CoL49 (5) Hilarius

[Robin Landseadel]

Oedipa is genuinely concerned that she's going nuts, enough so that  
after 12 hours of sleep at the hotel in Berkeley she heads straight  
for the offices of Dr. Hilarius, her shrink. As Oed was heading out on  
this little adventure, she figured the worst that could happen was "a  
little something for her shrink to fix."  When it turned out to be so  
much more than she could handle the first thing she does is go to her  
shrink, who appears to be in the midst of a full-tilt psychotic break:

	. . .She pulled into the drive at Hilarius's clinic a little after
	sunset. . .

	. . .she was startled by an insect whirring loudly past her ear,
	followed at once by the sound of a gunshot. That was no insect,
	thought Oedipa, at which point, hearing another shot, she made
	the connection.
	PC 108

The sort of scene one might run into at this stage of the game in a  
Raymond Chandler thriller.

Helga Blamm, the shrink's sometimes assistant, lets Oedipa in through  
the gunfire. For some inexplicable reason, seeing as Dr. Hilarius has  
already cut the line for the phone and is working his way through the  
PBX while firing off rounds from his vintage Gewehr 43, Oedipa figures  
she can talk him down. In the process, the therapist/patient alignment  
is flipped. The shrink breaks down and tells Oedipa all about the work  
he did at Buchenwald, a little slice from work-in-progress Gravity's  
Rainbow, where Hilarius is developing a collection of evil grimaces  
that destroyed minds for Nazi gain:

	"There is a face," Hilarius said, "that I can make. One you
	haven't seen; no one in this country has. I have only made it
	once in my life, and perhaps today in central Europe there still
	lives, in whatever vegetable ruin, the young man who saw it. He
	would be, now, about your age. Hopelessly insane. His name
	was Zvi. Will you tell the 'police,' or whatever they are calling
	themselves tonight, that I can make that face again? That it has
	an effective radius of a hundred yards and drives anyone
	unlucky enough to see it down forever into the darkened
	oubliette, among the terrible shapes, and secures the hatch
	irrevocably above them? Thank you."
	PC 110

This works into the LSD therapist's backstory, I'm not sure how far  
Pynchon's research into the CIA got to by 1966, & we can't rule out  
that all that espionage research in Gravity's Rainbow & Vineland came  
out of the pre-existing conspiracy theories of others in addition to  
those based in reality.  Might be a red herring or two in the mix. At  
the same time, Hilarius was part of a CIA-flavored research study of  
deliberately making people go crazy:

	"I worked," Hilarius told her, "on experimentally-induced
	insanity. A catatonic Jew was as good as a dead one. Liberal
	SS circles felt it would be more humane." So they had gone at
	their subjects with metronomes, serpents, Brechtian vignettes at
	midnight, surgical removal of certain glands, magic-lantern
	hallucinations, new drugs, threats recited over hidden
	loudspeakers, hypnotism, clocks that ran backward, and faces.
	Hilarius had been put in charge of faces. "The Allied liberators,"
	he reminisced, "arrived, unfortunately, before we could gather
	enough data. Apart from the spectacular successes, like Zvi,
	there wasn't much we could point to in a statistical way." He
	smiled at the expression on her face.
	PC 112

	This declassified CIA memo was written on April 18, 1958 by
	Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the Chemical Division of the
	agency's Technical Services Staff. Gottlieb, who oversaw many
	of the MKULTRA projects, reviewed covert CIA support for
	research studies of "controversial and misunderstood" areas of
	psychology such as hypnosis, truth drugs, psychic powers and
	subliminal persuasion.

http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/freebook/mk/

Now Hilarius is part of a research study of the exciting new drug,  
LSD-25. A drug that the CIA was very interested in at the time because  
induced insanity could take out their targets and leave no trail, or  
so they thought. Consider COINTELPRO: A catatonic activist was as good  
as a dead one. And it happens that the CIA recruited agents and  
research scientists from the Third Reich for science based projects,  
as the next book by this author will handily illustrate. The clues  
pointing to real-life conspiracies such as CIA's Operation Midnight  
Climax continue to proliferate as Oedipa's revelation of and loss of  
her psychotherapist is immediately followed by revelation of and loss  
of her husband:

	"So now I'm a hostage," Oedipa said.

	"Oh," said Hilarius, "it's you."

	"Well who did you think you'd been"

	"Discussing my case with? Another. There is me, there are the
	others. You know, with the LSD, we're finding, the distinction
	begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges. But I never took
	the drug, I chose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I
	know who I am and who the others are. Perhaps that is why you
	also refused to participate, Mrs Maas?"
	PC 111

Practically from the moment Oedipa first encounters her husband  
"Mucho"—"Mucho pressed his cough button a moment, but only smiled. It  
seemed odd. How could they hear a smile?"— she knows something's wrong.

	There was one last footnote to the MKULTRA LSD subproject,
	one unintended and unforeseen side effect. Ken Kesey, author
	of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and arguably the
	founder of the hippie movement of the 1960s, was a willing
	participant in a separate, legitimate MKULTRA LSD experiment
	[source: Davenport-Hines]. Kesey brought his experience with
	acid to his friends, and by extension, whole generations of
	American youth were introduced to LSD.

	http://history.howstuffworks.com/american-history/cia-lsd3.htm
	
	"Mucho," she said, impatient but also flirting with a wild
	suspicion. "Is this what Punch means when he says you're
	coming on like a whole roomful of people?" "That's what I am,"
	said Mucho, "right. Everybody is." He gazed at her, perhaps
	having had his vision of consensus as others do orgasms, face
	now smooth, amiable, at peace. She didn't know him. Panic
	started to climb out of a dark region in her head. "Whenever I
	put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand
	what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,'
	yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all
	over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages,
	shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is
	everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's
	a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of
	beer.
	PC 117

My take is there's an epiphany here and Oedipa's way too scared to see  
it. Of course, Mucho really does look scary right now. For Oedipa it  
was as if she woke up one morning and realized she had no clue as to  
why this man should be in her bed. The physical body is mostly the same 
—strange to encounter this man with his sphincter relaxed—but it's  
just not the same person. LSD clearly did its number on Mucho.  
Whatever happened to him thanks to LSD, it seems like he got the  
message:
	
	Mucho blinked sympathetically, a little sadly. "I guess it's over.
	We're on into a new world now, it's the Nixon Years, then it'll be
	the Reagan Years-" "

	Ol' Raygun? No way he'll ever make president."

	"Just please go careful, Zoyd. 'Cause soon they're gonna be
	coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes,
	sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please
	any of your senses, because they need to control all that. And
	they will." "Fat Police?" "Perfume Police. Tube Police. Music
	Police. Good Healthy Shit Police. Best to renounce everything
	now, get a head start."

	"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count.
	 Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane,
	down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew .... "

	They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to
	die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed
	to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was
	always their last big chip, when they thought they had the
	power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see
	through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."
	Vineland, pg 313/314

And of course, by the time Zoyd runs into Mucho, Mr. Maas has already  
hung up the phone. By the time "The Crying of Lot 49" made it into  
paperback—1967—the story was perfectly in synch with 1967's  
fascination with LSD.