ATDTDA - petroleurs, p.19

[Monte Davis]

Joseph T:
 
>  Before ATD I would have agreed with the statement that Pynchon  
> doesn't  preach, but he seems to be taking that liberty , albeit   
> with restraint, in this  
>  novel. Some moral lines are drawn here. 
 
For what it's worth, I intended "Pynchon doesn't preach" to be read not as
"he draws no moral lines" -- I think he does, and always has, and plays both
ends against the excluded middle -- but as "[he doesn't *need* to
sermonize]... he's god in his own creation."
 
That is, the most immediate and powerful moral communication in any remotely
realistic fiction comes via what the characters *are*, what they *do*, and
what *happens* to them. Given the author's power to choose and orchestrate
all three, and our tendency to take them as givens and start our judgments
from there -- well, Modernism 101 sez: show, don't tell. (Then in Modernism
207 we lare reminded that the author isn't *really* paring his fingernails
indifferently; he stacked the deck six ways from Sunday by putting *these*
people in *these* situations via *that* plot. And then in the PoMo seminar,
surprise!  we wax indignant about how that kind of sneakiness covers up
hegemony.)
 
The nearest thing to a verdict on Webb is surely his own, at Madame
Eskimoff's seance (672-673):
 
"No point makin excuses. I could've done 'er different. Not driven you all
away. Figured how to honor those who labor down under the earth, strangers
to the sun, and still keep us all together. Somebody must've been smart
enough to manage that one. I could've worked it out. Not as if I was alone,
there was help, there even was money.

"But I sold my anger too cheap, didn't understand how precious it was, how I
was wasting it, letting it leak away, yelling at the wrong people, May, the
kids, swore each time I wouldn't, never cared to pray but started praying
for that, knew I had to keep it under some lid, save it at least for the
damned owners, but then Lake sneaks off into town, lies about it, one of the
boys throws me a look, some days that's all it needs is a look, and I'm
screamin again, and they're that much further away, and I don't know how to
call back any of it. . . ."

 

Where we get to choose is in how much weight to give his assertion that
dying in bed, surrounded by a loving family, "wasn't in the cards for me,
not in that flat-broke world it was given us to work and suffer in, those
were just not the choices."

 

To me this is a voice from a Virgilian kind of afterlife: to the extent
there's punishment it's neither fire nor ice, but simply that no amount of
self-knowledge and reflection now can undo what he did and didn't do then.
And hey -- we all get to taste plenty of *that* without even dying, right?

 

Some time ago I mentioned the "Hamlet, revenge" theme, and of course the
Bard of Oyster Bay flips it at us here too:

 

"But the one thing his sons wanted, they wouldn't get tonight. They wanted
to hear Webb say, with the omnidirectional confidence of the dead, that
seeing Scarsdale Vibe had hired his killers, the least the brothers could do
at this point was to go find him and ventilate the son of a bitch."

 

And we're off to the races. Remember all those classroom debates: is this
*really* Hamlet's dad... or a diabolical apparition sent to tempt him to
regicide and/or suicide? Would Claudius *really* go to Heaven if Hamlet were
to kill him at his prayers...or is that moot because the prayers,
ironically, are worthless... or, double-ironically, is it all about Hamlet
damning himself a la Roger Chillingworth by playing God, presuming to look
into and weigh another's soul?

 

Then again, since just a minute ago Reef was "singing operatically, in the
tenor register, and the Italian language," Webb's ghost may be not the
former Great Dane at all but the Commendatore. Lord knows the kids get lots
of multinational sex. Help me, opera buffs: that's the testifying ghost who
comes to my ignorant mind, but surely there are others..?    

 

 

 

 

 

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