IVIV (13) scene one question

[Robin Landseadel]

On Nov 6, 2009, at 3:07 PM, John Bailey wrote:

> Doc doesn't exactly have any sleepless, bedsheet-clutching nights
> after killing two people.

There is something shocking about the way Doc dispatches Puck.

To start with, Doc is placed in Inherent Vice much as Oedipa is placed  
in The Crying of Lot 49. We are with the central character throughout  
the book, we are meant to identify with these characters as if they  
are the "eye" through we witness the events of the novel—even though  
the "authorial voice" is an omniscient narrator, every now and then we  
slip into the minds of these two characters. Oedipa Maas starts off as  
a figure of domesticity and normalcy and winds up obsessed with a  
conspiracy that may or may not be the product of her fevered  
imagination. One way to read Oedipa's character is as a victim though  
we're not really sure what she is a victim of—Pierce Inverarity's  
estate? A global postal conspiracy? Her own middle-class karma?

But Doc is a private investigator, his bumps and bruises and scrapes  
are part of "the job"—"But the private eye sooner or later has to get  
beat up on" and we'd be disappointed if he didn't. What's different  
about Doc, what sets him off from Oed or Slothrop or Zoyd is that he  
fights back, that he attempts to get even. When he does "get even"  
it's as violent a scene as any in Pynchon's writing—

	"Doc was on his ass, slamming him in the head back and forth
	with the loose handcuff, smashing his foot into Puck's knee to
	bring him down, and then going down after him, giving in to a
	fury Doc understood would provide the balance he needed to
	coast through this, grabbing Puck's head and continuing to beat
	it almost silently against the marble doorsill till everything was
	too slippery with blood."

If that didn't take Puck out, the "hot shot" Doc administers will. If  
the uncut #3 smack doesn't take out Puck, the bubble in the syringe  
will.  Doc has the will to kill and the means as well. It's part of  
his job. The usual means Pynchon deploys to make us identify with his  
loser characters are all in place with Doc, right up to this point.

There's scenes of unbridled violence committed by "Them" in Pynchon's  
other books but never before by one of the schlemiels—it's as though  
the author is breaking the contract with his readers in this scene.

And then there's the names themselves—Doc, as in "Doctor", Puck, as in  
an uncontrollable force of nature. That divide between a living,  
breathing, "Giaian" world, the world of "Humores", of Alchemy of magic  
and the world that followed, the tamed, the mechanistic, the virtual  
world—Pynchon has presented this divide in so many different ways  
before but here the author appears to be placing the destruction of  
the natural world directly at the feet of the "freaks" giving lip  
service to "the cause" but continuing to keep driving, continuing to  
cruise on the freeways, soak up cathode rays, inhale junk food, prop  
up the machine by "virtue" of their own sloth, their own Acedia:

	Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of
	serious concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue
	to evolve away from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and
	miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work
	and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and end. Belief
	was intense, engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God
	was near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of God's good
	intentions -- was a deadly sin.

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  Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now
	seems increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in
	Luddite sorrow, despite technology's good intentions, there
	we'll sit with our heads in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be
	absorbed in its idle, disposable fantasies, even those about
	superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old days, full of
	leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains of
	the Acedia Squad.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html