Plastic Man versus Odysseus

Count this.

So here I’m beginning to see a conflict in views. We’re talking about Slothrop as potentially an epic hero. And yet when Slothrop thinks of himself, it is as Rocketman, he of the opera cape and helmet. This is creating a lot of problems for Slothrop.

If this story were set in Hellenic Greece, Slothrop would react perfectly to the circumstances (circumstances being that he has been launched on a quest, alone, against a host of forces which take on a supernatural aspect due to their great power and secrecy). However, this is a story set in modern Europe, with a modern American in the lead. As a result, his perceptions of the hero figure are different. He’s Plastic Man, or Cary Grant as he says himself. He knows there are bad guys, and there are good guys, and he is one of the good guys. So all he has to do is beat up on the bad guys, and everything will be fine. Things will work out, because he’s the hero and that’s what happens.

But that isn’t what’s happening. In an epic story, the hero has no natural enemies; everyone is an enemy. He has to make careful alliances, and then work to maintain them because they may fall apart. Even among gods, there are some who hate him and some who love him. Most importantly, the epic hero goes through tons of, to use a literary term, really bad shit. Odysseus had all of his sailors turned into pigs. Aeneas, at the very beginning of his story, was running away from his home city, which was in the process of burning to the ground. On the other hand, Superman never has to deal with a chipped tooth. The film and comic book hero of this time period is nearly indestructible (it’s only in the mid 60s that we begin to see superheroes take a beating).

So Slothrop is playing a superhero in an epic hero’s role. It’s possible that Pynchon is saying something about America in general, and the “cowboys and indians” mentality with which we approach both foregn policy and internal conflicts. At the very least, he is making fun of Slothrop’s simplistic, stripped-down view of problem-solving, which amounts to putting on a cape and punching something.