GRGR(34) - New Dope

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2000 7:21 AM
Subject: GRGR(34) - New Dope
> (745.28) a brand new kind of dope that nobody's ever heard of.  One of the
> most annoying characteristics of the shit is that the minute you take it
you
> are rendered incapable of ever telling anybody what it's like, or worse,
> where to get any. [...] It's the dope that finds _you_, apparently.
> ----------
> Poolside this last weekend I read this passage to my wife.  I thought she
> might like the film-under-the-rug bit (she's endured many of these short
> readings from GR).  She responded, "It [New Dope] sounds like death."
I've
> got a smart woman (and she knows it).  Nobody who's taken (been found by)
> this drug is able to tell the tale of its trip....
>
> Remember the Loonies on Leave?  They were selling  New Dope:  "Lightning
> Latch, The Door that _Opens You!_" (260.10)  The next night he's offered
> some other "New Dope," LSD, by the same dude who later delivers the file
>on Lazlo Jamf. --- We next encounter Slothrop "In the Zone," having read
>Jamf's dossier.  New Dope indeed!
>
> Is this passage "death?"  Maybe so, and if so, may your death be so
>joyful!
> Amen!
>
> David Morris

But what about:
"(...) Part of the reverse world (...) and the Great Irreversible is
actually reversed as the corpse comes to life to the accompaiment of a
backwards gunshot (...)."  (745)

Douglas Fowler, whose perspectice is strictly binary, sez:
"Dope in *New Dope* is life-affirming, a mindless pleasure." (p. 263)

Weisenburger: "Another elaborate *hysteron proteron*. For a similar example
of this rhetorical figure see Vonnegut's novel *Slaughterhouse Five*
(63-64), where the guns 'sucked bullets and shell fragments' from airplanes
and corpses; there the scene is naturalized as a reversed film." (p. 307)

hysteron proteron - a rhetorical figure perfectly fitting to the binaries,
'the later as the earlier' (? better translation required), an inversion of
the chronological run of time, often sneering: "Ihr Mann ist tot und läßt
schön grüßen." (Goethe, "Faust", V. 2916)
(Otto Lorenz, Kleines Lexikon literarischer Grundbegriffe, München 1992, p.
52)

Regards to Mrs. Morris

Om
Otto
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