Adenoid Again

[Craig Clark]

Douglas Kellner writes:
> The comments on the Adenoid fantasy so far miss the significance for 
> Pynchon and GR. To be sure, it disrupts, confuses, and probably mystifies 
> at first reading but it also throws the reader into yet another 
> dimension of fantasy, projection, and surrealism that complexifies the 
> whole issue of textual reference and cues the reader that they are now in 
> a multidimensional universe where the lines between fantasy, reality, 
> dream, and surreality are blurred or rather where one is thrown into 
> multiple universes. It also signals the connection to Surrealism so 
> important for GR and lets the reader know that they are in for a 
> surrealistic voyage....

I'd add to that that it indicates a detailed understanding on TRP's 
behalf of some of the more risible aspects of Freudian theory. I 
don't think TRP has much time for Siggy, quite frankly, and the 
Adenoid sounds like a rampant case of what Freud labelled Nasal 
neurosis. Don't laugh, this is serious. Apparently a substantial body 
of Freud's extant-but-unpublished writings, admittedly from the 
latter part of his career, are dedicated to the premise that one of 
the best ways to treat neurosis was to administer large amounts of 
cocaine to the nasal passages of the neurotic. Revisionist Freud 
biographer E.M. Thornton, from whose "The Freudian Fallacy: Freud and 
Cocaine" I draw this information, suggests that the evidence is 
unassailable: Freud was at this point in his career suffering from 
cocaine poisoning, and those "early" experiments with the "wonder 
drug" didn't stop when he said they did...

The Adenoid sounds remarkably like a deranged parody of this... how 
TRP got into Freud's unpublished papers is unknown to me, but it 
looks like he might have...

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"