Drugs in Pynchon's fiction

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

OK, I will post another. George's pot takes up the blending
of tradition into commerce. A better example from M&D to
compare with LSD in GR, is Dr. Paracelsus and Daffyolatry,
where a natural substance, opium, is made chemical,
manufactured, used for medicinal purposes, marketed, and we
know the sad, sad  story. George fits in as the elite here,
the hemp of the indians was used for ritual and for lots of
other things, but George is growing his own for what? Who is
he going to sell it to? Remember this chapter opens with
Wicks' Spiritual D-B and the "dangerous
boobyisms of the Virginians. George smokes pot, talks real
estate, the expanding America, the killing of Indians, the
confounding of other European clans with the killing of
indians, the contracts on indians and lands, the business
"Plainly dealt." This expanding America will kill indians,
and Brits of course, because the two things they can not
abide are taxes and indians. George has a "Market-Crop" of
hemp and with luck, between the Navy and the New-York Fops,"
he will turn a profit. Profit, Market-Crop, and the land it
is planted in has human bones for fertilizer, business
PLAINLY dealt. Menippean? OH yes, remember Gershom is a Jew,
and he is telling Jokes--Slave and Master Jokes re-tailored
for the current audience as King and Fool jokes.And guess
who the joke is on?  Again we find that a traditional
substance for ritual and other
cultural purposes (indians traded hemp for all sorts of
things) in being taken in by the elite, serves the ends of
the elite, in this case profit and the "expansion of
America." 

Here's one of the problems with my question about drugs in
Pynchon, rather than stick to LSD in GR, I asked a more
general question, interesting discussion has followed, and I
knew Doug's input here essential, so I'm glad for his
responses and rj has brought in other very interesting
considerations. However, I want to get back to
the LSD in GR and the whiteness, but I'll give a brief
response to the examples given here and explain why I see
that in each case we find a natural substance, traditionally
used for
ritual, is bastardized or imitated ("a pornography") by the
elite.

In one sense, I regret broadening the discussion because I
think given Pynchon's dance of parodic opposites, "his
daunting intricate web of reciprocities, ironic
correspondences, inversions and unexpected doubleings,"  too
many examples in this medium, will only lead to a collapsing
of Pynchon's
dialectical method and structure and undermine his satire.
Of course this is what some readers of Pynchon prefer, but
not this reader. 

I have argued for  a year on this list, that Pynchon's
method
is dialectical. The dialectic method is consistent and
constant in his
texts--fiction and prose. Eddins doesn't miss it, he gets it
right, when he claims
that "out of the parodic opposites rises the basic conflict
of Gravity's Rainbow, the religious dialectic that
structures the novel." The term dialectic here, refers to
the method of Plato. Plato's text brings the dialect to
western thought. The dialectic takes various form, as in the
dialectic of
Pythagoras, Augustine, Hegel, Marx, and so on. The dialectic
method does not support a relativistic perspective in
Pynchon's text. True, the narrative perspective(s) makes it
difficult
to attribute a particular statement to the author. His
method,  however, permits us to understand how he endeavors
to preserve and transcend the positions of opposites. He
does not  blend all positions equally in a relativistic
miasma. Like
Plato, we have a  dialogue (Plato's "dialegesthai") that
does not fix
positions in agons, does not accept all positions as having
relative value, nor does it completely destroy one position
to privilege another. In the dialogue, parts of positions
are argued away, LSD is argued away. The position is not
completely destroyed, what is preserved is that part which
in dialectic transcends the conflict, in the case of LSD in
GR it is the natural, ritualistic substances, traditionally
used by cultures east and west,
 ancient and modern. Also, if we find a general condemnation
of drug use
(qualified I think most clearly by Tchitcherine's and
Enzian's questioning of the legitimacy of the System as they
perceive it while under the influence of drugs, which I
think similar to the X-ray vision scene in VL), in GR, it
does not seem to include the natural substances used for
traditional ritual. I'll turn to some of the examples we
have taken up, but first I want to mention one contrast
between the mindless pleasures that contribute to moral
relativism and anti-social behavior, and the bueauracratic
conditioning that by itself, can be broken and permits even
a bueuracrat to take a moral position and act upon it:
Ensign
Morituri's act of bravery that is "not even in his
folder." Remember that Moriuri's bravery, his ability to
distinguish ethically, despite "his conditioning, his
verbal, ranked and uniformed," conditioning, is contrasted
with the burned out minds of those whom Slothrop meets after
the War. They have heard of the War Crimes Tribunal at
Nuremburg but no one "is clear who's trying whom for what,
but remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by
anti-social mindless pleasures." 

