IV Killing Puck

[alice wellintown]

Partnerships and alliances are rarely if ever equatable or fair in P's
fictions or in America.  Sharing information or not, using information
or hiding it to keep one's partner in the dark, even if the dark
endangers a partner and partnership, these are typical power plays in
P's fictions and are found in all partnerships. Larry takes chances
with Penny. She does the same. The ideal brotherhood that Bigfoot
talks about is like courtly love; it doesn't exist but in the loss of
it and the longing for it. At the end, Bigfoot, while he doesn't take
acid, sees things from Larry's doper's point of view. Larry asks for a
commission or at least a tip for the job he's done. Bigfoot offers
that job Larry can't quite take. But Larry has done the work, the job,
anyways. It's as Shasta sez, not so much who, but what they work for.
Now that the dead partner has been revenged by the partnership,
Bigfoot & Larry are more even partners. Larry has settled a big
account and Bigfoot acknowledges this. But all is not fair in Love and
Noir.



On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Robert Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> Pynchon is probably is aware that air bubbles don't kill.  Everybody
> got air-bubble in the syringe fear from B movies.  By the way, they do hurt=
> ,
> and maybe all of that is the point: pain before being sedated to death.
>
> It might be more to do with Doc not worrying about the niceties of
> administering a fix, flicking the syringe, tying off the circulation in
> Puck's arm, etc. Puck's already unconscious and in a world of pain, and Doc'
> s in a hurry.
> I agree that Doc's 'fury' and the extreme vengeance he enacts is a response
> to what Puck did to Trillium.
> I also don't believe it's correct to call Doc and Bigfoot 'partners' ...
> exactly. Doc doesn't know about Adrian or Indelicato until Puck tells him.
> Bigfoot has set up Doc here, and he sets him up again with the 20 kilos in
> the boot of the Impala after the job is done. However, it's true that Doc
> looks out for Bigfoot. ... I suspect that their relationship is meant to be
> regarded as more along the lines of those strange alliances between
> erstwhile adversaries which occur often enough in the comics and cartoons -
> 'Dagwood and Mr. Dithers, Bugs and Yosemite Sam, Popeye and Bluto' - in that
> 'green and magenta' flashback hallucination that Pynchon supplies him with
> as he's about to get the job done for Bigfoot. (326)
> Not sure whether there's anything to the 'two Docs' stuff during his PCP
> trip, exact perhaps as an attempt to narrate what the experience is like ...
> or the vision he has of 'the Golden Fang' as a vampire, describing itself as
> 'their worst fear ... an unthinkable vengeance they turn to when one of them
> has grown insupportably troublesome, when all other sanctions have failed'
> (318-9). Is the implication here that Doc is 'one of them' (i.e., the Golden
> Fang) who, like Blatnoyd, has grown 'troublesome' and is going to get it in
> the jugular as a result?
>
> todo lo mejor