IVIV (10) page 157

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I guess in some ways IV is a faint echo of COL49.  Jason (despite the Rolls), Coy and Jade represent the preterite, and like the preterite in COL49, they possess some knowledge of a shadowy group (although they don't benefit from it, as do the participants in W.A.S.T.E.) that Doc must ferret out.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>

>
>My thinking about Jason Velveeta is that he is a reflection of larger  
>arrangements of social status. His name is an odd mix, half classical  
>quest to TRoy and home, half processed cheese, a true American. On  
>the practical level he is a pimp selling asian girls who mock him but  
>work for him; they see themselves as independent but must have some  
>level of protection from him to be able to do that. The picture of  
>ineptness is offset by the Rolls. He also seems to know something  
>about the Golden Fang's operation as it impacts his neighborhood. The  
>big players in heroin and prostitution at this time are the Mob, the  
>KMT, and the police and governments that allow it. But the black  
>gangs and pimps are a growing force  who will continue to grow. The  
>only thing that makes Jason funny and inoffensive is that he is not  
>beating his workers. He doesn't sort into a Vato &Blood  type  
>suitable compartment.  He's either going to figure out he's in the  
>wrong business, he'll get pushed out or killed, or he is doing a  
>Steppin Fetchit  routine to keep an unthreatening profile while he  
>works his way up.
>
>I tend to think the latter and he represents a nastier "function in  
>the socius" than the Steppin Fetchit routine betrays.
>If so his info on the Fang gains weight. But maybe he is all 3. The  
>different possibilities of a person one knows briefly.
>
>If any of us could or did look back on the experiences of a given  
>time like investigative reporters or criminal investigators I think  
>there are many levels to what we would see: characters who seemed to  
>embody directions and ideas and, moments when the veneer came away  
>and we saw the violence and grinding lusts of large forces exposed in  
>their rapaciousness, coincidences  and events that seem too shocking  
>to propose as credible fiction, and realities we don't know what to  
>do with.  Some of it would be funny. Maybe there is not a lot new  
>here in IV but for me the new terrain is in a greater sympathy with  
>the whole sick crew.  And for new readers of Pynchon, born in a world  
>of search engines, there is still plenty going on here, a deviant and  
>creative take on things that dares to hide as much as it reveals to  
>ask as much as it gives.
>
>I would defend IV in this way, in an age when everyone is hunting for  
>the bad guys and refusing to notice the flag waving american who just  
>picked their pocket, Pynchon is pointing to old fashioned follow the  
>leads detective work. Plus he gives us gratuitous sex, drugs and rock  
>and roll galore,  a playlist, and rather sweet vision of love as the  
>thing that might make a difference in what we find and what we do,  
>and whether it matters.
>