IV more thoughts on killing Puck

[Mark Kohut]

nypl    "In Shakespeare, tragic heroes fall from mountaintops; in noir, they fall from curbs. http://ow.ly/TDIp #reading 

--- On Thu, 1/7/10, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IV more thoughts on killing Puck
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, January 7, 2010, 6:10 AM
> >
> > 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!
>