Zoyd still, but Back to the past: IV

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>; "alice wellintown" <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 8:10 PM
Subject: Re: Zoyd still, but Back to the past: IV


>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?

Well, my reaction was a bit different . I saw the lines as an early hint 
that Doc might be a visionary idealist, who would willingly exchange worldly 
pleasure for a higher, occcult, state of being, not bournd by material 
existence. His words sound a little like those of De l'isle-Adam's Axel: 
Living?  the servants can do that for us. Some kind of  crazy Romantic.

P