VLVL II: Allergy to the medicine

[Ghetta Life]

Nice post, Kai.  They are both nice passages.  The Vineland passage here 
makes me wish that Pynchon had developed this book beyond the shorthand 
version that he gave us.  Brock could have been more, as couldhave been the 
whole book...

As is, I'm very impatient with it.  The only reason it gets any attention is 
that Pynchon wrote it, and that's not a good enough reason to spend so much 
effort to make it have meaning.

Ghetta

>From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (lorentzen-nicklaus)
>
>"Once, not too many years ago, sober, wide awake, he'd begun to laugh
>at something on the Tube. Instead of reaching a peak and then tappering
>off, the laughter got more intense each time he breathed, diverging
>toward some brain state he couldn't imagine, filling and flooding him,
>his head taken and propelled by a supernatural lightness, on some course
>unaccounted for by the usual three dimensions. He was terrified. He
>glimpsed his brain about to turn inside out like a sock but not what
>would happen after that. At some point he threw up, broke some cycle,
>and that, as he came to see it, was what 'saved' him --- some component
>of his personality in charge of nausea. Brock welcomed it as a major
>discovery about himself --- an unsuspected control he could trust now
>to keep him safe from whatever his laughter had nearly overflowed him
>into. He was careful from then on not to start laughing so easily. All
>around him in those days he was watching people his age surrendering to
>dangerous gusts of amusement, even deciding never to return to regular
>jobs and lives ... " (278f).
>
>This is, obviously imo, answering a corresponding passage in Ken Kesey's
>One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (pp. 237f, Penguin Books edition):
>
>"While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the
>cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water --- laughing at the
>girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the 
>captain
>back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the servive-station guys and the
>five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you
>have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance,
>just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a
>painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised
>breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain
>blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain./
>I notice Harding is collapsed beside McMurphy and is laughing too. And
>Scanlon from the bottom of the boat. At their own selves as well as at
>the rest of us. And the girl, with her eyes still smarting as she looks
>from her white breast to her red one, she starts laughing. And Sefelt and
>the doctor and all./ I started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the
>men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of them, laughing with them ---
>and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water and
>skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself and the rest of
>the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds,
>see McMurphy surrounded by his dozen people and watch them, us, swinging
>a laughter that rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and
>farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast, on beaches all
>over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave ... "
>
>
>Does anybody here remember Laughter? Kai +
>
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