuff that men are made of.
American men in particular, but not only American men.  
If Pynchon had not written his Moby-Dick (a combination of the white
rocket of GR and the homoerotic brotherhood of M&D), his novel V., that
half spun yarn with the female protagonist, and that nostalgiac
political sitcom would not hold our attention for long. We are, after
all, most of his readers, men.