IVIV1: Introducing Pynchon's burgher

[Mark Kohut]

from a review Doug sent:
"he does, amid the fog of skunky smoke, have a moral center."

Discussion challenge: Some have expressed the notion of Doc as unreliable narrator. Degrees of that, of course, he isn't hallucinating but what is his distance from the author's vision? 

What is Doc's 'moral center' if you agree with the reviewer. Or, if not, riff....

--- On Sun, 8/30/09, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:

> From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
> Subject: IVIV1: Introducing Pynchon's burgher
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, August 30, 2009, 6:16 AM
> Things have changed, it seems; Doc
> now has an office (1) and Shasta has, or
> had, moved to Hancock Park (3), even if, subsequently, she
> claims to be
> "staying where I can anymore" (4), perhaps a means to
> keeping Doc at a
> distance. Nonetheless, the opening chapter introduces Doc
> by emphasising
> status. And Shasta, as he chooses to remember her, belongs
> to pre-office
> days. The text homes in on her appearance, "all in flatland
> gear" (1); and
> then, a few pages later, Doc describes Penny as a "nice
> flatland chick" (4),
> so Shasta also belongs to Doc's present.
> 
> She might also be associated with another aspect of times
> past. On 3 the
> narrative censors the "sum" that cannot be shared with the
> reader, but we
> know, down the page, that Doc is "beginning to feel deeply
> nervous again".
> On 4 we don't find out the one phone number she is prepared
> to share with
> him either; but that might be dismissed as a mere
> convention, knowledge of
> no use to the reader. We might insist, by way of contrast,
> that the money
> Shasta says she has been offered is useful knowledge;
> instead, we are given
> Doc's response, a sum of money rendered comparable to the
> choices that Doc,
> once upon a time, made as a matter of course. Hancock Park
> similarly
> functions as a signifier of wealth, status defined in
> relative terms.
> 
> Is Doc trying to achieve professional respectability, and
> with it an
> elevated social status that Shasta's reappearance
> threatens? On 1, "nothing
> romantic tonight" suggests that he wants her to say this is
> more than 'just'
> business, but the office boast is still a boast; beneath
> the paving-stones
> of the "day job and everything", the beach of "that
> reckless era" (3), a
> return of the repressed. All of which begs the perennial
> Lacanian question:
> what will we find beneath the beach? (Those of us
> interested in character
> development and backstory might be inclined to start
> identifying dots to
> join here. Shasta left Doc because he couldn't offer her a
> home on Hancock
> Park; Doc tried to make money by taking risks. Whatever.)
> 
> And then, all of a sudden Shasta has become inscrutable:
> "... some heavy
> combination of face ingredients ... that he couldn't read
> at all". At which
> point she introduces the "somebody downtown" that Doc can
> give her access
> to. Top of 3, she dismisses Doc as no better than "Dear
> Abby"; a page later
> it becomes apparent that the job she has in mind is too big
> for Doc, he has
> become no more than a go-between. Shasta has been doing
> some investigatory
> work of her own: as Terrance has noted, she knows about
> Penny in the DA's
> office. Doc has use-value in the here and now; and Shasta
> refuses to play
> the game he has been playing, turning the clock back to
> wallow in something
> approximating to sentimentality. Note the insert splitting
> Shasta's speech
> at the bottom of 3: Doc is half-listening, until she brings
> up "somebody
> downtown" and then, top of 4, he immediately connects the
> two women.
> According to Doc, Penny is slumming, "out in search of
> secret hippy love
> thrills"; it is Shasta--here to tell a story, to answer
> questions and insert
> the PI into an already existing narrative--who confirms
> Penny's professional
> status.
>  
> As the chapter opened, the narrative voice sided with Doc
> to emphasise the
> difference between Shasta as she used to be and how she is
> in the text's
> now. Just before they leave, and for the first time, Doc
> sees the room
> through her eyes, "everything that hadn't changed ..." etc
> (4), a line we
> have waited for since "Shasta ... sort of drifted around
> the place" (2); it
> has taken a couple of pages for her female gaze to be
> acknowledged.
> Moreover, "I heard you're seeing somebody downtown?"
> (bottom of 3) recalls
> her opening words: "Thinks he's hallucinating" (1). Later:
> "At least her car
> was the same ..." (5). And on 6 he supposes that Penny is
> with "some
> shorthaired attorney with a promising career". By the
> bottom of 7 he has
> decided he wants to go after Mickey, even though Shasta
> hasn't explicitly
> asked him to: this while talking to Aunt Reet, like Penny a
> successful
> careerist (and also like Penny with a date). On 1, "it
> still might be a
> paying gig"; on 2, he is thinking of Shasta as "a client".
> On 7 Aunt Reet
> confirms that, like late-Marlowe, he is working "on spec".
> If Shasta has
> been introduced as a femme fatale we should acknowledge
> that the text, while
> isolating her as an object of desire, also connects her to
> other female
> characters rather more securely than it does to the
> narrative's putative
> patriarch Mickey. Who in turn has now become an object of
> desire.
> 
> 
>