Zoyd [IV spoiler]

[alice wellintown]

Why is this important? Again, only an allegorical or political reading
of the text must insist on Zoyd's innocense. It's not a fable or fairy
tale or a medieval parable. It's after the Fall. No one is innocent.
In fact, it's after the Second Fall.

VL Penguin p. 28 it's there. Zoyd is not innocent. He wants to be. He
wants to believe. But it's too Late. He is FALLEN!

The Second Industrial Revolution is the Second FALL of MAN. see GR
opening dream of Pirate and Mumford's Technics and Civilization. We
are all solitary men. from Eliot "Each fixed his eyes before his feet
... so many  undone ...so many ...."

Pynchon's novels are loacted in the Wasteland Betwixt the Dark
Romantics (Hawthrone, Melville, Poe, Dickeinson ...) and Tough Shit
Eliot.

The Catholicism that Eliot took cold confort in is now just hauntings
and huntings for the Fisher King Christ in the Wind.

Emerson's Experience

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have
made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever
afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not
see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting
these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the
amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative
power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw;
now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb
all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, --
objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas.
Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every
good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of
humiliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs
in his livery, and make them wait on his guests at table, so the
chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form
as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or barkeepers in
hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and insultable
in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the
eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes
this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of
hero or saint. Jesus the "providential man," is a good man on whom
many people are agreed that these optical laws shall take effect. By
love on one part, and by forbearance to press objection on the other
part, it is for a time settled, that we will look at him in the centre
of the horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will attach to
any man so seen. But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term.
The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all
relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and
love. Marriage (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible,
because of the inequality between every subject and every object. The
subject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel
his being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though not in energy, yet by
presence, this magazine of substance cannot be otherwise than felt:
nor can any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper
deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every subject. Never can love
make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the
same gulf between every me and thee, as between the original and the
picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All private sympathy
is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in
a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each
of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a
particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in
union acquire.

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion
of its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only
begotten, and though revealing itself as child in time, child in
appearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life.
Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in
ourselves, as we do not believe in others.

see Poetry, Politics, and Culture: Argumet in the Work of Eliot,
Pound, and Stevens.

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 9:57 AM, David Morris<fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree that Zoyd never "turns" or has his cherry popped.  He doesn't
> work for the government:  He is on eternal parole from BV, until BV
> suddenly (and for no apparent reason in the text) decides to change
> the deal and swoop in for the kill.  Zoyd is a pawn desperately tryng
> to avoid being crushed.  If he is stuck in childhood, it is not
> entirely voluntary.
>
> If Frenesi and BV are the adults in this dynamic, Pynchon clearly sees
> adults as having crossed over to that dark side.
>
> The characters in VL that have admirable volition are Takesi and DL.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 8:48 PM, alice
> wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Richard Fiero  wrote:
>>   . . .
>>> Not sure I have a dog in this fight but Zoyd does not roll over on Shorty but gives Hector nothing.  It's a word or mind game run by Hector.
>>
>> There is nothing on Shorty to give. Hector needs Zoyd  to roll so he can rubber stamp the deal with BV.
>