The Nose Knows

[Craig Clark]

Don Larsson writes:

> I haven't read Thornton's book, but thought the cocaine stuff was from the  
> early days.  In any event, one of Freud' s closest early friends was a guy named
> Fleiss, who had grand theories about the connections between noses and 
> sexuality, later subsumed into symbolic qualities by Papa Freud.
Thornton's argument is that there is no way that Freud could have 
used the amounts of cocaine he claimed to have used (and it was 
probably less adulterated than the snow available at your local 
dealer's) for the period he claimed to have used it and been able to 
kick the habit with the ease he claimed. She also argues that a 
growing imprecision in Freud's language, his messianic beliefs and 
his paranoid reeactions to the split with Jung, all point to heavy 
cocaine usage late in Freud's career. 

If you can get holdof Thornton's book, have a read: you'll discover 
just how nasally-fixated Freud became in late life.
 
> There are times that I think P finds Freud at least suggestive, particularly
> in his portraits of Blicero, Katje, and Greta, and in the musings of Edwin
> Treacle.  But he is certainly no "traditional" Freudian.

Pynchon of course is well aware that Freud is one of the three most 
infleuntial thinkers whose shadow lies across our century (the others are 
Marx and Darwin), and one of the literary conventions he is trying to 
explode is the shallow Freudianism of so many characters in mimetic 
fiction in the decades after Freud's work became widely known. But of 
course there's more to being a human being than what Papa Freud sez, 
and TRP knows it. I think of many of his characters being parodies of 
Freudian reductionist portraits of personality. I think it was our 
fellow Pynchon-lister Terry Caesar who suggested that we read "Oedipa 
Maas" as "Oedipus my Arse".

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"