GRGR(6) LSD in literature resource + ...

[rj]

Doug:
> re GR and LSD -- the Advent passage has always seemed, to me at least,  to
> possess a very trippy logic in its movements.  Would knowing with certainty
> that LSD somehow influenced TRP's conception or execution of this novel
> make any difference? As davemarc reminded us recently, the Surrealists are
> known for their experimentation with novel ways -- dreams, automatic
> writing, etc. -- to generate content for art projects. Might LSD be
> considered such a technique in GR's case?

Well, that ol' Amanita Muscaria that Osbie bakes into cookies and smokes
as joints (93, 112) is pretty much LSD in one of its purer, more organic
guises. Pynchon certainly seems to know what to do with the stuff. That
particular mushroom is known colloquially as Fly Agaric, and it is the
one that was (is?) used by northern shamans -- Finnish magi, for example
-- to transcend the physical realm and achieve the "altered states of
consciousness so central to their magic." These involved "flying
astrally or ... shape-shifting". Although the origins of Santa Claus are
from Saint Nicholas, the way he is depicted is as a Finnish magus, and
he drives a magic reindeer-driven sled, like Vainamoinen, the central
figure of the _Kalevala_. (NELSON, Robert. Finnish Magic_. St Paul:
Llewellyn, 1999, Ch 1.)
All of which would seem to have some bearing on both the ontological
ruptures in Pynchon's narratives, and the constant recourses to
irrational or magical 'solutions', angels, playing out myths &c. 

The way the Surrealists used automatism and transcendent consciousness
as an aesthetic process in itself (textual and graphic fragments joined
together at random, impromptu and spontaneous 'performances',
'dream-writing', disconnected and irrational images spliced together in
defiance of narrative logic or continuity) is quite different to the way
Pynchon *emulates* this type of automatism in, say, the *deliberate*
composition of Slothrop's Roseland dream sequence or Katje's snatches of
insight or the Advent section. Where the Surrealist artist seeks to
project his or her own dreams or drug-phantasms figuratively (de
Chirico, Dali, Bunuel, Delvaux, Remedios Varo), or else to remove the
artist's hand and mind from the aesthetic equation altogether (Klee,
Breton, Tzara, Ernst, Pollock, Burroughs), Pynchon is very consciously
projecting the psychic states of his characters. I guess Magritte's
paintings might be a possible comparison in that the dream images there
depicted are often similarly offset, similarly 'almost-real' (and
emulate, or pre-empt, the spectator/reader's own hallucinations, as
Pynchon so often does as well. Jungian 'collective unconscious'-type
stuff.)

Comments on the extent to which GR (or any fiction for that matter) is
"autobiographical" are pertinent here. Even if Pynchon does (or
endeavours to) offset his narratives and thematic concerns from his
personal experience as Paul suggests -- and this is quite reasonable --
still he has to imagine and represent the psychical and psychotic
personalities which do populate his fiction. It is his own
consciousness, as the author, which in a way must contain all of these
ideas and perspectives. This, to a point where it is fair to ask, as I
think Doug is, how can Pynchon attempt to emulate episodes of
drug-altered consciousness in his characters without some personal
experience of same?

best 

ps   Other books and authors which might be useful to your purposes:
Tom Wolfe's _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_, Ken Kesey's _One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest_, Jacqueline Susann's _Valley of the Dolls_, some
of Nelson Algren's novels and stories, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg,
_The Wizard of Oz_, Lewis Carroll ...

pps   I've always seen _GR_ as advocating, eventually, a 'return to
life'. Put the book aside. Leave the past behind. Go forward. Get out
and do. Which is what happens to Slothrop. In one way the text of the
novel is all wrapped up in Death and genocide and the history and nature
of humanity's inherent evils and the way human systems (language,
culture, religion, commerce, social organisation and
counter-organisation and counter-counter ...) actually dehumanise and
debase humanity and the world. Eventually, though, all those hints and
possibilities of transcendence in the narrative do start to leak
through, and the absolute manifestation of these comes in the shape of
Slothrop's transcendence of the text, which is the ultimate controlling
system over him and his life. In this respect the text -- war, rocket,
history, culture, words -- is something which itself must be overcome.
Which is why, at the end of the novel -- if we're still there, that is
-- we sit as passive spectators in a theatre with Armageddon poised by
the merest of dts away from our noggins. the novel seems to say we need
to live in this state of constant expecatation of the
bomb-being-about-to-drop. Personally, live each moment to the fullest,
it could be your last. Locally and globally, seek to contribute to
changes in the mindset of communities and society at large which have
permitted such a spectre to have emerged.

After the novel's close (beyond the zero ..., as it were), the bomb
drops (figuratively-speaking) only if we haven't learnt anything from
what we've just read; just as it will drop literally if human society
doesn't learn anything from the lessons of history. The possibilities
are all in place. Slothrop *does* escape, has *already* escaped this
fate. Into life. So can we: with Slothrop Pynchon shows us how. There's
still time. Just . . . .