ATD p356 Chinese Gong Effect

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

What Dan said. 

I think of the scene of Oedipa going to her shrink (only to find him no longer 
accessible or even useful) after her harrowing in the Greater Bay Area a major 
turning point in COL 49, where she is  pretty much abandoned by the world, lost 
to it in a way, Mucho having gone loco as far as she's concerned. I think of the 
placement of a ex-pat German practicing LSD therapy on the west coast is a 
vector that points straight to Stanislav Grof, much as Dr. Oyswharf (AtD 182) 
points to Stanley Augustus Owsley III. And ultimately, Pynchon makes his biggest 
pre-GR turn towards themes to be developed in GR with this second scene in COL 
49 featuring Dr. Hilarius.

http://www.holotropic.com/
http://tinyurl.com/2yqw2


      Dave Monroe:
      BTW: In this section, the white slavery show calls
      to my mind "Fu Manchu's Mask", a 1930s
      movie Pynchon heavily borrows in COL49....
 
      How so?  Genuinely curious.  Let us know ...
 
      Dan Hansong:
      Dave, "heavily borrows" might sound an overstatement, 
      but I am alwayswondering whether there are more 
      parallels between Fu Manchu series and COL49 other 
      than a direct reference to this name on p.8/9. For 
      instance, the stamp expert "Genghis Cohen" in COL49 
      is named after "Genghis Khan", as TRP went out of his 
      to verify in New York Times (17 July 1966), and Khan's
      mask is a Holy Grail both the Oriental freak Fu and his 
      Western rivals crave for.More importantly, apart from 
      Fu Manchu's many a doctorate he earned in Europe, 
      psychology is a field he specializes in. Fu Manchu 
      devises so many exotic gadgets to tortue the rivals and 
      eventually to control them in a mental way. As a result, 
      his ex-prinsoners appear as normal as they should be, 
      but they are in fact no more than Fu Manchu's walking 
      dummies. Like Fu, the Nazi,
      as is revealed by Pynchon latern on in COL49, carried 
      out a series of experiments in order to tamper with the 
      Jewish prisoners' mentality, or, annihilate this people 
      mentally, rather than physically. So-called humane 
      extermination. Oedipa's shrink, Hilarius, turned out to 
      be a Nazi scientist at large, who worked in a 
      concentration camp and engaged in accousitic 
      experiments which can elicit insanity artificially. 
      This back story isn't disclosed until Oedpia returns to 
      her hometown in chapter five. However, Hilarius' 
      mysterious drug test, coded as "Bridge", starts in 
      earnest from the very beginning of this novel. What a 
      shrink does, as Pynchon lampoons,
      is supposed to replace the role of priest in 1960s, a 
      time of spiritual "NADA". Yet the ex-Nazi prescribes 
      LSD to save those who are undergoing existential 
      crisis. Oedipa refuses LSD unwittingly, but her 
      husband, Mucho, falls to the prey of Hilarius' drug 
      conspiracy. Considering the recurrent motif of 
      "paranoia" in COL49, the allusion to Fu Manchu in 
      the opening chapter is probably apocalyptic and a 
      tell-tale clue as to Hilarius' secret.  
 
      BTW: Fu Manchu as a TAT picture in COL49 is 
      tagged as "37", the year of Japanese invasion in 
      China, a prelude to WWII. "Manchu" in Mandarin 
      Chinese is ÂúÖÞ£¬where the last emperor of Qing 
      Dynasty settled down. By that time, Manchu was in 
      the firm control of Japan, a warmonger nation 
      which would soon devastate Asia.