COL49 End of CH 5

[Joseph Tracy]

The last thing Mucho tells Oedipa before they part is how he no longer has the nightmares that startled him awake screaming. His dream was of a real sign with initials for the National Automobile Dealers of America, N.A.D.A.. Nada, nada, nada, creaking against the clear blue sky. The thing being offered, the car, a symbol of freedom in American culture its really nada, nothing, a false promise.  This shows a large and liberating  change in Mucho’s subconscious, but the only thing Oedipa can see is that he isn’t the old Mucho. Frequently in successful psychedelic and similarly envisioned  therapy there are confrontations with serious internal terrors and the person is encouraged to let go of the fear response and talk with or even enter the source of anxiety This can lead to amazing inner transformations.  We can see that Mucho has been seduced and oversimplified his experience to LSD = liberation and a renewed contact with the abundance of the universe. He later, as told in Vineland, finds there is no magic cure-all  and serious dangers to drug use. Here, he is not getting through. Oedipa has, for reasonable causes,  put up barriers to this oversimplified message  that won’t allow her to see anything positive in the new Mucho despite her own observations.

One of the funny and loaded riffs, which reappears in their parting kiss, has to do with the Cartesian self vs the Zen no-self, or mindful awareness that makes no distinction between outside v. inside, mind v. body , self v.  other. 

This becomes  explicit here:  " “Is this what Funch 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.”

To some the ease of Mucho or say, someone like  Alan Watts with this larger  less  conceptual self is scary, and contrary to our social orientation. But without the vast input from outside an individual body and mind what is a self? What in our experience of “I am” is verbal noise and what is real? It isn’t so obvious in an honest reckoning.  This is a brief but powerful glimpse into a profound split in the American vision stretching back in obvious ways to  the expansive inclusiveness  of Emerson and Whitman vs  the outwardly combative  visions of  G.Washington and Andrew Jackson. 

I don’t know about other readers, and Pynchon, as usual, does not tell us what to think,  but I see profound and indispensable value on both sides of this unfortunate division.  For me Oedipa, with a beautifully credible feminine practicality represents the demand of the household, the ecosystem, of concern with  the details of where the local meets the larger social direction. She wants to understand and fix the mess she feels responsible for. She also is repeatedly struggling against and succumbing to a naive myth of  beautiful princess saved by handsome, kind, powerful prince( external salvation). As she struggles to free herself from that restraint she is shocked at the pervasiveness of dishonesty, game-playing, cowardice and narcissism. Where are the princes? Mucho feels trapped and constrained in a different way. He is good as a salesman for American culture and well rewarded, but wants to believe in what he does of living and can't. Where Oedipa searches externally his struggle is internal and he finds a breakthrough in LSD and a rather Zen approach to union with sound, a medium which is abstract and through which he connects to others in a less judgmental or agonized way, even imagining a universal  choral union of rich chocolatey goodness. Whether the peace he has found with himself and the world can help forward that choral union is questionable without practical changes.  The more I look at these poles the more I see a spectrum of overlapping potential that is greater than either alone. 

So when, "At the station they kissed goodbye, all of them.” It is laugh out loud  funny and immensely sad because we really all are part of each other and divorce from that reality can only invite self righteousness and dangerous anger. But life is bigger than the individual and so far anyway, life goes on.

On to the last chapter.