Terrance in Aliceland

[Robin Landseadel]

I've been irritated by Terrance's posts, but this one strikes me as  
disinformation and misdirection incarnate. I'll just make a few notes  
and let Terri's post speak for itself.

Mucho Maas is one of the few characters in Pynchon where we can see a  
progression. Mucho starts as a used car salesman with severe doubts  
about the nature of his work, moves over to being a radio DJ with a  
kink for jailbait then, as a participant in Dr. Hilarius' LSD  
experimentation/therapy shifts gears radically. When we encounter  
Mucho after Oedipa's encounter with a clearly deranged Dr. Hilarius  
it's obvious that something has happened, and the reports from those  
he has been working with indicate that he seems, for lack of a better  
word, manic. At the same time, he is also clearly in a state of  
creative ecstacy. When Mucho speaks about separating voices in the  
muzak, expanding channels, his heightened awareness of the details of  
sound, music, and recordings, his transformation into a record  
producer in Vineland seems llike the natural progression. And when  
Mucho later speaks in Vineland of the LSD driven insight of the  
essential interconnectedness of being to Zoyd he is clearly in better  
emotional and spiritual shape than he was in the opening passages of  
The Crying of Lot 49.

As regards Terrance's take on Doc, he's a genre type in a genre book  
fer christsakes! Doc doesn't model himself after a fictional Private  
Eye, HE IS A FICTIONAL PRIVATE EYE!

Knocking off bad guys is just part of the job description.

And then Terrance misdirects with a passage from an analysis from The  
"Playboy of the Western World."

Like I said before, Pynchon is trying to tell us something about his  
life in L.A., circa 1970. All Terrance seems to be interested in is  
lambasting us for not thinking exactly as he does.


