Everybody Must Get Stoned

[Rob Jackson]

Robin:
> Pynchon's notion of Gnosticism [...] is wrapped around visionary  
> experience. This is =20
> rendered in a quite explicit fashion in "Against the Day" in the way  
> =20
> Sir William Rowan Hamilton "receives" Quaternions in a vision, much  
> as =20=
>
> Rilke [another Idee fixe of Pynchon's] "receives" the opening lines  
> of =20=
>
> the Duino Elegies. Think of "The White Visitation" and Madame  
> Eskimoff =20=
>
> in this light.

Think also of Kekulés dream of the benzene ring as ouroboros in GR  
(411-2). A vision of science and mysticism intertwined, neither  
beneficent nor benign for humanity...

That Pynchon's 'writing' - whatever the weasel-wording around that  
term - is often and uninhibitedly driven by drug-induced altered  
consciousness is impossible to deny. The prevalence of drugs, drug  
paraphernalia, drug marketing and distribution, the effects of drug- 
taking, et al., as subject matter in all of Pynchon's novels is one  
thing; the two-three eyewitness testimonies another; and Pynchon's own  
endorsement of marijuana as 'that useful substance' in the only memoir  
he has vouchsafed us his readers, an autobiographical recount of his  
development as a writer (!), should be the clincher. But it's the  
evidence of the texts themselves: the byzantine plotting; the extended  
riffs on anything and everything at hand which do, somehow, and as if  
by magic, come together eventually; the ontological shape-shifting of  
the narrative agency; the relish for giggly and sophomoric excesses;  
the lyricism, the love of words and of story-telling, the willingness  
to descend unabashedly into sentimentalism and bathos; it's all of  
this that seals the deal.

I found IV to be a slight work, one that doesn't have much in the way  
of hidden layers of significance. The wacky names don't really lead  
anywhere and, as they're a Pynchon staple, it puts the lie to the sort  
of reading that invests so much in trying to trace incidental  
coincidences via the names of characters to uncover a hidden 'true'  
meaning. With Pynchon's major works, too much loving attention has  
been given to the text we are presented with for it to be no more than  
a mere palimpsest.

Marc Chenetier I think it was who first noted Hawkes' The Lime Twig  
and The Cannibal as major influences on GR.

And Ed Mendelsohn who noted that Pynchon's default narrative mode is  
traditional omniscient narration which is 'filtered' through one or  
another character or point of view, often jumping between different  
points of view within the space of a paragraph, or sentence.  
Postmodernism, at least the Pynchonian strand, maps onto realism and  
naturalism much moreso than Modernism.

Maybe Micky Wolfman is Howard Hughesesque ... I don't know. But he  
came across as idealistic, momentarily at least, and vaguely  
sympathetic. Pynchon likes to push the envelope with the 'bad' guys  
(Blicero in GR a case in point, Pointsman as well) ...

The impression I was left with after reading IV was that smoking dope  
for Larry is like drinking coffee or chewing gum. It's no big deal.  
The distinction between 'stoned' and 'not stoned' is irrevelant;  
notions of addiction or psychological, intellectual or physiological  
ill effects don't factor into it. The buzz he gets from smoking dope  
is just Larry's natural state of mind. Live and let be.

But it's heroin that gets the really bad rap in IV. Pynchon's later  
works (from VL on) have had a strong emphasis on family: in fact, I  
would suggest that, if nothing else, the bond of family is immune from  
satire. There is irony and tragedy in spades, but family persists in  
these texts as a legitimate value I think. And so, in IV, it's the  
quest to restore Coy with his family which drives Larry onwards, not  
the Shasta/Micky job or Bigfoot or Penny or the Golden Fang cabal. But  
the Coy story depends upon a really conservative and ultimately  
moralising take on heroin addiction which even the mainstream American  
cop shows of  the 1990s and 2000s have revealed as shallow and short- 
sighted.

... and Doc just doesn't have the charisma or lasting appeal of a  
Marlowe ... or even a Kojak or Columbo, a Banacek or Baretta ... I  
can't see IV being a success on the screen ...

mis dos centavos