Zoyd

[alice wellintown]

> He is sympathetic in so many ways.

Zoyd is a deal maker. Same as Hector. And, they are partners in
crimes. The S&M element is the clearest evidence, other than what the
author clearly states about the failure of the Left in his SL
introduction, that Zoyd & Hector are parodic figures, that is, they
are comic figures constructed as polemical allusive imitations of what
has been made of them by the Tube circa 1984 and they are figures of
satire, treated with ironic derision for their contributions to the
failure of the1960s Left.


Both are running around making deals and dreaming up ways to make
money, money, money, money.  And, since it's California, Tube
celebrity if they can get it. Why have all these folks been reduced to
a hustle here and a hustle there? Is it only a matter of the voo-doo
trickle down of a economy-stupid? Or is there more to it than that?
The blame it ob Reagan crowd can be satisfied. Hell, most reviewers of
the novel figured out as much. After a while critical studies flowed.
Some excellent ones, in fact. A sympathetic characters is a modern
character. Zoyd is not a modern character. Even if we insist, as James
Wood does-- and this is one of the reasons he finds postmodern fiction
a fiction that denies characters and thus the novel or fiction
itself--that we must read the postmodern characters as if they are
modern or real characters, Zoyd is not a sympathetic character. Read
as a modern hero or anti-hero, Zoyd may have one or two
characteristics that we can say represent the ethical norms of the
implied author (the Pynchon of the texts). Perhaps this is what is
meant by "so many."

What has this to do with the idea that Pynchon has written a novel
about labor in the United States? Well, one of the failures of the
labor movement in the United States, and it is a given that Labor was
the only possible force to counter the Firm and late Capitalism, is
dealing with the Zoyds. The American Male is driven by something quite
deep in his-story to be a Hero (James Fenimore Cooper). He is not only
a boy inside, refusing to pay the price of any real relationship with
the a real grown up person--have a family,  or grow up and get over
his losses, and this is not a problem that Pynchon associates
exclusively with hippies, but also in love with being young and having
youthful qualities, with being innocent and pure of purpose, with
having a set of principles higher than the honor code of the society
at large, with having knowledge of his world that has been earned not
at college but on a whale ship or through deep intuition or from what
he has learned from the "Other", and a love of off-the-grid nature and
a distrust of life in the town or city, and with a quest to find
higher truths in TREES or NATURE or In The WOODS. In short, the
American male is a Romantic and yearns to remain so--singing the song
of myself.

We may find these attributes sympathetic. We may read the novel as a
modern work.

But the critique, and in VL it is decidedly feminist, of the
narcissism of the Hector/Zoyd Romance, and S&M relationship,
complicates and I say undermines such readings of Zoyd.