IVIV: Trust

[Joe Allonby]

Aha! So it's about trust?

Crocker Fenway - further proof that Pynchon is a Red Sox fan. It's
about faith and trust.

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:58 AM, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Can I just skip back a page or two to this passage on p. 70:
>
> "Doc watched her getting in line. What kind of DDA game was
> she running on him now? He wished he could believe her more,
> but the business was unforgiving, and life in psychedelic-sixties
> L.A. offered more cautionary arguments than you could wave
> a joint at against too much trust, and the seventies were
> looking no more promising."
>
> It seems to me that the notion of 'trust' emerges as a crucial
> theme in IV. On the one hand, we have characters in the novel
> saying things like "I figure a guy can't ever be too paranoid"
> (149), but on the other hand we have characters like Doc, who
> consciously decides to try his hand at some trust, despite
> all the cautionary arguments against it.
>
> On p. 342, Crocker Fenway lectures Doc (who is nervous that
> he'll get wasted when he hands back the heroin Bigfoot put
> in his trunk):
>
> "Luckily for you, that's a sanction they prefer to exercise
> only against their own. Given the sorts of business they engage
> in, without absolute trust in one's associates all may too
> swiftly revert to anarchy. Outsiders like yourself tend to
> get the benefit of the doubt, and you in turn may trust their
> word without any hesitation."
>
> Crocker is of course one of the bad guys of IV, but what he
> says here isn't entirely a crock of shit. In fact, his assertion
> that without trust all may too swiftly revert to anarchy is
> very similar to one of the central themes in Melville's
> The Confidence-Man. That novel also seems to tell us that
> without a minimum of trust, it'll all fall apart. Expect
> to be cheated, but don't not trust. Otherwise things may
> degenerate all too easily into all-encompassing suspicion
> and paranoia.
>
> At any rate, Doc takes Crocker's lesson to heart, and when
> Denis asks him why on earth he believes Crocker's promise
> that the crooks won't hurt anybody, he says:
>
> "What, I should only trust good people? man, good people
> get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody
> evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean
> I wouldn't give odds either way." (349)
>
> I trust y'all have an opinion on this.
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