Shorty VL 303

[alice wellintown]

Bailey wrote:

>> If Hector had really wanted Zoyd to snitch here, it would have been so
>> easy to use Prairie as a point of leverage. Instead, when Zoyd is busted
>> on p. 295, Hector calls Sasha so she can come collect Prairie. Now why
>> on earth would he do that?
> because he is putting friendship above principles?
> If it wasn't contradictory, I'd say let's make that a principle...

He puts his humanity above his work. His job, his profession tells his
how to deal with or treat or engage with people, but his humanity
tells him to do unto others as he would want to have done unto him or
to the least of his brothers, the golden rule. This is clearly an
authorial norm. When characters in VL or IV subvert their political or
professional policies or dictates and treat one another as humans, and
as they would hope to be treated in similar circumstances, we can say
that they are acting in accord with the norms of the implied author.
Another example I provided in a previous post is when Sasha puts her
familial obligations to her son-in-law, Zoyd, and her grand-daughter
Prairie above her Lefty politics.

> Zoyd's willingness to talk, share a meal, relate on purely human
> terms pays off in this case.  I fault Zoyd for a lot of things
> (driving after all
> them beers, the hotel scene in Hawaii, unseemly lachrymosity,
> screaming matches with Frenesi, his tendency to violence - yeah, the
> chainsaw thing but also his willingness on page 358 ff, to even consider
> armed action to recover his house) but it seems to me that he handles
> Hector intelligently and ethically enough...

He tries to run Frenesi and Sasha over with the car. Of course, he has
a history of car-death driving.
My complaint about Zoyd is the ding he put on that surfer's biard by
dropping the beer can out the hotel window. No surfer should ever do a
thing like that to another surfer.

Like Hector, Zoyd is not a stable character but one that zaps in and
out of Tube behavior. This is not the same as Foster's flat/round or
static/dynamic, these spacial metaphors, while useful to an extent,
are too limited. James Wood adds unstable, transparencies and
opacities. This is useful, but also limited, and one of the reasons
Wood has a hard time enjoying pynchon. Wood claims we expect complex
and dynamic characters to experience consistent change. But that's not
what happens in postmodern novels. Hector can seem like a fairly
normal man, even a very sensitive guy, a guy who has a clear view of
what happened in the past--and clearly, Hector's view or narrative of
the snitching, by Zoyd and others, is given more credence by the text
than Zoyd's foggy and Romantic  remembrances-- but, in his language we
notice his use of TV-talk. The little buddy stuff here is very
important. In any event, Hector is an addict and, although he can talk
about his addiction in rational ways, he can't stop watching the Tube.
He can even explain to Zoyd how the TV cops are not real and that his
work is not like the work cops do on the Tube. But he can't help
acting like the TV cops. ANd he zaps in and out of TV mode. Not
stable. Zoyd does the same. In fact, in the Hawaii episode, where TV
is contrasted with Film (feminist Film and working class film--MUCHO
Importante to our reading of this novel and IV--this contrast), Zoyd
zaps into TV show mode and even into cartoon mode. This turns a reader
like Wood off.  Zoyd is cartooned by Pynchon. So how are we to
understand and sympathize with characters that flash or zap out of a
real character form into a TV character and even into a cartoon mode?
We need identify the implied author's norms first. The P-List is
constantly arguing the fine points of Lefty politics and sometimes the
blunt and obtuse points, but this is a waste of time. The novels are
fairly simple on the moral level. Basic stuff we all understand and
have understood for as long as we've been sentient and mature people.