Zoyd still, but Back to the past: IV

[Mark Kohut]

I did miss the half-line before the quoted line....Alice, I thought you gave me the whole thought, exact, :-) so I did not look it up. My bad,
although I want to blame you. ;-)

That half-line has Doc saying that with those nickels he would be "digging the waves at Waimea" so my large-hearted reading is wrong. 

However, and I'm sticking with Doc so far, I'm tired of Zoyd and not leaping into overarching interpretations of Doc just yet.....

1) I did not conflate even my misreading with the author's norms yet...I was just starting to define Doc's character. 

2) Yes, he does want an endless summer. Reliable, unreliable? So far, we have to take it straight AND even having finished the book, using other unreliable narrators as touchstones, ones who GET THE FACTS IN THEIR LIVES WRONG----The Good Soldier; The Remains of The Day---Doc is not that kind of unreliable narrator.

So, he is being satirized? In what way? I think it is much too abstract to
start saying his language is already permeated with real-estate 'business talk', jargon and shop talk expressions. Marlowe is full of shop talk. He is not an unreliable narrator in any way. Doc has already made the distinction between straightworld and ...another. Just like the underground did at the time. A very reliable distinction. He very reliably sees, 39 years later on the video, the rise of yuppies over hippies. 

 We learn that Shasta has not been seen in that counter-cultural world for a year. Since (the events) of 1969, right? Nice thematic touch, yes? And now she looks at Doc's furnishings with disdain. She's traded up and wants acting success, not Doc and his world. 1969 is so over.  Doc is satirized for wanting an endless summer? Explain the epigraph then? More authorial irony denying the positive meanings behind it? I think not. A very narrow, projectively narrow reading if so, I say. 

What do others think? 

And, I and others have written about how penance or 'karmic adjustment'---mentioned in Inherent Vice--- are key later-work themes in Pynchon. What Doc was, for whatever reason, is not in this book. The phrase 'karmic adjustment'is.  I see all the reasons in Wayne Booth's and in Pynchon's  universe to play Doc as he lay. On the page as he is given to us in the book. Even in the video he is aware of what he was, and has decided not to be that any longer.

It seems that when you've found a (stated) flaw in a character, that character is morally 'doomed' within the book, so to speak. No matter what he/she 'also' does. Too Calvinist a way to read for me. 

(I love this irony, speaking of irony. Not long ago we were all justifying
P's cartoon-like characters! Now we can't sort thru the richness clearly. just like with hank james,sorta.)


Satire/irony can be massive with characters who are still 'mixed". Catch-22 is a total satire. So, how do we take Yossarian? And Snowden's death? 
ironically?

Doc acts to help his old girl-friend unironically. That's the beginning.





--- On Sun, 8/23/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Zoyd still, but Back to the past: IV
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, August 23, 2009, 5:10 PM
> Mark Kohut wrote
> 
> > "Doc says, he can hire some dude to
> > dig the waves for him over in Hawaii."
> >
> > It is an expressed joking fantasy about what he could
> do with 'a nickel from every client' who etc., common in our
> world, middle and otherwise...........
> 
> 
> Yes, of course it is.
> 
> > And notice what he would do----not surf himself, not
> live in an endless
> > summer but 'give it" to someone else.....by 'hiring
> them to surf! yes, IV is about work, fer sure.
> 
> 
> Wayne Booth complains that the problem with reading Modern
> and now
> Postmodern fiction is that the critic with the most ironic
> reading
> always wins. I didn't miss the irony. I didn't read it
> straight.
> 
> 
> Doc, and I'll say the same of Zoyd, does not represent the
> implied
> author's norms. Both are infected by the environment they
> reside in.
> They are not exceptional. So, here, as elsewhere in the
> text, Doc is
> subjected to the author's satire. A parodic figure, Doc is
> not the
> author and does not present the author's norms. His
> narrative is
> unreliable. The irony here:  We know, but Doc doesn't
> know that his
> apparently casual language usage here is infected with the
> cliche'
> riddled speech of the period which is so obviously
> saturated with
> TV-talk and pyramid scheme real estate business talk. These
> shop talk
> expressions and jargons, and they mostly move like a huge
> wave across
> the USA from California East, saturate this novel.
> Rememeber Doc was
> once a vampire &  vulture in the credit scam
> business. And, while, as
> a dynamic character, he changes, even changes professions,
> becomes a
> doctor of a much cooler and kinder trade, he is still
> Larry. And Larry
> can't help but say things like, I'll hire ....a Mexican to
> lick my
> wife's pussy.
>