BE: March

[Mark Kohut]

Trying to find the right analogy from another novel,
from Pynchon's preferably, to argue against the false
dichotomy imo of Joseph's about how I see (some of) March
vs. "you don't like her".

I can't quite come up with it in Pynchon although if I were as clear
as I once was on all that the Chums do and are---who are inevitably "like"
the
leadership of the Pequod *in some ways* as such are alike in patterned ways
in
most fiction, I could only come up with this...

My attempt at a holistic Read of BE is modeled on how critics and us at our
best try to do it.
See as much of Pynchon's vision of the meanings of his novel as we can.

So, March, as sympathetic perhaps as Joseph wrote, is also no help to
Maxine at all. Is also hapless
and out of the unfolding story that is* Bleeding Edge. *I suggest that
Pynchon, taking the care and time
to give us her 'sympathetic' past and that her present-day concerns are "in
the right place" as Joseph put it
does remind me, sea-changed---see what I did there?---a little of Starbuck
in *Moby Dick*. Here is a simple crib sheet
characterization: Ahab’s
<https://www.litcharts.com/lit/moby-dick/characters/ahab> first mate,
Starbuck is loyal, practical, ethical, and cautious, perhaps overly so. He
does not want Ahab <https://www.litcharts.com/lit/moby-dick/characters/ahab>
 to attack Moby Dick
<https://www.litcharts.com/lit/moby-dick/characters/moby-dick>, and
recognized both the physical and moral danger of Ahab’s obsession, but he
also lacks the passion and conviction to stand up to Ahab.

Starbuck is a very sympathetic character but he ultimately does not help at
all.
March is like that to me re Maxine's increasingly complexified
investigation and its solution via old-left concerns.
Anyway, I think that is one way Pynchon may be seeing her in this fiction.
Again, that image of Maxine seeing her
face framed as 'antique" has to mean something relevant.