GRGR(20) 1904 revisited

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, jporter wrote:

> In Hank Adams mode, "the narrator," offerring a little solace to the
> water-closeted Achtfaden:
> 
> "Look at it this way, Achtfaden....If tensor anaysis is good enough for
> turbulence, it ought to be good enough for history. There ought to be
> nodes, critical points... ...1904 was one of them-...it was the year the
> American Food and Drug people took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave
> us an alcoholic and death-oriented generation ideally equipped to fight WW
> II..." (p451-2)
> 
> Not sure if the narrator is speaking for P. here, but this is baloney. Not
> only is the premise of tensor analysis applied to history a narrative load
> of crap, but with hindsight, cocaine, especially in the form of crack, has
> turned out to be one of the most damaging and violence promoting
> substances, ever.  Irrespective of any CIA involvement in trafficking, if
> this passage doesn't make today's P. wince, I'm ducking for him.

Boloney's not a bad word here. We get tipped off right away in this
episode that we are in the mind of a pretty bombed out narrator (or
narrators) when, for example, we hear Henry Fonda referred to as an
American cowboy actor, which no one with even a particle of knowledge of
American movies would ever have done. As far as the cocaine is concerned
we have to remember that these observations did not sound nearly as weird
to a 1973 reader as they may sound to us today. This not not merely that
they did not have our present day hindsight. Rather, back then we had been
living for some time in a epoch in which the reversal of normal or received
values was probably as rampant as it had ever been in history. People
said many things for effect that could not possibly have been thought of
as literally true. This was called revolutionary truth. One of my
favorites was the idea that Madness is Health as preached by the
followers of Dr. Laing and his colleagues. This of course was all fine and
good for the times. Served some historical purpose no doubt. Pynchon
would be half going along it and half burlesquing it--in the usual
inimitable Pychnonean way. Anyway that's my take on Jody's comment.

			P.