Pounds, Shillings, Pence

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

eric writes:
"Has anyone written about Pynchon's use/treatment of drugs in GR?  I'm in
the process of writing a term paper on the subject & haven't come across
anything.  I'm not so much interested in biographical material (such as
Andrew Gordon's "Smoking Dope w/ TP") as criticism that discusses the way
the numerous drugs allusions & references (particularly LSD) in GR "work"
within the text itself."

There *are* of course numerous allusions to drugs in GR (just start with 
"Doper's Greed" and Pig Bodine's song (a variation, as Ray Olderman pointed
out, on "La Belle Dame Sans Merci") for starting places and work backwards.)

But as I've mentioned before, there does seem to be a shift in P's thoughts about
drugs in his works.  In V., he (or at least Profane) seems downright censoriouws
about altered states of mind (reality apparently being altered enough already
as it is).  In COL49, altered states of mind (especially Mucho) seem to involve
loss of human contact.  But then, in GR, pot and other organic substances are
valorized over chemically processed ones, such as cocaine and especially LSD
(which the narrator somewhere alludes to as something like the "ergot blight" of
the white European mind.  Or maybe I'm misreading.

P seems to have loosened up even more in his attitudes in VINELAND, interesting
since the drug
-episteme had radically shifted by the time of that novel.

BTW, thinking about bananas in GR, does anyone else recall the best hoax/hippy
humor of the 1960s--the Great Banana Scare?  As you may recall, rumors began to
circulate that if one scraped the fibers from the inside of banana peels, baked
them and smoked them, interesting psychotropic results could be had.  This, of
course, sent unknown numbers of young people to their fruiterers and an almost
equal number of government-sponsored scientists, all with the premise that someday
we might find bananas to be a Controlled Substance.  It all turned out to be a
joke, anyway (I think . . . )  Naturally, this theory was reinforced by Donovan
singing about "elec-trical bananas going to be a sudden craze" and the Beatles'
"Yellow Submarine".  But then again, this was not long before the years when
Spiro Agnew denounced "reds, whites, uppers, downers and Screaming Yellow 
Zonkers"--a crackerjack-like confection!

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)