 I wonder whether the more
> fantastic sequences and startling images in his fiction might owe
> something to the heightened consciousness of drug euphoria.

Well, one can wonder I guess, but I have found that such
speculations often lend to a reduced appraisal of the author
in wonder, so I don't wonder about this. His erudition is
not surprising, GR has "encyclopedic anatomy" and if
Melville were writing today, I'm sure he would do a lot of
homework on drugs and all sorts of things that are so
essential to an understanding of postmodern experience. The
piling up of an enormous mass of erudition, the overwhelming
of pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon is
what satirist like Pynchon and Melville do so well.  
 
> This technique is sophisticated in *GR* to the point where rhetorical
> figures are replaced by the actualisation of drug consciousness as a
> narrative strategy:
> 
> "Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop?
> He's sat in Saure Bummer's kitchen, the air streaming with kif moires,
> reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf
> paraphrases of himself . . . " (625)
> 
> " ... and don't think this wretched old horny dopefiend [Saure] doesn't
> love her, because he does, and don't think he isn't praying, writing
> down his wishes carefully on cigarette papers, rolling up in them his
> finest sacramental kif and smoking them down to a blister on the lip,
> which is the dopefiend's version of wishing on a star ... " (685)

In GR we find drugs, as we find, mystical and supernatural
manifestations on both sides. The Voyeurism of V. is now
brought to a Solipsistic world, where the managing of other
people's dreams, trance mediumship, and drug use, serve, as
rj notes, Pynchon's narrative techniques. These various
Streams of solipsistic consciousness, make the boundary
between waking and sleeping, drugged and sober, living and
dead, and so on, permeable.  A similar relationship exists
between reality and film, and although film is most often
associated with pornography and the elite, we need to
investigate Pynchon's complex treatment of film, where
everyone, including YOU dear reader, is implicated and
affected by the interface of film and reality, to discover
his attitude, VL helps here again.  The boundary is thus,
only a technical boundary that Pynchon's narrative moves
through with dazzling speed. 

Drugs are one of the chief causes of mindlessness.
Mindlessness contributes to the moral relativism, the lack
of clarity as to who is trying whom for what. Just as in
CL, drugs alter consciousness, time and space, and
personality. Slothrop is constantly moving in and out of
drug induced states. Not all of Slothrop's drug trips are so
"happy go lucky" as his conversation in the down the bowl
trip demonstrates: "I don't have anything in mind."  "WE
DO." (my emph.)

This conversation parallels Benny's with the robot, in that
it deals with the future of humanity, but here the view is
much darker. Benny is being warned about the insanity that
will ensue now that "it's started." Here, his interlocutors
clearly have the better of Slothrop and are in a position to
determine, by mathematical means, who is useful and,
therefore, real. LSD is a chemical that the elite will use
to make such determinations.  

> I'd be particularly interested to read any anti-coke references, I must
> say. But I do agree with Mike Weaver that there is on this, as with most
> things in P's fiction, a relativistic attitude.
> 
> best

I think here, rj, I disagree, but I'm not sure of what
"most"
implies and how you are using the term "relativistic."
Relativistic in what sense? As I understand the term, it
would clash with your qualification that Pynchon's attitude
towards *most* things is a relativistic attitude. What do
you mean by relativistic and what are the things that
Pynchon is not relativistic in attitude towards?

TF