col49 2 pt2

[Doug Millison]

The problem with Tupperware, which has been part of my life ever since Mom
took part in her first TParty way back when, is that it tends to get smelly
as it absorbs the aroma of certain foods stored in it, and certain foods
(tomato sauce, as in leftover spaghetti sauce) tend to stain it.  So, not
only is it artificial, extracted (using a method as violent as its name,
"cracking", as crude oil -- essence of dinosaur -- is conquered in the
process of fractional distillation)  from those deep, living strata of earth
history in a process that Pynchon clearly identifies in GR with the
Enlightenment project of raping the Earth for short-term gain and using
technology in a vain attempt to hold death at bay and break the natural
cycle of return, but it fails to live up to plastic's promise of unchanging
sterility.  Tupperware parties, along with Avon cosmetic sales, were also a
way to co-opt housewives into the same jive sales hustle that occupied so
many of their Death of a Salesman husbands, and turn all of U.S. suburbia
into one big daisy chain of sellers and buyers -- the shopping mall of the
70s, and the continuing colonization of the American mind with designer
label goods in the decades since have been merely mopping-up operations
after the initial successful assault.

The Tupperware puts Oedipa squarely in suburbia (and not the old money, high
brow enclaves south of San Francisco, either) but she's not a traditional
60s housewife.  No kids, for one thing.  Through Mucho she's plugged into
the rock and roll scene that scared most traditional 60s housewives to
death.  Add a psychiatrist who's dispensing LSD and that puts Oedipa in a
very select circle.  Given the Peninsula location where she lives, it's
possible that Pynchon had in mind the LSD sub-culture that centered on Menlo
Park, where folks like Ken Kesey first encountered LSD in officially
sanctioned research programs, and where a few in-the-know psychiatrists and
others had access to LSD. Recall that as Pynchon is writing COL49, LSD is
still very much an underground phenomenon (COL49 is published in '66) , it
didn't break out as a widely known thing until the Summer of Love.  And the
fact that some psychiatrists (and the CIA) were using LSD was never common
knowledge (although LSD's history was exposed in underground newspapers;
psychedelic mushrooms had received some short-lived publicity earlier, in
particular a famous article in Life magazine brought the Mexican mushroom
cult some international attention that was largely forgotten until LSD broke
out as a big story in '67, as I recall it) until much later.  With regard to
LSD, Pynchon is pointing to knowledge that was, in fact, suppressed and
intentionally kept secret, and which was just beginning to seep out into the
broader culture at the time he's writing COL49. So, the atmosphere of
secrecy and revelation available only to an initiated elite in this novel is
not a complete fabrication or mere literary game -- it's inextricably part
of the community of people who knew anything at all about LSD in the early
'60s.