re Zoyd

[alice wellintown]

> The similarities between the Zoyd/Hector and Doc/Bigfoot dymanics are
> unmissable. Possibly so unmissable that they suggest a smokescreen?
> Certainly seems a more complex setup than Zoyd/Hector.
>
> Bigfoot is probably the most enigmatic character in the book, the
> off-screen presence of Mickey Wolfmann notwithstanding. It's hard, at
> first reading anyway, to say exactly what Bigfoot is really up to. Or
> how he really feels about Doc, or hippies in general. And why does he
> talk so fancily? Overall, to me, Bigfoot feels probably the least like
> himself, I mean the least like you expect him to be. Make sense?


As I noted previously, the characters are parodic figures. The TUBE
family/Reagan family.  For example, Hector can not be the Father of
Zoyd's baby, but this is one of the ways the novels expects us to read
their relationship. Prairie is also the product of Frenesi/Zoyd/Brock
and Hector/Weed. The sexual relationships that produce Prairie
(Pynchon's plots and scenes resist PC readings) are perverse--S&M,
Homosexual, and so on. It's never a matter of BOTH/AND when it comes
to these relationships, we need to read these dialectically. The
BOTH/AND reading slides into relativism and then, unless you are
stupid, you can not read Pynchon as a satirist or a moralist or even
as an author who takes a moral position. If everything, as Ivan
teaches us in The Brother's Karamazov, is permitted, Pynchon has
written novels that don't say a damn thing. Is that the claim here?
They are postmodern  provocative, sometimes beautiful, art objects?
Now, one can take this position, if one also gives up the moral and
political statements of the texts.