IV translation: spades

[alice wellintown]

Pynchon plays his usual literary game; first, he makes the reader the
victim of his humor, than he lets the reader in on the joke. He does
this to achieve his purpose, to show us that when we think we have
resolved the ambiguity by taking a moral high ground, what have taken
isn merely an arbitrary ways out of the Pynch he puts us (and usually
a character we treat as traditional and side with or identify with, as
we think we are on the right side, the moral side that P favors)  in.
But there is no such side, no moral way out. Our high ground is an
invention, a useful tool that, while it may help us dig out of a hole,
can not be used as a hammer to build a moral ladder, of if it can,
only builds one to the gallows where, every mother's son gets hung in
the comic noose. A big fat paradox, fore surely we must have faith in
the Pyncher, but putting faith in him (or his narrators, characters,
plots, etc.), only makes us easy victims. Beneath the mask are only
masks. So, as I think Monroe taught us a ways back, when we look to
Poe's red mask, or to Poe's novel, so influential on young P's V., or
better to Moby-Dick, or still better to his Confidence Man, we find,
beneath, under, below, only masks and masquerade. Our usual methods
fail us and we are left only with humor in the Pyncher.