IV Chapter 17 Thoughts

[Robin Landseadel]

"Inherent Vice"—this is "Late Period" stuff, look into the music  
Beethoven made towards the final chapter of his life, zonked on  
laudenum, feel the inherent strangeness of Opus 101 onwards, compare  
to such Yardbird classics as "Bird of Paradise." "The Long Goodbye" is  
late period stuff. There's plenty of reconsideration of one's life  
path in such works.

The thoroughly fictional Philip Marlowe may be able to handle liquor  
but neither Roger Wade nor Terry Lennox was very useful or responsible  
when in their cups. And then one should consider the state of mind of  
the thoroughly alcoholic Raymond Chandler when cooking up the self  
consciously "literary" "Long Goodbye," written during the last days of  
his beloved wife Cissy. Chandler quit the booze for a while—blackouts  
and freakouts a-plenty, most likely and bound to crimp his style so  
the author took a break. There's reconsiderations, re-evaluations,  
seemingly numberless days to look back on where one might ask—"Why did  
I do that, how could I live like that?' Longing, regret, nostalgia.  
All major elements of "Inherent Vice" as well and it seems to me a  
rather similarly retrospective view of things.

On Dec 10, 2009, at 5:46 AM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> It seems to me that people handle cannabis differently. I never  
> could handle it, but have high tolerance for other substances I've  
> tried.

One can build tolerance in time, this is throughly documented.

> There is a fair amount of evidence that P was a heavy smoker at this  
> time, but he managed to write one of the  greatest and most  
> dauntingly layered novels of the century. For him to imagine a  
> detective who functions competently and creatively while smoking a  
> good deal of weed seems reasonable.
> There is a moment near the end where Doc doubts everything he has  
> found and ascribes this fogginess to the weed, to me that is just  
> the self protective adoption of the dominant or straight view of  
> drugs, but in my own experience I find no correlation between drugs  
> and loss of memory.  Apart from physical disfunction, memory loss  
> seems principally a function of time and use.


On Dec 10, 2009, at 5:52 AM, Carvill, John wrote:

> . . .I would guess that he spent the majority of actual writing time  
> completely straight. If he could write all or even much of GR whilst  
> smoking weed, then I'm afraid to say, ladies and gentlemen, that Mr  
> Pynchon was getting ripped off, just like that pimp in IV!

Seriously, can you place yourself inside the mind of Pynchon?

Every bit of anecdotal evidence suggests that TRP was a wake-'n-bake  
type—just look at:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n24/bill-pearlman/short-cuts 		

. . . something you posted previously just today:

  	". . . His diet consisted primarily of pot, coffee and Kools. . ."

For whatever reason, the subject of marijuana comes up all the time in  
biographical citations of the author and the subject comes up all the  
time in the novels as well. In this late period work the author  
appears, on some level, to be fictionalizing his life at Manhattan  
Beach—all sorts of low level clues pertaining to Gravity's Rainbow  
ooze from the text, all intertwined with a persistent odor of Kools,   
reefer smoke and fast food.

> << For him to imagine a
> detective who functions competently and creatively while smoking a   
> good deal of weed seems reasonable. >>
>
> Yeah, but I just wonder whether it's a mistake to see Doc as being  
> stoned all the time.

Just count the number of times Doc lights up, what sort of details are  
offered up as regards what's being inhaled at any given moment. Doc  
may not be "stoned all the time" but the times he's not are the  
exception, not the rule. Whoever this Doc may be, he sure knows his  
weed.

> I don't think the text really supports that view.
> I am willing to accept that I may be wrong. But just as IV *seems*  
> like a simple book, until yu start trying to unravel it, it maybe  
> only *seems* that Doc spends his days stoned.

Again, we're talking about L.A., 1970.  This little entertainment,  
narrated by the author, is his take on life at Manhattan Beach in 1970:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWKPdDk0_U

	"Later on this is all gonna go high rise, high rent,
	high intensity . . .

	But right now, back in 1970, what it is is just high."

"I guess you had to be there" as Janis Ian always sez. I can vouch for  
a number of folks who I observed, "freaks" who lived in L.A. around  
that time & who were "just high" just about all of the time There's  
nothing in any of Pynchon's books that would undermine the assumption  
that he was part of that scene, rather the opposite.

> Plus, if he is stoned all the time, does that make him an  
> 'unreliable narrator' in the usual sense? Of course, strictly  
> speaking Doc is not any kind of narrator, is he?

How reliable are any of Pynchon's narrators? I'd say that the  
character of Doc fits into a rather strange corridor of narratorial  
effects. Philip Marlowe is the narrator of Raymond Chandler's novels,  
one might assume that Marlowe is a mouthpiece for Chandler though we  
all know the old adage about assumptions. In making Marlowe the  
narrator of of his fictions, Chandler established a tradition in Noir  
fiction that is still with us, a rather cinematic tradition—like  
handing the protagonist of his fictions a camera, seeing to it that  
all the scenes in all his books had a single witness, a certain  
"visual style."

The point of view of the narrator of Inherent Vice sticks close to Doc  
throughout the book—closer than the narrator of "The Crying of Lot 49"  
stuck to Oedipa Maas. The "Doc"/narrator relation is curiouser and  
more complex than the Oedipa/narrator relation. The narrators in  
Pynchon's books—all of them—are curiously unstable, changing voice  
constantly. The narrator of Inherent Vice often blurs into Doc's  
consciousness, expressing Doc's thoughts, often wondering "Did I say  
that out loud?" so we're not sure how reliable Doc—or the narrator— 
really is. "Long term short-term" is what I'd call it. Perhaps Doc is  
more consistently "wasted" than IV's narrator. Perhaps not. Again,  
assuming [there's that awful word again] an autographical element in  
IV one seriously wonders where Doc ends and the narrator begins.