col 49: who's mad?

[jbor]

on 8/14/01 7:58 PM, lorentzen-nicklaus at lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de
wrote:

> could be. but perhaps trp simply mixed up different motifs and then didn't
> manage to give consistency to the character? according to my impression, the
> hilarius issue is taken up again in gr, but here the technocratic hardcore
> scientist is one figure (pointsman), and the mad black gnostic another
> (blicero). this works much better! in my opinion, that is. yet the message
> for oedipa is also important. as eddins, who's not always wrong, writes in
> "gnostic pynchon" on page 103: "although he has been more or less destroyed by
> the demonic fantasies he tried to suppress, hilarius has discovered the value
> of fantasy on the one hand and the danger of absolute suppression on the
> other. he reads, like a good blakean, a normative lesson into his extreme
> experiences. his warning to oedipa to 'cherish' her fantasy and to protect it
> against 'freudians' and 'pharmacists' is in effect a warning to preserve her
> private sense of the transcendental from the mania for a monistic
> materialism". 

I'm not so sure about this one. I guess we can assume that the community
hospital is running the experiments with hallucinogens in the hope of
"curing" neuroses like paranoia and schizophrenia and depression: I don't
really see anything much more sinister than that in it. But I don't know
that Hilarius telling Oedipa to "cherish" her fantasy is "a warning to
preserve her private sense of the transcendental" -- by which I guess Eddins
means her faith in God -- against some sort of chemically-induced "monistic
materialism". Eddins loves to set up these good/bad binaries, but I'm not
sure that there is any textual substance to support the notion of Hilarius
reading "like a good Blakean, a normative lesson into his extreme
experiences", and I'll even give the benefit of the doubt to Eddins on the
insertion of that "good" there (i.e. good as in consistent).

Hilarius has no idea what Oedipa's current fantasy is, and is totally caught
up in his own paranoia and solipsism, so partly he is dismissing her,
doesn't want to have to deal with her problems, isn't "in session". But from
what we have seen of her, and thus what he would know about her, she doesn't
seem to be the "transcendental" type at all and so what Eddins surmises
doesn't seem to be Hilarius's message at all. Also, Herr Doktor asks, "What
else do any of you have?" which implies to me that there is distinct *lack*
of transcendental experience in the godless world of the 'burbs. I tend to
think his message is along the lines of retaining her individuality and
eschewing conformism. His paranoia and her paranoia are very similar to the
type of creative paranoia and operational paranoia which both Slothrop and
Pirate endorse in _GR_. (But, for my money, with all those satiric
references to the Cosa Nostra in Ch. 3 it's hard for me to envisage Pynchon
personally fearing to mention the C.I.A. directly in the novel.)

I agree with both you and Paul that there seems to be something anomalous
about the narrative's attitude to Hilarius. He did seem somewhat eccentric
back in Chapter 1 (the 3 a.m. call, hysterical pitch to his voice, his odd
mention of the "feeling" he had that she had called him) but apparently
Oedipa had accepted his quirks, until his admission to her of his past at
Buchenwald that is. I think that, as in all the novels (and as in life,
too), the "good" guys and the "bad" guys" are never as clear-cut as some
would like them to be.

best

ps Thanks for the heads up on the Deneuve pics! I'll keep an eye out.