IV Chapter 17 Thoughts

[Robin Landseadel]

On Dec 8, 2009, at 1:34 PM, rich wrote:

> thx, Robin. that goes a way in explaining Doc's dilemma but why does
> Doc think Coy can quit the game so to speak but he can't--is it
> because he doesn't have a wife and kid to support/protect/serve, etc?
> is it because he's a PI, that's his job, the job makes the man to
> quote the Wizard in Taxi Driver?
>
> rich

In this case it's "The Genre Archetype Pre-Determines the Character."  
On top of everything else, "Inherent Vice" is a genre exercise and Doc  
is its Knight Errant—in order for Doc to fulfill that archetype he  
must save someone. Coy is an artist, a musician. While Coy has to sing  
for his supper Coy also has to get back to his art and life's little  
detours re-routed Coy away from his true calling. Doc can do something  
about that, along with Coy's family and so on and so forth. At the  
same time, Doc also has to spill some blood, as Jefferson told him to  
do—unfortunately, it is Doc's destiny; built-in to his genre archetype.

Remember as well that Doc being constantly stoned—a wake 'n bake type— 
ties in with his soul brother Philip Marlowe. As Raymond Chandler  
faces up to such considerations as alcoholic black-outs and simple  
mortality in "The Long Goodbye," so does Pynchon face up to some of  
the consequences of Ganja's candy-coated fog and simple mortality in  
"Inherent Vice."


>> Remember that Sportello is constantly stoned—"Completely Attached to
>> Delusion", as John Giornio might say. That would go along with  
>> Lemuria and
>> Bigfoot and a host of other non-scheduled theologies and mythic  
>> structures
>> bruited about by the Freaks of the greater Los Angeles region,  
>> circa 1970.
>> They are all signifiers of the demographic that Pynchon tends to  
>> focus on.
>> Obviously Dope—and the karma attached to Dope—are major themes in  
>> "Inherent
>> Vice." Again, this is grounded in reality, in the lives lived by  
>> millions in
>> California during the transition from the sixties to the seventies.  
>> There
>> was so much of the economy of California that was dependent on such  
>> things
>> as the Military-Industrial Complex. There was so much of the  
>> economy of Los
>> Angeles that was dependent on such things as the Underground  
>> Economy. The
>> two meet up in the Golden Fang, that open palm of desire that wants
>> everything. Pynchon must have been thinking about both issues a lot  
>> as he
>> wrote Gravity's Rainbow, a lot of these considerations made their  
>> way into
>> Gravity's Rainbow—Doper's Greed, anyone?
>>
>> Thoughts like Sportello's have dawned on me—who knew that all these  
>> major,
>> corporate, record companies manufacturing songs of love and peace  
>> in the
>> sixties turned out to be in the center of the Nuclear power,  
>> Nuclear weapons
>> industries and other Military-Industrial interests? How could I  
>> know, as I
>> was selling Bernard Haitink LPs—me being just another freak in a  
>> record shop
>> flogging vinyl—that I was promoting Nuclear power at the same time?
>> Simultaneously there are many parallels with current times, with so  
>> much of
>> our collective hope for change torn apart by the reality of how  
>> money really
>> is made.
>>
>> Doc has been working to get away from the karma of his line of work  
>> but
>> there's no escape—it's one of the inherent vices of his occupation.