The Illuminatus! Trilogy

I’ve come back to the book, since it’s still something of a cult item even after all this time for many people, and found that I haven’t missed anything.  I like it a lot less now, partly because what was funny and spontaneous when young now seems turgid and snotty. It’s a ponderously big, potty-mouthed, overblown, meandering book, and redolent of a set of philosophies that have become simply embarrassing in the time since they were coined.  I also laughed at it a lot more when it was younger, but for the same reason I laughed at “Freeshow!” jokes when I was that age, too.  The only other book I could remotely draw any connections to is Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, a book so uniformly awful it makes this one look like a masterpiece, but don’t take that as praise.

Describing the plot in Illuminatus! would be useless.  The story is a free-form congeries of accidents, mishaps, sexual encounters, violence, coincidences, and God knows what else, all vaguely centering around a group of people who want to destroy or conquer the world (it’s never made terribly clear).  A good deal of the story revolves around the importance of coincidences and numerology, such as the significance of 5, 17, and 23.  There are dozens of characters, a great many of whom get christened with deliberately dumb names.  Consider “Fission Chips,” a British secret agent, number 00005.  And that’s allegedly one of the more refined jokes in the book.  I won’t even go into the sex scene with the giant apple.

Some parts are funny, no question about it.  There is an amusing parody of Atlas Shrugged in synopsis form (called “Telemachus Sneezed,” ho ho), and some of the bits are quite Firesign Theatre-ish in their absurdity.  But bits and pieces do not a coherent work make, and the whole of the book is by and large tiresome and aimless.  Let’s face it: when you’re fifteen years old, having a sex scene or an F-word every few pages is a lot of fun.  When you’re thirty, you see it for what it is: a sex scene or an F-word every few pages.  The shock value of both the ideas and the actions are liberating to someone who’s been weaned on relatively tame books, but once the shock wears off, there’s less and less worth going back to.

Wilson did say he was writing the book mostly as a way of making fun of pretty much everything he could get his hands on, including dreary conspiracy-theory nuts.  He and Shea wrote the majority of it while they were still working at Playboy, and would often comb the crank-mail pile for ideas.  One of the stories that wound up being a big influence on the book was the Kerry Thornley incident, where a friend of his was harassed by what appeared to be government agents.  No one ever really found out what the truth was, but it was spooky enough to be an inspiration.

With Cosmic Trigger and his other recent books, Wilson seems to have let the inspiration run wild.  He certainly doesn’t have the grace and irony of Thomas Pynchon—whose shadow, along with James Joyce’s, looms over the book—and he definitely doesn’t have Pynchon’s capacity for achieving intelligent distance from his material.  Heck, Douglas Adams (whose Hitchhiker’s series gets namechecked along with this one) did far more with less.  Another cousin to this book is Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, another story that deals with conspiracies and secret societies (among many other things).  That one was no picnic to get through, but it was consistently interesting and didn’t fall back on a raft of drugs/sex/anarchy/hippie clichés to make its points.

I have written elsewhere about Wilson, whom I initially found to be an interesting thinker but who has since degenerated into pushing foolish claptrap like Neuro-Linguistic Programming or whatever other bright, sparkly intellectual toy falls into his lap.  Illuminatus! is like all the worst of his tendencies rolled into one.  He can be a wonderfully entertaining writer, but he gives way too much gravity to ideas which are disposable at best.  He’s also all too happy to be a product of the counter-culture Sixties, despite the all-too-clear evidence of how inept so much of the thinking that stemmed from that age has turned out to be.  One of the signs of a good thinker is not only that one has an open mind, but a careful and discriminating one as well, and Wilson is wholly indiscriminate—downright promiscuous with his ideas, so to speak.  The end result is that some genuinely good ideas in the book are crushed under the dead weight of many more stupid and ultimately frivolous ones.

Illuminatus! has been successful with a lot of bright but not terribly worldly people, and re-reading the book brought some other things back to mind that worried me.  I remembered meeting a number of other folks who were fascinated with the book, and who were of remarkable intelligence to boot (I could probably number myself among them).  They were by and large fascinated with adult-level trivia, like the dippy jokes, numerology, mysticism and simple-minded dualities that the book has by the bucketful.  When it came to talking about or doing something concrete about openly dismaying problems like crime or famine, however, they backed off into a sanctimonious, platitudinous Utopianism, with things like this book as a thinly veiled justification.  Why fix hopeless little things like welfare when a revolution would fix everything at once?  (This despite the fact that most revolutions have only fixed a very small handful of social problems, while often creating greater and more intractible ones.) When asked how that would happen, detail for detail, they were evasive or silent.  I found it telling that few of the people I talked with were aware of just how catastrophically bad the failure of Soviet collective farming had been, for instance.  But they could sure quote Timothy Leary and the Principia Discordia!  Trying to talk about really changing things with a vocabulary and a roster of ideas as provided by the likes of Wilson was like trying to build houses with foam-rubber tools.

It annoyed me that people who were otherwise so sharp would get so involved in something that amounted to an elaborate in-joke, and I was embarrassed at having been that way myself.  The joke was only mildly amusing then, and now it’s monumentally unfunny.  At one point someone in the book pens what sounds like a review of the book, slamming it as “a pair of LSD Nietzsches looking for a psychedelic Superman.”  Of all the criticisms I would give the book, that isn’t really one of them.  “Think for yourself, schmuck!” goes a line in the book, but I always find it funny how people who uncritically recycle each other’s ideas constantly use such slogans to justify what they’re doing.