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FLE02:
Hilarius’s & Oedipa’s Paranoia: Commentary on Knowledge and ConsciousnessWhen 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 aconspiracy, 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 fromthe others who delve into psychedelics and other drugs - they both try to maintain a senseof identity, a uniqueness that drugs muddle up. It is interesting, then, that Hilarius andOedipa, 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 tostate that paranoia comes hand in hand with a sense of identity and the ability todistinguish 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 psychoanalytictherapy. 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 hasthe 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 isharmless enough, and also a bit funny. So it is with much irony that Hilarius reveals heused 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 toatone for that: “If I’d been a real Nazi I’d have chosen Jung [a Nazi sympathizer], nichtwahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew” (112). He explains further that he really triedto fit into the role:“I tried to submit myself to that man, that cantankerous Jew. Tried tocultivate a faith in the literal truth of everything he wrote, even theidiocies and contradictions…. And part of me must have really wantedto believe—like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror—thatthe unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in.That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses andBiedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it intosociety 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 noBuchenwalds 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 thestrangling rooms… I tried to believe it all” (112). Hilarius’s paranoia stems from hisinability to eliminate his doubt or guilt, try as he may – he thinks that Israeli avengerswill come for him like they did for Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who fled to South America toescape 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) byassuming and using psychoanalysis – but he cannot keep this up, he has doubts and guiltythoughts 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, byignoring 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 postalservice 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 becomesincreasing paranoid at the end of the story because she cannot distinguish between realityand fiction. She says to herself: “Either you have stumbled indeed… onto a secretrichness and concealed density of dream [the Tristero conspiracy]… Or you arehallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you [by Pierce Inverarity]. Or youare 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 beliefsinfinitely. Continuing the metaphor of entropy and Maxwell’s demon, Oedipa tries toreduce “thermodynamic entropy” (i.e. uncertainty) by trying to decipher all theinformation, and ends up failing (this outcome may be expected, since Oedipa finds outin her conversation with John Nefastis that she is not a “sensitive”, and thus unable to
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