IV more thoughts on killing Puck

[Robert Mahnke]

I find Zoyd sympathetic.

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 6:10 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> >
> > 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!
>
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