Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[alice wellintown]

 That P-texts are saturated with drugs, as they are saturated with TV is
>> obvious enough. Why? That's what you've not explained. You claim that
>> the author's POV has been permanently altered by drug use. This may be
>> true; you can't prove it. But why do you defend the claim? Is it
>> meaningful to some deeper reading of the texts?
>
> Yes, I do believe that is the case. There is the issue of those roads not
> taken. There are those issues of Gnostic/Visionary experience. Like it or
> not, Pynchon's exploration of spies and spycraft sooner or later gets around
> to MKULTRA and its relatives. You think such issues are in the books as
> examples of tail-chasing paranoia. I'm not in agreement with that. At all.

What is the deeper meaning? MK-ULTRA and projects like it add
conspiracy, tension, cute correspondence, paranoid possibility,
historisized plots, so on to the works of hundreds of authors, fiction
and non-fiction.
some examples from Wiki's entry MK-ULTRA:  The Ambler Warning by
Robert Ludlum, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe,
Firestarter by Stephen King, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace,
Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito, The Manchurian Candidate by
Richard Condon, The Telling of Lies by Timothy Findley; and The
Watchmen by John Altman; the films The Bourne Ultimatum, Conspiracy
Theory, The Good Shepherd, Jacob's Ladder, and The Killing Room; the
television series Angel, Bones, Fringe, The Lone Gunmen, Numb3rs,
Quincy M.E., The West Wing, and The X-Files; the games Conspiracy X
and The Suffering: Prison is Hell; the character Deathstroke the
Terminator in the Teen Titans by DC Comics. A Google search will turn
up dozens more. And, how do you account for the fact that the
characters who chase down these CIA projects and/or complain that the
government has taken LSD off the free market because it fears a
population that will gain new insights into government corruption, are
made fools of in the P-texts?


> Just because there's an overwhelming abundance of what you would call the
> more puritanical concerns and the continuation of a literary legacy that
> goes back to Plymouth Rock in these novels doesn't alter the manifest
> presence of drugs and drug related issues in Pynchon. As to why, I'm sure
> you've got your theories. I would say that the more dystopian aspects of
> these issues are on display in Inherent Vice. Considering your abiding
> fondness of bummers in general, I thought you'd have already picked up this
> Bal and run with it.

It does. Pothead paranoia is but one little ornament on the Christmas
tree of Pynchon's paranoid project. LSD epiphanies are the same. Of
course, because P's fictions always circle the 1960s (not the decade,
the happening), drugs are bright ornaments on that Christmas tree; one
could even argue that the star or angel on the tipsy top is a joint
that appears to blink as it is toked, but the paranoia project is not
about drugs, but America. This is why scholars have spilled so much
ink on the Puritans and Dark Romantics and Paranoid American
Modernists--Adams, Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.

>
> One thought—my opening sesame to Pynchon was The Crying of Lot 49. You might
> find some indication of the presence of God in the folds and convolutions of
> the story. I might find the absence. LSD figures heavily into that—if the
> visionary experience is really only the action of chemicals on the brain,
> what next?

Like all American Romantics, P responds with poetic insights and
spiritual longings to Benjamin Franklin's Deistic Newtonian Clockwork
Universe and to America's turn from Nature (see Richard Chase, Leo
Marx ...others I've cited several times ...see the prior post where
the connection to Thoreau's Civil Government is noted), but unlike
Thoreau and Emerson and other Transcendentalists, P embraced a darker,
Puritan view of Humanity much as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe and, while
he embraces intuition and imagination and poetic vision while
rejecting logic and reason as the road not taken but the the road to
the truth of the human heart (Hawthorn's phrase), and while he sees
sign everywhere as signs of a spiritual and mysterious power active in
the lives of Humans, the power is not necessarily benevolent or good
and predestination, while it no longer carries the meaning that
Edwards, the Last Puritan gave it in his fiery sermons to "Natural
Men," still, also operates. And behind the pasteboard is a battle for
the preterite souls (the workers) and for what they will experience as
real.  In IV, the preterite, the prols in Orwell's terms, have lost
their humanity. THEY control what is real. Doc is but a blind manakin
battleing blind manakins. Even the one-eyed Bigfoots fall in the
ditch. Darker than Dark. IV is ugly and Dark. And, P seems pissed off.
I suspect that AGTD took  a lot out of him. Will we get more Pat Hobby
Stories? We hope not.