re Zoyd

[John Bailey]

I predict that when we reach the end of the IV group-read the True
Meaning of Bigfoot will cause violence and tears. I agree with John -
he's the most enigmatic character in the book. He goes from villain to
victim and back again incessantly, and he's one of the most
significant nodes in most of the conspiracy networks the book offers.

Hector, for me, ended up as a deluded chump, and I liked him a lot.
Bigfoot, not so much.

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 1:09 AM, alice
wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>