Drugs in Pynchon's fiction

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, rj wrote:

> Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net>:
> 
> > studying the dope culture as a social phenomonom and something
> > to write about is nothing like the same as being a part, even a marginal
> > part, of that culture
> 
> There's something very sterile and bookish (or newspaper reporterish)
> about this view of Pynchon as an Encyclopaedist, merely studying sources
> and commentating rather than actually living through the experiences he
> writes about. When I said that he seems to share Kerouac's
> "phenomenological" attitude to writing fiction, I meant that his life
> and his writing seem to be deliberately intertwined. 'A Journey Into the
> Mind of Watts' is the key text here, I think, where Pynchon is trying to
> get into the "mind" of that neighbourhood. But, his experiences as a
> corporate employee at Boeing (--> "Yoyodyne"), his work on aerospace
> safety, even his Jazz Club and post-Beat partying, all find their way
> into his fiction. In this respect I also think that his references to
> drug consumption and mind-altered states are more than the product of a
> quick cerebral dip into Hilde Hemme's Herbal Encyclopaedia.

But he IS an encyclopaedist, isn't he? And obviously very bookish. He
knows just about everything about everything it rather seems and he
didn't become conversant with multitudinous and widely varied knowledge
systems hanging out with dopers or denizens of Watts or in the Navy or in
Greenwich Village or the California coast or other trendy places.  Don't
get me wrong I assume he's hung out aplenty and taken his share of illegal
substances but probably no more than the average p-lister I would suspect.
Surely he uses  this experience or material or whatever you want to call
it in his writing. But it's inconceivable to me that anyone could conclude
that P is a writer who writes principally from life. Not his life
certainly. He's an intellectual and an artist. Ask yourself this. 
Does he ever write about people remotely resembling himself? Are there any
artists in any of the books. Are there even any people likely to read
the kind of books he writes. Let me go a step father. Are the characters 
in p-books really very much drawn from life at all. Anybody's life?
Seems to me they're are built on exaggeration and caricature. Or historic
personages on occasion. Well you might find one of two realistically drawn  
person if you looked a bit but there wouldn't be many. This of course is
quite as it should be. Quite the way he and we want it. What is normally
called character development (or whatever it's called) would be quite
superfluous to his art. 

OK, let me draw back from my tirade. I don't want to say P is one thing
or the other. Or that he hasn't led an interesting  life and profited
authorwise from it  But his life certain would never be considered the
stuff of fiction No romantic adventurer-author he. And very definitely
between the poles of writing from life and writing from the library P
comes a lot closer to the latter than the former. (he's gone far beyond
Baedeker of course)  

All only in my humble opinion of course and I'm not saying rj has
necessarily denied anything I say. It's a matter of emphasis mostly I
suppose. We put the emphasis in different places. 

		P.