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

[Mark Kohut]

I would argue that Pynchon, through Hilarious, savages those who would trivialize the Holocaust.....he's anti-"Hogan's Heroes"....

--- On Wed, 7/15/09, Rob Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> From: Rob Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com>
> Subject: Re: C of L 49: "That's how it is..most of the time."
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 9:49 AM
> 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!
>