CH 15 the hard on

[Mark Kohut]

Felicitously, smartly argued case in embryo. 

However, I counter by saying that IV, like all his works, is a subtler moral argument than we have yet fully articulated. 

That it may not work--no moral center--is worth continued argument BUT

The man has a MORAL perspective on EVERYTHING, on history, on the Human and its loss........it is in Inherent Vice or IV fails to embody it.....
but it is intended, I say over and over.

--- On Sun, 11/22/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: CH 15 the hard on
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, November 22, 2009, 9:14 AM
> What are the moral limits? While
> these dark snapshots  & TV episodes &
> parodic historicizings seem a critique of the experiment in
> democracy
> we call America (circa 1970 & 2009) and how its
> corruption by an elite
> produces Frankenstein's monsters that turn the "relatively
> poor and
> powerless" people of the United States into dehumanized
> zombies and
> slothful consumers of solipsistic slop, that critique is
> undermined by
> the S&M and homosexual self inflicted imprisonment
> theme. The People's
> History of the United States or Who Built America, and the
> Whitman &
> Thoreau & Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, not to
> mention Melville
> (Typee to Bartleby) themes, evinced on each and every page
> of
> Pynchon's latest tome, seem only present in their absence
> in this
> California Pot Broilier.  While clever readers may
> construct meaning,
> and morals, the text refuses to allow a center that
> holds--not even
> murder, as the discussion of Larry's propensity to kill
> seems to
> prove, is beyond the pale. He's a pacifist, man. But the
> Dude, try as
> he may to avoid violence, can not. Larry is no Dude. He is
> a man
> driven by his romantic notions of heroism; he admires
> Bigfoot. It is
> easier to like Bigfoot than it is to like Larry.  This
> is not quite
> thew case of P's previous California Buddies, Hector and
> Zoyd. What
> are the moral limits if the character we like most is a
> corrupt cop?
> Again, I suggest that these California works are
> post-modern thumbs in
> the eyes of the reader who would attribute a moral meaning
> to Pynchon.
>