IV: potsmoking Doc SPOILER ALERT

[Carvill John]

Double disclaimer: SPOILER ALERT & Possible Incoherency Warning....

Great stuff, Tore. Just one clairification on my original 'thought': I was only talking about pot smoking, not including LSD or other drugs in my pondering of 'is Doc really so stoned?' And as you say, both pot and LSD are depicted, even explicitly so, as 'useful tools of teh trade'. That useful substance, eh?


We can't help looking for autobiographical clues in IV, particularly ones which spool off into GR territory. All that 'I was so blitzed I don't know what it means' stuff for starters. Although as you rightly point out, nobody could pull a work like GR together without at least some 'straight' stretches. It would be a brave man who'd argue that GR doesn't show signs of stoner mentality, and I'd be willing to put good money on you being right when you say Pynchon (by the way can we drop the OBA thing? It's getting, like, so old now?) likely got ripped while thinking about all the cornucopia of intellectual stimulants he was to eventually stir into the broth of GR, then used all those stoned contemplations to enormously successful effect later on, in tranquility. And that tranquility was, at least part of the time, to be found in Gordita/Manhattan beach, Doc's old stamping ground.


And what a great symmetry, as David M mentioned, that the reader of GR can read teh book stoned then go back over the notes he makes, in tranquility. I feel confident Pynchon would approve.


That great quote - "PIs should really stay away from drugs, all 'em alternate universes just make the job that much more complicated." - really struck me like a gong too. And it ties in nicely with the is he/isn't he thing, for me anyway. If it's sometimes hard to say when Pynchon is just following (and fooling around with) the conventions of the noir genre, or when he's just being typically Pynchon, with all the coincidences and connections etc., then it's similarly hard to say when a character like Doc is just under the influence of drugs, or under the influence of Pynchon, eg. with that time-travelling, altered density stuff. Which curls nicely back onto the whole question of the probable influence of drugs on Pynchon.


Reading the start of your post I was gonna say, ah wait, can *all* the paranoia be put down to drugs? I think the subset of people who are likely to become serious dope smokers, has a significant overlap with the subset who are susceptible to paranoia anyway. BUt also I was going to say, the *kind* of paranoia Pynchon gives DOc does not seem to me the *right sort* of paranoia. Bummer eh? "I finally got a paranoiac freak-out and my doctor said it was the wrong kind." BUt seriously, the typically Pynchonian paranoia is not, in my experience, the sort induced by smoking copious quantities of weed. Rather than conspiracy and connectedness, what the average marijuana enthusiast normally experiences is paranoia of a more, um, quotidian variety.


Which you then covered in your discussion of INfinite Jest, a book I have still to finish, yeah I know. I found some of it fantastic stuff and some of it fantastically turgid, particularly the GR/brocken 'influenced' segments, which made it a bitter irony to hear Wallace criticise Pynchon, but anyway... YOu're bang on about Wallace's more, well, yes, more realistic portrayal of heavy dope use, that scene from near the start of IJ where he shows us a marijuana addict waiting anxiously for his dealer and making preparations for a long stint of hard-core dope abuse, is strikingly (and depressingly) real. As you say, maybe Pynchon never experienced the down sides of dope, which may partly explain why he only seems to depict its positive qualities. For a lover of ambiguity and duality, it's a notably curious eception to his usual rule, eh?


Don't get me wrong, I'm nont anti-weed. Far from it! And one of the many aspects I so cherish about IV is its depiction of just how much the characters *enjoy* their drugs (except smack). As Bill Hicks said, "I had a great fucking time on drugs. Sorry!". Or:


“Wouldn't be a nice change, just once, to hear a *positive* story about LSD? [Newscaster voice:] Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”



And then 'Tom' would smile and say, the weather in Gordita is just fine and tranquil this morning, though things stand to get a good bit foggier as the day progresses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXmzcroUmdU




----------------------------------------
> From: torerye at hotmail.com
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: RE: IV: potsmoking Doc SPOILER ALERT
> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:02:57 +0200
>
>
>
> 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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