COL 49 Hilarius, Printed circuits, Echo Courts, The paranoids, Metzger

[Joseph Tracy]

Hilarius is part of a landscape  we find throughout the novella of activities more sinister than we or Oedipa know- I hear him with the voice of Henry Kissinger. He is conducting an experiment he calls 'the bridge' on housewives using LSD. He scares Oed and she does not trust him or want his drugs( tanquilizers or LSD).  Later it turns out he is an ex Nazi scientist. As soon as WW2 was over, there were numerous Nazis recruited into various endeavors of the US government. One recruiter of ex nazis was  James Jesus Angleton, a senior figure in THE CIA( Duke Angelo?), who specialized in Nazis with anti-communist background or from unique research fields. There is a reasonably high probability  that Hilarius is one of these, willing to do questionable psychological research.  In its early phase(50s-60s) MK Ultra was interested in the possibility of  reconfiguring the human mind by wiping clean previous conditioning and then reconditioning the person. It was well under way under way in the 60s and using LSD and Curare under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, or Donald Cameron out of Toronto branch of MK ultra. We can only imagine the purpose of his housewife experiments but it is not at all implausible for that secretive government program. Hilarius clearly regards Oedipa as a particular challenge and he is right. How Pynchon knew about these things so early, while they were still wrapped in secrecy is hard to fathom, but quite common for him.

Here are 3 lines from Wikipedia profile of Sydney Gottlieb; 1) Dulles( head of CIA) and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery. They also wanted a "truth serum <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum>", something that had been investigated during the days of the OSS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services> but never fully realized. Gottlieb conducted experiments using THC <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol>, cocaine, heroin, and mescaline <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline> before realizing LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide> had not been properly tested or investigated by the agency.
2)Gottlieb was the liaison to the military subcontractor Lockheed <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Corporation>, then working for the CIA on Project AQUATONE <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUATONE>, later known as the U-2 spy plane <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2>. In 1953, he arranged a safe house <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_house> for the Lockheed Aeronautics Services Division (LASD) with an easy and exclusive egress. 3)Gottlieb administered LSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD> and other hallucinogenic drugs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen> to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything". He was named as the person who gave Army bacteriologist Frank Olson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson> LSD at an MK-ULTRA retreat, leading to Olson's mental spiral and death a week later. Hilarius is also the name of a saint from Arles who was involved in a power struggle with the pope.

When Oed heads for San Narciso to meet Metzger and theoretically to look into Pierce’s books and records, She tells Mucho to hang up on Hilarius if he calls.  At this point hanging up seems a minor metaphor about closing one mode of communication which often opens another one. In this case, as she heads into San Narciso and before she gets a room at Echo Court( Are these increasing references to myth important or just greek herrings?) she stops and looks down at the “ ordered swirl of houses” and  she is reminded of opening a transistor radio and seeing for the first time a printed circuit board: "there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant".To my mind the encounter with the Varo painting, and this moment of genuine insight  into the future and felt transcendence rooted in a space of openness and possibility have a distinct similarity to both a classic mystical experience and the similar states that can come from a benign psychedelic experience.  Both times she was turning from a power figure, Pierce and then Hilarius and finding something remarkable rising from within. This moment is followed by a moment of deep sympathy for Mucho and his estrangement from his role as DJ; even though he is very fond of the music,  it fails his need to believe in something. Is this what binds them, what they share in common?  Of course, she is about to descend from the sublime, if slightly smoggy  heights and be pulled by fleshier forces and perhaps even devilish ones. 

“Deception is a State of Mind, and the Mind of the State” James Jesus Angleton.

As she drives past the detrital junkiness of a California automobile-based city, Oedipa begins to see the freeway  as a hypodermic needle delivering heroin to a world not so much wind-in-the-hair free as numbly sedated. She pulls into Echo Court with its 30 ft high sheetmetal nymph whose face echoes Oedipa’s. I grew up in Ca and there were lots of cartoony buildings and roadside attractions. When I was young and on a nice day they could seem magical but soon they seemed dingy, noisy, fakey. Oedipa is disturbed a little by the fan blown gauzy covering of the nymph revealing a demeanor and form more lurid than nymph-like. The hotel manger is singer for ’the paranoids’, a band who function more than a little like a greek chorus, observing the action and commenting.  Metzger, PI’s  lawyer and co-executor comes to introduce himself and uses his good looks, child actor role in a movie that mysteriously plays on TV that night, lots of booze, and deception to seduce the first reluctant, then enthusiastic Oedipa. It seems as if it is part of a script written by Inverarity or as if he has his own designs on who will manage the disposition of the estate. The interchangeability/similarity of lawyer and actor already noted in Roseman’s issues with Perry Mason, comes forward and Manny DePresso, another lawyer turned  actor is mentioned . ( in similar events of the time,Reagan got political with conservative speech in 64 and became governor in 66.) Metzger seems to act as an agent of deflection and deception and throughout the novel and uses anti-communism as a kind of religious orthodoxy and to some degree an excuse for fascism( Tony Jaguar), for racial segregation( Yoyodyne) and for those who know where the bodies are buried and what the secretive assassins of the Tristero are all about.  Metzger is also another dead end for whatever Oedipa is looking for in men. In American history, lit and film there is a powerful albeit sentimentally false tradition of the lawyer fighting for truth, but in COL 49 that is mocked and undermined. Metger is a predator and manipulator who likes an easy mark. The last we see of him he has seduced one of the Paranoids young girlfriends. I find that Metzger maps quite strongly onto those in  the Couriers Revenge who are in on the secrets of Duke Angelo and his inner court loyals, part of the chill that spreads when the audience  or action comes near a hidden truth, a defender, not of individual liberty or excellence or accountability, but of the power and control of corporate investor/owners.