�re "not arresting growers, but supervising quality control"

[pynchonoid]

--- jbor:
> What about "Victory gin"? 

It's not the gin that crushes the human spirit in
1984, it's being forced to adopt the Party's
particular set of doublethink priorities, and being
tortured if you don't. The Proles seem to use gin as a
buffer against dystopian life in general, generally
ignored as they are in any sort of individualized way;
the Party instead focuses psychological terror --
which Pynchon rightly sees as pivotal in _1984_ -- on
Party members like Winston and Julia. Party members
appear to use gin to soothe themselves after
submitting to Party discipline.

Pynchon doesn't seem to refer to Victory gin at all in
the Foreword -- it doesn't take a place in the series
of features of "dystopian life" that Pynchon offers
(plumbing, cigarettes, food)-- unless I'm overlooking
something.

Pynchon doesn't do anything else with the detail about
Britain's opium trade he uses to begin his Foreword,
because, I suspect, he's using it to point to his own
treatments of this subject elsewhere (the opium that
Franklin shows Dixon how to mix up in a generic
equivalent of an expensive patent medicine, for
example; or, the way the American colonists come in
and set up commerce in the local locoweed), inviting
the reader to consider this Foreword in the broader
context of his other writings. 







=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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