col49 2 pt2

[Paul Mackin]

Doug's discussion is useful in that it helps point up some of the incongruities
of Oedipa's social milieux as portrayed in Lot49. These are part of the
hilarity of the thing.  It shouldn't be thought however that at the time P was
writing Crying there was anything very forbidden or secret about LSD use and
experimentation.  There was some secret military type research not revealed
until later  but my own employer of the time, the very staid National Science
Foundation, had a few years earlier funded some of Tim Leary's unsecret work
(that later became a big joke around there). It was only around '66 after LSD
caught on with youth and a lot of celebrated bad reactions turned up that the
substance was officially restricted. Everybody had of course read Aldous Huxley
from away back but chemically induced hallucination  took money and apparently
an interest the counterculture had not yet developed.  Grownups tended to do it
in their well appointed homes and if they did go outside fortunately had the
sense not to look up into the sun. I know Doug disagrees with me on this but my
feeling is that it's a mistake to think of P as revealer of secret knowledge in
the sense suggested (if I'm not exaggerating his position too much ). In other
senses no doubt P WAS revealing the unknown  as should any good writer. Perhaps
not so much in L49 as later.


            P.

Doug Millison wrote:

> 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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20010807/abcd85cd/attachment.html>