C of L 49: "That's how it is..most of the time."

[Rob Jackson]

On 15/07/2009, at 7:16 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> But he doesn't make the bad guy very evil.

Yes. Dr Hilarius is a good example. He's a cartoon stereotype ex-Nazi,  
a grotesque pastiche of "evil" villainry, a bit like those Walt Disney  
drawings of "screaming, hairy-nosed, front teeth in white dihedral,  
slant-eyed (long, elaborate curlicued shapes), round black licorice  
dog-nosed Japs, zoomin' through ev'ry page!" of 'The Wisdom of the  
Great Kamikaze Pilots' book that Pynchon lambasts with not a little  
vitriol in GR (680). Because it's so flip, the bit about Hilarius  
making "Fu-Manchu" faces at Buchenwald inmates trivialises the  
Holocaust and sounds a bum note in this earlier, and lesser, work.

In fact, it's actually characters like Winthrop Tremaine and John  
Nefastis in Lot 49 who are far less likeable, because less comical,  
than Hilarius. Ultimately, though, it's those characters who Oedipa  
thought were on "her side" and who she gradually and instinctively  
feels are betraying her, like Fallopian and Emory Bortz and Genghis  
Cohen - Mucho and Metzger and Arrabal and the 'Arnold Snarb' guy too -  
who are most responsible for inducing Oedipa's existential crisis.  
These guys are the let-downs, the traitors, the ones who show up the  
false dichotomy between all those self-satisfied projections of "us"  
and "them".

"They" 'R' "Us" - Pynchon's constant theme.

cheers!