IVIV: Trust

[Mark Kohut]

All of your fine examples add up to a dark mini-version vision ala The Confidence Man.....as in your first post.

the beach group expects to be sold out and the other groups have to rely on each other, cop solidarity or honor among thieves.  

Doc is not part of any of the groups.....the loner with no one to trust....

--- On Tue, 9/15/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: IVIV: Trust
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 2:13 PM
> 
> I dug up a few more relevant trust-related quotes, in
> addition to 
> the ones I mentioned in my previous post. I'm not sure that
> they
> make matters any clearer, but they do underscore that trust
> is an
> important theme in IV.
>  
> So for the record: When one of the bad eggs from LAPD
> approach 
> Adrian Prussia to get him to kill one of their own, Prussia
> at first 
> balks at the request. Why a cop? Wasn't he only supposed to
> kill 
> "black and Chicano activists, antiwar protesters, campus
> bombers, 
> and other pinko fucks"? (323). But the contact explains:
>  
> "On the job [...] there's a code. There has to be trust.
> Everything
> depends on it, it's nonnegotiable." (324)
>  
> Seems the villains in IV are the novel's staunchest
> defenders of
> trust (maybe because they can afford to be screwed over,
> having
> the option to kill those who screw them). But that doesn't
> mean
> Doc is willing to discard trust altogether. We hear that
> the "bond
> between partners was nearly the only thing Doc had ever
> found to 
> admire about the LAPD" (66). This bond is of course
> primarily built
> on trust: 
>  
> "here was at least something they had not sold but kept for
> themselves, 
> forged in the dangerous life-and-death uncertainties of one
> working
> day after another - something real that had to be
> respected." (66)
>  
> Life on the beach is a different story:
>  
> "Everybody around here drove around like a dedicated loser,
> expecting
> moment to moment to get into an accident. Doc could relate
> to this -
> it was like the beach, where you lived in a climate of
> unquestioning
> hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always
> expecting
> to be sold out - but he didn't have to enjoy that either,
> especially." 
> (225)
>  
> Paranoia has clearly crept in with the L.A. fog.
>  
> So what's a poor Doc to do: surrender himself to the mean
> suspicion and
> paranoia characterizing life on he beach around 1970? Or
> listen to crooks
> like Crocker Fenway espousing the virtues of absolute
> trust? Or something
> in between?
>  
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