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

[Malignd]

Millison:

<<Pynchon chooses to focus on an interesting detail to
begin his Foreword to _1984:

"born[...] in the middle of a highly productive opium
district. His father was there working as an agent for
the British Opium Department, not arresting growers,
but supervising quality control of the product, in
which Britain had long enjoyed a monopoly. ..."   

Whatever else it does, using this
little-known-drug-history fact to begin the Foreword
also serves to place it squarely in the context of
Pynchon's past writings about drugs:  Vineland (set in
1984) with its narc-chases-hippie-dopers plot
elements, the Tube as a drug, LSD, and repetition of
the rumors about Bush's involvement in the cocaine
trade; drugs in GR, including opium specifically;
drugs in COL49; etc. 

The opium reference also recalls the way that the
current Bush Administration has co-opted the War on
Drugs (leftover from the Nixon Administration that
Pynchon savages in GR) into the never-ending War on
Terrorism (legacy of the Reagan/Bush Administration
that Pynchon critiques in Vineland).

More generally, beginning the Foreword in this way
also immediately establishes that Pynchon is using
this venue -- foreword to 1984 centennial edition --
as an opportunity to write something more general and
more contemporary than the immediate facts at hand
about the novel _1984_ and its author, an essay that
will also link at many points to Pynchon's other
writings.

...  he begins the essay with a reference to opium as
one of the British Empire's trade commodities and
social control mechanisms (a history with parallels in
the US experience with the international drug trade,
colonies, proxy wars, etc., which are to be found
throughout Pynchon's work). From the start Pynchon's
broadening the perspective, pulling back from a strict
focus on _1984_ itself to embrace issues that his work
shares with Orwell's, ...>>

These conclusions are entirely baseless, even a little
mad, Orwell as the deposed King of Zembla.
 
Here's the first sentence of a bio of Orwell, plucked
randomly from the Internet.

<<George Orwell was the pseudonym of the English
writer Eric Arthur Blair. Blair was born on June 25,
1903 in Mothari, Bengal to Richard Walmesley Blair, a
Government of India employee in the Opium Department,
and Ida Mabel Limouzin.>> 

http://students.ou.edu/C/Kara.C.Chiodo-1/orwellbib1.html
--

A reasonable surmise might be that Pynchon, like
University student Kara C. Chiodo, chose to begin his
piece on Orwell with Orwell's parentage, noting the
colorful detail of his father's employ in the Opium
Department.

Millison:

<<Where does one text end and another begin ...?>>

This brings a very similar question to mind.


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