FLE02: Hilarius’s & Oedipa’s Paranoia: Commentary on Knowledge and Consciousness

When looking at the Dr. Hilarius character in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of

Lot 49, it is easy to connect his paranoia to Oedipa’s. Although Hilarius is paranoid

because he thinks Israeli assassins are out to avenge for his war crimes, and Oedipa is

paranoid because she cannot figure out whether the Tristero conspiracy is actually a

conspiracy, this bit of dissimilitude is minor, as they are both still paranoid. Furthermore,

Hilarius points out that he and Oedipa share a special likeness that separates them from

the others who delve into psychedelics and other drugs - they both try to maintain a sense

of identity, a uniqueness that drugs muddle up. It is interesting, then, that Hilarius and

Oedipa, in addition to being the only unique people, are also really the only paranoid

people in the story (other than the trivial inclusion of the band). Pynchon may be trying to

state that paranoia comes hand in hand with a sense of identity and the ability to

distinguish between things.

Dr. Hilarius, as Oedipa’s shrink, is really only putting on a mask as he tries to

pass himself off as a slightly absurd, Freud lookalike practitioner of psychoanalytic

therapy. When Pynchon introduces him into the story, as an awful three-in-the-morning

phone call asking Oedipa to join a study that tests the “effects of LSD-25, mescaline,

psilocybin, and related drugs on a large sample of suburban housewives” (8), Hilarius has

the air of a proto-New Age psychiatrist wanting to expand Oedipa’s feeble closed mind.

He cannot be malicious because he cannot know the psychosis-inducing side effects of

psychedelics – since, after all, this is the ‘60s, the age of “experimentation.” Hilarius is

harmless enough, and also a bit funny. So it is with much irony that Hilarius reveals he

used to be a Nazi scientist, performing psychiatric experiments on prisoners in the

concentration camp at Buchenwald. His post-war Freud-like persona is an attempt to

atone for that: “If I’d been a real Nazi I’d have chosen Jung [a Nazi sympathizer], nicht

wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew” (112). He explains further that he really tried

to fit into the role:

“I tried to submit myself to that man, that cantankerous Jew. Tried to

cultivate a faith in the literal truth of everything he wrote, even the

idiocies and contradictions…. And part of me must have really wanted

to believe—like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror—that

the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in.

That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and

Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into

society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe,

despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?” (109-110)

Hilarius—being distressed by his past—sought order, and he found it in Freud. However,

Hilarius recognizes that what Freud offers is only a comforting illusion, fraught with

“idiocies and contradictions,” and Hilarius’s new persona does not atone for his old one,

even if Hilarius would like for it to do so: “Freud’s vision of the world had no

Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would

become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower arranging and solfeggio in the

strangling rooms… I tried to believe it all” (112). Hilarius’s paranoia stems from his

inability to eliminate his doubt or guilt, try as he may – he thinks that Israeli avengers

will come for him like they did for Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who fled to South America to

escape punishment but was captured and sent to Jerusalem for trial and, afterwards,

execution. His situation begs to be interpreted with Pynchon’s symbolization of entropy -

Dr. Hilarius tries to emulate Maxwell’s demon (that is, order the system/reality) by

assuming and using psychoanalysis – but he cannot keep this up, he has doubts and guilty

thoughts which mount higher and higher into an eventual psychotic paranoia. A finer

secondary insight is that Hilarius tries to reduce entropy by trying to forget his past, by

ignoring the Freud’s shortcomings, by erasing information – this rise in entropy may also

be the cause of Hilarius’s paranoia.

Unlike Dr. Hilarius, Oedipa is trying to uncover rather than erase history -

specifically, she is trying to uncover the history of The Courier’s Tragedy and Tristero.

Oedipa finds many details about Tristero during the story – that it used to be a rival postal

service to Thurn und Taxis, that there is a conspiracy to bring the defunct service back

into power, etc. – but she is never able to make sure that any of the details are true.

Oedipa either cannot check her sources, or neglects to do so, and as a result she becomes

increasing paranoid at the end of the story because she cannot distinguish between reality

and fiction. She says to herself: “Either you have stumbled indeed… onto a secret

richness and concealed density of dream [the Tristero conspiracy]… Or you are

hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you [by Pierce Inverarity]. Or you

are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull”

(140-141). One imagines that she could continue this recursive reevaluation of her beliefs

infinitely. Continuing the metaphor of entropy and Maxwell’s demon, Oedipa tries to

reduce “thermodynamic entropy” (i.e. uncertainty) by trying to decipher all the

information, and ends up failing (this outcome may be expected, since Oedipa finds out

in her conversation with John Nefastis that she is not a “sensitive”, and thus unable to

handle the demon’s burden). Moreover, as per Maxwell’s demon, her effort raises

informational entropy as she loses all certainty about any belief. Oedipa’s paranoia is not

causally the same as Dr. Hilarius’s—he becomes paranoid through inability to maintain

his belief in psychoanalysis, while Oedipa becomes paranoid because she cannot find

enough evidence to accept any beliefs at all—but symptomatically the two are identical.

If one wishes to apply a symmetry to Oedipa’s and Hilarius’s paranoias, the two

cases may be reduced to where, on one hand, choosing one option over many (Hilarius

becoming a psychoanalyst) is unsatisfactory; and where, on the other hand, the alternative

of considering all options (as Oedipa finds herself doing) is unsatisfactory as well. The

two can neither face nor turn away from their doubts – both face epistemological

dilemmas which Pynchon feels are insoluble, since they remain unsolved by the end of

the story. In a sense, Pynchon is communicating here a sort of literary incompleteness

theorem that denies certainty and maintains the ceaseless upward climb of entropy

because, unlike reality, there is no known unstated decision rule. That is, Dr. Hilarius’s

psychoanalytic worldview is “complete” (allegedly, from its own perspective) but

inconsistent since, as Hilarius comments, one can only ignore and not deal with its

fallacies to accept it; Oedipa’s worldview is consistent (in only that she is considering all

options and not making any discriminatory assumptions like Hilarius is) but far from

complete – she has to consider all these mutually non-concurrent possibilities, none of

which are decidable. Paranoia and perpetual doubt inflict Oedipa and Dr. Hilarius as they

are unable to ignore the truth of their shortcomings of thought. Now, there is no small

amount of irony in this analysis, since it can itself be subjected to the same criticism –

Pynchon must have realized this problem for the reader, and have realized the same

problem for himself, as he was writing about it (which would provide a better explanation

for the open ending than simply Pynchon being ignorant of an answer). Oedipa’s and

Hilarius’s paranoia extend out of the story to the reader and the writer, who while not

facing as perplexing problems as Oedipa still do face less “dramatic” uncertainties about

reality (we should like to think that the logical interaction between things is real enough

to make our uncertainty of the “actual” nature of things practically irrelevant, but for

Oedipa her uncertainty over the truth of various things in fact does affect the total

calculus/logic). Escaping this paranoia is to not think about the problem – but the

problem is inherent in thinking itself, so escape is to not think, which is probably

unacceptable to most (cogito non, ergo sum non). Hilarius summarizes this concept

beautifully when Oedipa asks him to dispel the nagging question of Tristero, and he

retorts fiercely: “Cherish it! What else do any of us have? Hold it tightly by its little

tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you.

Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others.

You begin to cease to be” (113). But again, what sort of life is a paranoid life anyway?

So, perhaps, drugs are the solution, or other forms of nihilism.