IV translation: spades

[Bled Welder]

Why must we have faith in him, what does that mean.  Why do you think that Pynchon presumes we take a moral high ground, on anything.  Is that a faith he has in us?  I would want to have faith he has a little more faith in us than that.
Or the interesting thing that, he doesn't intend anyofthat, it just comes out that way.

> Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 06:56:21 -0400
> Subject: Re: IV translation: spades
> From: alicewellintown at gmail.com
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> 
> 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.
 		 	   		  
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