LSD

[jbor]

on 8/12/01 10:03 PM, Paul Mackin at paul.mackin at verizon.net wrote:

> but I'm not really certain *why* Hilarius is
>> experimenting with the LSD in the first place, what he's trying to prove
> or
>> gain. He seems to want to brainwash people, but to what end/s?
> 
> 
> We can't discount the circumstance that Hilarius has sexual designs on
> Oedipa though she's plainly not very attracted to him (couldn't feel his
> footsie playing through her boots.). Pretty sure my original reaction to the
> scene was that whatever else  the "LSD study" might signify (Menlo Park VA
> Hospital, overmedication of women, etc.) it was very much a seduction
> strategy. She sees this and decides she doesn't want him involved in any
> kind of mind manipulation on her--mind manipulation being what  LSD
> expermentation  would imply to her and most readers. Her refusal to take
> even the sleeping pills he prescribes seems to be a further indicator of her
> distrust of his interest in her.

Even though it was the lawyer, Roseman, playing footsie with Oedipa I agree
with you here Paul. Just about every man she knows or meets has sexual
designs on her, but it's always as a type of male ego-gratification. Miles
the motel manager makes a pass at her as well because he assumes she's
eyeing him off: but it's actually all about his own "smooth young body" and
to him she's just an "older chick". (p. 17)

Later on Herr Doktor admits that at the end of WWII he was working at
Buchenwald on "experimentally-induced insanity" on the Jewish prisoners (by
pulling faces at them!), but says that since then he has "tried to atone".
(p. 95) It seems to me that whatever the purpose/s of the current LSD
experiments in Kinneret -- I don't think it's ever made explicit in the text
what these might be (even so, it is certainly possible that the community
hospital and Hilarius have differing agendas) -- Hilarius has viewed his
work in the U.S. as part of this atonement phase, a type of "penance".

on 8/12/01 6:58 PM, lorentzen-nicklaus at lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de
wrote:

> ps: 
> the sentence "but i  never took the drug" seems to 'falsify' the
> hilarius=leary 
> thesis, no? 

I agree. Later, Oedipa, thoroughly self-absorbed herself, will come to him
in the hope that he will "talk her out of a fantasy".

    "Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have?
    Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax
    it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it
    dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You
    begin to cease to be." (95-6)

It doesn't sound to me like the vengeful and unrepentant cry of an evil Nazi
scientist. Oedipa calls him "Hitler Hilarius", but I'm not sure that there
isn't an ironic distance between the narrative and "narratrix" here.

best