IVIV Doc goes to find Wolfmann

[alice wellintown]

Why? What motivates Larry's quest. That he is the protagonist of a
detective fiction and therefore acts like one is not a very
satisfactory response. What is novel here? What is conventional is
easy enough to identify. Read detective fiction. Surely we've done
that and more. Now what? Read Pynchon. His others texts and his essays
provide excellent exercise for reading his latest work. Now, the
detective novel is actually a lot older than Poe and Dickens and the
Moonstone. Much older because it comes out of the tradition of the
quest and the journey. Of course, Pynchon's quest narratives are
American--so The WIzard of Oz is, perhaps, more useful here than a
harboiled conventional sleuth narrative. Why is that? Well, Pynchon
writes Romantic Satires and his texts mock and parody the
conventional. So, discovering the conventional boilerplates is only
the beginning of analysis. Same with history. That Pynchon mentions
the CIA means nothing. We need to unpack the ironies. These don't
often turn in direction that his readers expect (i.e. Left).

  "She had to find out for herself."
		--Glinda, The Wizard Of Oz

“Tis better to be lord of men than of Waste: since neither walled town
nor ship is anything, if it is void and no
men dwell with thee therein."

--Sophocles, Oedipus The King, Priest of Zeus to Oedipus

Obviously, Pynchon has a penchant for quests: from Sophocles'
masterpiece Oedipus The King to The Wizard
of OZ,  to detective fiction, Pynchon's satires are postmodern
parodies of the age-old quest story.

see "Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, edited by J. Peter Euben:
"Sophocles implies that incest and exile, too much
unity and too much diversity, are not opposites but are, literally,
two sides of the same coin. He also suggests, what the
audience believed, that incest and parricide are acts that obliterate
the distinction between man and beast,
inside and outside, the wild and civilization. What Oedipus lacks (and
Thebes as well) is some middle term, an Aristotelian
Polis that mediates between our divinity and animality, making us
whole in a community constituted by diversity."

 After ruminating over the hazards of interpreting Pynchon, Euben
states,    "If there is any hope in the novel,
it rests with Oedipa. She is the only one who does not give up the
quest, she is the middle term." (302).

J. Peter Euben in "The Road Home: Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49”

Many scholars agree that from a purely structural point of view,
Oedipus The King is practically unrivaled in
dramatic literature. Pynchon seems to have a fascination with the
"unrivaled" texts. In any event, Sophocles
demonstrates his remarkable skill as a dramatist by allowing Oedipus
to become aquatinted with His story incrementally, while
at the same time exploiting the total range of possible ironies by
allowing the audience to know more of His story than
Oedipus knows at any given moment in the play. Moreover, and this is
the "crust of the biscuit", in Oedipus The King we
find perfect motivation for individual actions. This is one of the
reasons Aristotle turns to this drama more than
any other Greek Tragedy to illustrate his critical theories.

The characters in GR are on quests. Slothrop, like Stencil and Oedipa,
is on a quest.

The quest theme is a Pynchon favorite and it is pervasive in GR:
cowboy, detective, love, picaresque, etc. and occurs in Sacral
(Kabbalist, Masonic, Gnostic etc), Mythic or Magical (Grail, Tarot,
Astrological, etc.), Scientific/Technological (psychology,
mathematics, aerodynamics, rocket engineering, etc.), and in
variations of these assimilated. The Scientific/Technological quests
(Faustian) are presented as Profane or corrupt versions of the Sacred,
Mythical, and Magical, while the Sacred, Mythical, and Magical, are
Carnivalized. So, sometimes characters are not sure if they are on a
quest or if they are running for their lives (kinda like
Dorothy--"I'll get you my little Tyrone and your Big Penis too!").

And as with Dorothy, the goal (spiritual and material) of the quest
keep multiplying: "some place where there isn't any trouble", "get out
of OZ", Emerald City, Home, Heart, Brains,Courage, OZ, Wizard, WWW's
broom, Kansas, and of course "the land of E Pluribus Unum."  Some
characters in GR, like Slothrop, are on a quest for a whole bunch of
things, like, Self or Identity, lovers, relatives, ancestors, doubles,
drugs, information, money, technology (Imipolex G, S-Gerat) discharge
from the service ("ruptured duck" GR.61 and GR.526), Jamf, and so on.
"Yeah! yeah what happened to Imipolex G, all that Jamf a-and that
S-Gerat, s'posed to be a hardboiled private eye here, gonna go out all
alone and beat the odds, avenge my friend that They killed (Tantivy),
get my ID back and find that piece of mystery hardware but now aw it's
JUST LIKE--LOOK-IN FAWR A NEEDLE IN A HAAAAY-STACK...chances of ever
finding...determining your goals...concentrate...The S-Garat now--O.K.
if I can find that S-Garat 'n' how Jamf was
hooked in, if I can find that out, yeah yeah, Imipolex GR...
--searchin' for a (hmm) cellar full o' saffron..."
(GR.561-562).

Moreover, characters change their interests rather haphazardly,
abandoning one set of objects or goals and adopting
new ones as the story moves along, parody after fantastic parody.

GR has all 14 elements of Bakhtin's formulation for Menippean Satire,
including the quest motif and parody of various genres.

The text mocks novelistic conventions even as they make up large
portions of the narrative.

Also, most characters  don't learn anything and those that do are not
transformed by their learning, but rather lapse back to their
conditioned selves after experiencing what would be a transforming
event or revelation of some sort in a more "traditional" novel.

In Ensign Morituri's Story (GR.474). "We are conditioned to forget"
GR.474, "So Ensign Moritori
committed then the only known act of heroism in his career....His
conditioning, his verbal, ranked and uniformed self
took over again." (GR.478)

Although Pynchon subverts traditional character motivation, thus
subverting both the quests and
questers, characters are not where we will find the "traditional"
maturation, evolution, learning, etc. as we do in say,
 Pip of "Great Expectations",  or Jude of "Jude the Obscure" or  Tom
Jones of Fielding's masterwork, the protagonist's
journey to maturation or bildungsroman, is still represented, as is
motivation, only what  motivates characters are various Forces
Invisible. These have infected the consciousness of Moden Man. In VL
and IV these Forces are most evident in the impact of Business or Work
& Media.

This is what Pynchon is concerned with, the forces of consciousness, though
consciousness is not individualized nor is it separate from the forces
"outside" consciousness.  Again, Slothrop
is our best model. In the Anubis chapters, we are told that
Slothrop is to be counted among the zone's lost and as
individual character this is the case, but at the
level of force motivation, Slothrop is transformed and
transcends.

The single force motivation in GR does not change. All
quests promise some sort of redemption from an
insufferable predicament and characters try everything on Earth to
"transcend" the human condition. Most fail either
because they cannot get to their goal or when they do, they
find annihilation. What's interesting is that when questers
succeed in GR, they succeed only in protecting or
redeeming others, Geli, for example, prevents murder with magic.
On the other hand, when questers fail, they fail for all
sorts of reasons: they are late, they are on the wring
track, the wrong train, the wrong ship, moving in the wrong
direction,  they forget, they are afraid (like Stencil is afraid
to got to Malta), etc.