COL49: Mucho (was Random Kindergarden Thoughts

[jbor]

on 8/22/01 8:59 AM, Søren Balslev at ssbalslev at get2net.dk wrote:

> Well, the second passage is the one with poor Mucho and his descent to the
> inner wastelands. The journey that got him there, seems (to me at least) to
> be the result of equal amounts of general emotional decadence and pharmacy.
> Mucho becomes a picture of the general lack of identity (throughout America
> and the world), being that walking assembly of man. Another exciting
> perspective is what Mucho tells about the media and the distortion of
> signals. That distortion would then have to be ever present and thereby
> result in a fatal misunderstanding, right?

I think that it's interesting that Pynchon chose to resuscitate Mucho for
_Vineland_. The characterisation of Mucho seems to be one of if not the most
rounded in the novel -- it shows that Pynchon is able to give his characters
some depth when he wants to at least -- and it's also interesting that
Mucho, the husband, is much further away from the source of the narrative
point of view than Oedipa, the wife. The reader gets to see Mucho -- and
everything and everyone else -- from Oedipa's perspective, but never vice
versa, so even when Mucho starts talking about the heightening of his
senses, his creative empathy, his belief in the "oneness" of humanity, and
having overcome his neuroses, we get Oedipa's reactions and so tend to
dismiss him and what he is saying. Oedipa ridicules him, wants to punch him
in the mouth, finally deserts him. I suspect that just as Hilarius's advice
to Oedipa to "cherish" her fantasy, whatever it might be, proves that Herr
Doktor isn't stark raving mad or just an evil Nazi after all, which is the
way Oedipa represents him, or "projects" him, to those outside the clinic
(and to the reader), so does what Mucho is saying garner at least a modicum
of sympathy for both the character (who has remained faithful to his errant
wife at least) and for, perhaps, the drug LSD. The experiments on heightened
creativity which Oscar Janiger was engaged in from 1954 to 1962 -- Cary
Grant and Clint Eastwood were two of his patients -- seems to be much closer
to what Mucho is involved with than those nefarious CIA experiments on
prostitutes and their clients, where the subjects often didn't know about or
agree to take the drug.

The "Edna Mosh" bit and the "rich, chocolaty, goodness" conversation made me
laugh. The "nada, nada against the blue sky" thing is quite poignant too.

best