LSD, JFK, CIA?

[Doug Millison]

If Mackin's not interested in discussion how specific elements -- LSD,
Tupperware, etc. -- in COL49 work as part of that novel, that's fine, but
that's no reason to throw rocks at people who are interested in discussing
them. 

I'm not quite sure what he might mean with your mention of "hidden messages"
being "bad writing"; even the most hermetic of works can contain passages
that are quite moving literary experiences -- the Book of Revelations in the
New Testament comes to mind as one example. Coming to grips with a work of
literature's metaphors and allusions is pretty standard stuff for readers
and critics to do -- what the French still teach as a very traditional
literary analysis method, explication du texte, beginning as early as middle
school --  and it also seems to be quite common for authors to seek to make
their poems and stories and novels work on several levels of meaning
simultaneously.  There's quite a rich store of books and articles that tease
out the many layers of meanings  in P's work by examininng the complex
interweavings of symbol, allusion to history and other works of art, and
such. 

To say that Pynchon readers (and "not necessarily everybody in America", as
M now qualifies the assertion) in '66 would have known about LSD use and
experimentation, may be closer to the truth.  In 1966, after all, Pynchon
had a readership that couldn't have been much larger, if at all, than the
total number of people who knew about LSD at that time -- although of course
I wouln't go out on a limb and claim a one-to-one mapping of those two
groups.  I expect Pynchon had many readers in '66 who didn't know diddly
about LSD. 

My broader point remains unchallenged, of course -- even though information
was available about some of the work that was being done with LSD, the vast
majority of people in the U.S., and around the world, knew nothing of LSD in
the early '60s and before that time, although lots of people would know lots
about the Hippies and LSD and such not many months after COL49 was
published. Pynchon's knowledge of LSD in the early '60s places him securely
in a small group of insiders who did know about it. That he makes his main
character in COL49 a housewife with a psychiatrist who wants her to take LSD
is worth talking about -- given the novel's concerns with hidden truths,
paranoia, revelation, what constitutes reality (shall I project a world?)
which are all concerns associated with the LSD experience itself.