IV: potsmoking Doc SPOILER ALERT

[John Bailey]

May I refer the class to the final line of IV?

I think the treatment of pot in the novel is very ambivalent - that
"useful drug" allows connections to be made, but there's always the
ever-increasing fog. And I think one of the most melancholy aspects of
IV is the increasing atomisation of society, as headphones replace
concerts and we all end up in our various, discrete automobiles
soaring high above the surface streets, moving but not really moving.
Early on the road is still filled with sundry and differentiated comic
travellers, but by the end it's just an indistinguishable caravan of
tail-lights in the fog.

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 6:02 PM, Tore Rye Andersen<torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Thanks for that useful list, Doug (I almost wrote Doc); an impressive
> intake, all right.
>
> What strikes me most about all the references to drugs in IV (except for
> heroin, which is bad shit, to be avoided) is how explicit Pynchon is in
> connecting the use of drugs - pot and LSD in particular - with the mindset
> he has become known for. All the paranoia in IV is clearly a result
> of all the pot being smoked and all the LSD being dropped. See e.g. p.
> 95-96 where Doc thinks himself into a brainfreeze after smoking some of
> Fritz's good shit. Fritz warns Doc:
>
> "PIs should really stay away from drugs, all 'em alternate universes just
> make the job that much more complicated."
>
> - but in fact those alternate universes and the ability to see connections
> help Doc solve the case (whatever the case may be), cf. his LSD-induced
> vision of Shasta on p. 109-10 which turns out to be a bona fide clue. It
> seems to me that drugs and the states of mind they induce are not so much
> described as debilitating; rather, they're depicted as mostly useful tools
> in Doc's toolbox.
>
> On p. 129, for instance, we learn that: "A private eye didn't drop acid for
> years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops."
> On p. 117 we hear that "paranoia was a tool of the trade, it pointed you in
> directions you might not have seen to go." And on p. 318, during a PCP trip:
> "Fortunately for both Docs, over the years they had been sent out on enough
> of these unsought journeys to have picked up a useful kit of paranoid skills."
>
> A-and on p. 107, Pynchon outright quotes GR in the scene with Vehi the
> LSD guru:
>
> "On the face of it," Vehi Fairfield said finally, "two separate worlds, each
> unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace."
> "Manson and the Surge of '69," said Doc.
> "I'd be very surprised if they weren't connected," Vehi said.
> "That's because you think everything is connected," Sortilège said.
> "'Think'?"
>
> Of course there is such a thing as too much pot/paranoia - brainfreezes of the
> sort Doc thinks himself into on p. 121 hardly help him do his job - but a
> certain amount of paranoia (caused by smoking a certain amount of weed and
> dropping a certain amount of acid) is actually described as productive in IV,
> like GR's "creative paranoia."
>
> I may only be paranoid, but it sure seems to me that IV is not only describing
> Doc's working methods, but also Pynchon's own working methods as he wrote GR.
> I'm not saying that he wrote that earlier novel completely blitzed - it's much
> too controlled for that, even when it goes out of control - but perhaps
> something along the lines of Wordsworth's description of the origins of poetry:
> not "emotion recollected in tranquility," but "pot thinking and acid trips
> recollected in tranquility." That sure would explain some of the intensity of
> GR, a novel which occasionally thinks itself into a brainfreeze.
>
> PS: I reread Infinite Jest over the summer and find it very interesting to
> compare Pynchon's take on marijuana with Wallace's. Pot is mostly a benign force
> in IV and the rest of Pynchon, whereas it is decidedly bad news in Infinite Jest.
> One of the opening scenes of IJ describes Ken Erdedy desperately waiting for his
> dealer (IJ 17-27), and of course Hal becomes severely addicted to marijuana as
> well. I've always suspected that much of Wallace's impatience with Pynchon stems
> from their vastly different perspectives on drugs. Wallace clearly had some bad
> experiences with drugs/marijuana, while it seems that Pynchon mostly just had a
> lot of fun, at least judging from his work.
>
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