IVIV, more lost innocence. Is IV a Paradise Lost? p.38

[Tore Rye Andersen]

alice:
 
> Babies and Dogs, hungry, listless, neglected, even healthy, happy ...
> sell anything on TV. Don't be fooled by the kid.
 
Let me just state for the record that no dog on TV or elsewhere has ever 
been able to sell me anything - I loathe the creatures, can't see the 
point of them.
 
As for babies, though, they can sell me anything! I just find it very hard
to believe that Pynchon is trying to *sell* me anything here with his 
sentimental portrait of Amethyst, that he's deliberately trying to fool
the reader into misreading Doc's motives. Take the passage on p. 162:
 
"It wasn't so much Coy he kept cycling back to as Hope, who believed,
with no proof, that her husband hadn't died, and Amethyst, who ought
to have something more than fading Polaroids to go to when she got
them little-kid blues."
 
Is this a cynicist trying to sucker-punch us, to sell us a line, or is 
it a Sentimental Surrealist at work? Even though you frown on such 
behaviour, I would probably say that IV allows us to jump both ways
on the question, but I would be much more inclined to jump in the
sentimental direction is this particular instance.
 
You've previously argued - and I absolutely agree - that Pynchon's
essays and introductions are a good place to go if we want to try
to establish his values. The novels may be too slippery to do so, but 
what we find in those essays can be used to support our readings of the 
novels. So let's go to the ending of Pynchon latest extended non-fiction
text, his introduction to Orwell'a 1984:
 
"There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with
his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have
been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight.
Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but
not smugly so - it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered
something that might be worth even more than anger [...].
It is the boy's smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and
radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that world, at the
end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love,
can always be taken for granted - a faith so honourable that we can
almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment
anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever
being betrayed."
 
Now, could someone please explain to me what Pynchon is trying to
sell me here with this unabashedly sentimental ending? Could someone
please tell me how he is trying to fool me here, and could someone
parse out the complicated ironies at work here that sucker the naive
reader into reading this ending literally? This passage seems not only
relevant to Doc's actions in IV, but also - and perhaps even more
so - to Webb's actions in AtD. For Webb, his anger remains more
precious than his kids, and that's one of the real tragedies in AtD.
 
It can sometimes be hard to reconcile Pynchon the cynicist or Pynchon 
the genius with Pynchon the sentimentalist, but if we want the whole
package, we have to accept (though not necessarily love) that sentimental
streak; we have to be fooled by the kid.
 
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