IV more thoughts on killing Puck

[alice wellintown]

>
> IV is, after all, set at a time when the promise of the 60's began to
> turn sour, e.g., with the reminders of the Manson killings. At the
> start of IV, we are surely meant to like Doc -- to identify with his
> cultural preferences and outsider status but also to respect that he
> can make a living as a PI. But it turns out that he can't straddle the
> line without sometimes getting on the wrong side of it, and that he
> can't make this living without doing some wrong.  (Like the hero of
> any other noir, right?) We keep liking Doc, but then there's this
> business of killing Puck.

Larry has, as I noted, all of the elements of the American Romantic
Hero. In the  scene when he kills Puck, Larry exhibits these elements
and the American reader, the male American reader almost to a fault,
can not resist him.

Zoyd is a deal maker. Same as Hector. And, they are partners in
crimes. The S&M element is the clearest evidence, other than what the
author clearly states about the failure of the Left in his SL
introduction, that Zoyd & Hector are parodic figures, that is, they
are comic figures constructed as polemical allusive imitations of what
has been made of them by the Tube circa 1984 and they are figures of
satire, treated with ironic derision for their contributions to the
failure of the1960s Left.


Both are running around making deals and dreaming up ways to make
money, money, money, money.  And, since it's California, Tube
celebrity if they can get it. Why have all these folks been reduced to
a hustle here and a hustle there? Is it only a matter of the voo-doo
trickle down of a economy-stupid? Or is there more to it than that?
The blame it on Reagan crowd can be satisfied. Hell, most reviewers of
the novel figured out as much. After a while critical studies flowed.
Some excellent ones, in fact. A sympathetic character is a modern
character. Zoyd is not a modern character. Even if we insist, as James
Wood does-- and this is one of the reasons he finds some postmodern fiction
a fiction that denies characters and thus the novel or fiction
itself--that we must read the postmodern characters as if they are
modern or real characters, Zoyd is not a sympathetic character. Read
as a modern hero or anti-hero, Zoyd may have one or two
characteristics that we can say represent the ethical norms of the
implied author (the Pynchon of the texts).

What has this to do with the idea that Pynchon has written a novel
about labor in the United States? Well, one of the failures of the
labor movement in the United States, and it is a given that Labor was
the only possible force to counter the Firm and late Capitalism, is
dealing with the Zoyds. The American Male is driven by something quite
deep in his-story to be a Hero (James Fenimore Cooper). He is not only
a boy inside, refusing to pay the price of any real relationship with
the a real grown up person--have a family,  or grow up and get over
his losses, and this is not a problem that Pynchon associates
exclusively with hippies, but also in love with

1. being young and having youthful qualities,

2. with being innocent and pure of purpose,

3. with having a set of principles higher than the honor code of the society
at large,

4. with having knowledge of his world that has been earned not
at college but on a whale ship or through deep intuition or from what
he has learned from the "Other" and the earth, sea ...off-the-grid Nature

5. with his distrust of life in the town or city

6. with his quest to find higher truths in TREES or NATURE or In The WOODS.

In short, the American male is a Romantic and yearns to remain
so--singing the song
of myself. We may find these attributes sympathetic. We may read the novel as a
modern work. But the critique, and in VL it is decidedly feminist, of the
narcissism of the Hector/Zoyd Romance, and S&M relationship,
complicates and I say undermines such readings of Zoyd.

Same goes for Larry.

But we must feel his pain. He is a peterite kingly common and dark
tragic graces are woven round him in episodes of this comedy. But the
loom of Larry doesn't make a mat with the fates of mystery and magic.
For these great mats we must turn to the mat-maker's other works.

But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart
to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may
be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so
noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over
any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw
their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within
ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the
outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped
spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a
shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the
permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the
dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no
robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a
pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands,
radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The
centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our
divine equality!

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among
them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I
shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall
spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all
mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which
hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out
in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart
convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with
doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of
old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles;
who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than
a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest
Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O
God!