On Nov 15, 2009, at 5:36 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Yes, Mucho is an excellent example. Mucho is a character in Lot49,
> P's first California work--a work in which drugs and CIA conspiracy
> are employed by the author to exactly the same end. Mucho takes LSD.
> Mucho is an excellent compare/contrast character to help us understand
> Doc. Like young Doc the repo-man who threatens poor people with a
> syringe, Mucho, a used car salesman who winces at the sight of sawdust
> and honey, is a "thin-skinned unscrupulous salesman, who sells cars to
> the American disinherited--"Negro, Mexican, cracker." As a DJ, Mucho
> spews sex over the air to an adolescent audience and has affairs with
> them off the air. He takes LSD, not to reach Nirvana, but as a habit,
> disintegrates into multiple personalities and goes groping "like a
> child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the
> elaborate candy house of himself." Mucho is made of fool of. He is
> satirized. Like it or not, it is not a CIA big shot who exploits the
> poor, but a car salesman. A car salesman with big dreams who hopes to
> make money and fame and settles for disguises and jailbait. Like so
> many of P's California characters, trapped in mundane day or night
> jobs, Mucho hates his life and so he finds method to escape it. But
> there is no exit. There is no way out. No one is saved. Romantic
> escapism only leads to death or annihilation or solipsism. Young Larry
> has much in common with Mucho. When he gives up tracing down poor
> deadbeats, he takes on work from women and children who have lost
> their husbands to the machinery of markets black and white and red all
> over, and from ex-cons, blacks, asians, crackers, disenfranchised and
> disinherited preterite. But Doc dreams of escape too. He models
> himself, as do all these California figures, after characters on the
> tube and in detective fictions. Who or what is he is working for and
> why becomes clearer as the work unfolds. Larry works for Larry. He no
> longer threatens people with a syringe, he kills them. That's what the
> guys he models himself after do. They kill people. Smoking a joint or
> having an LSD trip that opens his mind doesn't stop him from killing.
> Do we admire him? This is the question. Or do we admire the art only.
>
> The following analysis of The Playboy of the Western World was
> originally published in The British and American Drama of Today.
> Barrett H. Clark. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. pp. 194-7.
>
>
>
> On the west coast of County Mayo[2] Christy Mahon stumbles into
> Flaherty's tavern. There he claims that he is on the run because he
> killed his own father by driving a spade into his head. Flaherty
> praises Christy for his boldness, and Flaherty's daughter (and the
> barmaid), Pegeen, falls in love with Christy, to the dismay of her
> betrothed, Shawn. Because of the novelty of Christy's exploits and the
> skill with which he tells his own story, he becomes something of a
> town hero. Many other women also become attracted to him, including
> the Widow Quin, who tries unsuccessfully to seduce Christy at Shawn's
> behest. Christy also impresses the village women by his victory in a
> donkey race, using the slowest beast.
>
> Eventually Christy's father, Mahon, who was only wounded, tracks him
> to the tavern. When the townsfolk realize that Christy's father is
> alive, everyone (including Pegeen) shuns him as a liar and a coward.
> In order to regain Pegeen's love and the respect of the town, Christy
> attacks his father a second time. This time it seems that Old Mahon
> really is dead, but instead of praising Christy, the townspeople, led
> by Pegeen, bind and prepare to hang him to avoid being implicated as
> accessories to his crime. Christy's life is saved when his father,
> beaten and bloodied, crawls back onto the scene, having improbably
> survived his son's second attack. As Christy and his father leave to
> wander the world, Shawn suggests he and Pegeen get married soon, but
> she spurns him. Pegeen then laments betraying and losing Christy, The
> Playboy of the Western World.
>
> In the preface to The Playboy of the Western World, John Millington
> Synge wrote: "... in countries where the imagination of the people,
> and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a
> writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time give
> the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and
> natural form." This play is the living embodiment of Synge's ideas on
> the combination of reality and poetry in the drama. The Playboy of the
> Western World -- indeed, all of Synge's plays -- is outside the realm
> of literary "movements" and coteries; his plays are not plays of
> ideas. Theses and problems die. Ideas are for a generation, or for a
> few generations. Again the dramatist expounds (in the preface to The
> Tinker's Wedding): "The drama is made serious -- in the French sense
> of the word -- not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems
> that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives
> the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations
> live.... The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove
> anything...."
>
> In his travel-book, The Aran Islands, we find the following passage:
> "... He often tells me about a Connaught man who killed his father
> with a blow of a spade when he was in a passion, and then fled to this
> island and threw himself on the mercy of some of the natives.... They
> hid him in a hole ... and kept him safe for weeks, though the police
> came and searched for him, and he could hear their boots grinding on
> the stones over his head. In spite of a reward which was offered, the
> island was incorruptible, and after much trouble the man was safely
> shipped to America.
>
> "This impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west. It
> seems partly due to the association between justice and the hated
> English jurisdiction, but more directly to the primitive feeling of
> these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of crime,
> that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a
> passion which is as irresistible as a storm on the sea. If a man has
> killed his father, and is already sick and broken with remorse, they
> can see no reason why he should be dragged away and killed by the law.
>
> "Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if
> you suggest that punishment is needed as an example, they ask, 'Would
> any one kill his father if he was able to help it?'"
>
> Out of his sympathy and enthusiasm for life, its humor, its bite, its
> contradictions, its exhilaration, Synge wrote this play. The
> dramatist's end was "reality" and "joy." He was little concerned with
> technique, he had no purpose but that of allowing his living creatures
> to revel in life, to revel in rich idioms. Still, this apparently
> spontaneous comedy was the result of arduous labor: George Moore
> relates that the last act was rewritten thirteen times.
>
> Many plays, of all ages and periods, have contained first acts with
> very little in them but the exposition of a few facts and the creation
> of the environment or milieu. The opening of The Playboy of the
> Western World is full of atmosphere, and strikes the keynote of the
> action which is to follow; but there is no such conscious preparation
> as there is in the expository act of Pinero's Thunderbolt. Pegeen
> Mike, in Synge's play, opens the act with: "Six yards of stuff for to
> make a yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them
> and brassy eyes. A hat is suited for a wedding-day. A fine tooth comb.
> To be sent with three barrels of porter in Jimmy Farrell's creel cart
> on the evening of the coming Fair to Mister Michael James Flaherty.
> With the best compliments of this season. Margaret Flaherty." Compare
> this simple paragraph with the elaborate preparatory openings of The
> Second Mrs. Tanqueray and Iris.
>
> Throughout the play the development of the plot, such as it is, goes
> hand in hand with the development of Christy's character. Beginning
> with Christy's "I had it in my mind it was a different word and
> bigger" (just after his entrance in the first act), trace, by
> reference to his speeches, how, in his own estimation and in that of
> his audience, he grows from "a slight young man ... very tired and
> frightened and dirty" to a "likely gaffer in the end of all." There is
> a certain similarity between the growth of Hamlet's character and
> Christy's.
>
>
>
>
>>
>>> . . .how do you account for the fact that the
>>> characters who chase down these CIA projects and/or complain that  
>>> the
>>> government has taken LSD off the free market because it fears a
>>> population that will gain new insights into government corruption,  
>>> are
>>> made fools of in the P-texts?
>>
>> Well, like the Dude says—Not OUR Dude, the other Dude—"Yeah, well,  
>> you know,
>> that's just, like, your opinion, man." You say they're—I guess you're
>> talking about Mucho Maas and El Espinero—made fools of and I'm sure  
>> in the
>> voluble outpourings of your essentially Puritan mindset*, you'll  
>> find a way
>> to track it all back to Hawthorne in the process. You know—you're  
>> no more
>> impervious to projection than anyone else here. But I don't see how  
>> to get
>> around the fact that these folks [in TRP's books] did have  
>> insights, that
>> the forensic info gathered by Frank in fact was on the mark. But hey 
>> —it's
>> your bummer, you're entitled to get what you need out of it. I  
>> don't think
>> the insights gained by Doc during his Acid trips make him a fool,  
>> though
>> what he's learning indicates what fools we've all been while pursuing
>> mindless pleasures of our very own.
>>
>>> Darker than Dark. IV is ugly and Dark. And, P seems pissed off.
>>> I suspect that AGTD took  a lot out of him.
>>
>> Can't say I'd disagree with you on that one. Of course "The Long  
>> Goodbye"
>> ain't exactly no Swiss Picnic either.
>>
>> *Always thought Glenn Gould was the Last Puritan.
>>
>>