"It is not the intent of this book to confuse fact with fancy." Authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson insert this modest disclaimer on page 760 of their 800-page postmodern sci-fi work The Illuminatus! Trilogy . Perhaps they should have offered these words of warning in large print at the outset of volume one.
In any case, I don't believe them for a second. I've never read a work of fiction that tries harder than The Illuminatus! Trilo gy to blur the boundaries between truth-telling and myth-making, or to mash-up Delphic pronouncements with bald-faced lies. Thomas Disch, a sci-fi author who would defer to few in concocting outlandish tales, once compared Robert Anton Wilson to Oliver Stone, the filmmaker whose movie JFK mixed conspiracy theories with historical facts in a manner some viewers found exhilarating, others intellectually dishonest. Yet such a comparison is unfair to both parties. Wilson and Shea dish up "explanations" of the JFK assassination (and other seminal 20th century events) that border on the hallucinogenic. Stone, by comparison, seems like an honorary member of the Warren Commission.
Readers of The Illuminatus! Trilogy learn, for example, that John Dillinger, the infamous bank robber killed by the FBI outside a movie theater in 1934, actually survived the incident and turned up with a gun at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. But he was late to the event: several other organizations had already placed operatives on the scene with orders to shoot the President —and the real question, according to Wilson and Shea, isn't who planned the assassination of JFK, but which gunman managed to pull the trigger first. But if you seek ultimate answers, you need to dig below the scene of the crime, to the underground lair of the Dealey Lama, whose office is located under the sewers of Dallas. He’s a wise robed and bearded man who presides over a powerful secret society, and is perhaps more influential than either the President or conspirators up on ground level.
Full disclosure: there are many powerful secret societies hatching obscure schemes in The Illuminatus! Trilogy . You will need to keep a scorecard if you want to track who is doing what to whom. And these nefarious cults are so secret, even members aren't entirely certain who calls the shots, and what goals are pursued. Some play it safe by joining multiple secret groups —one character in this book even operates as a quintuple agent in the employ of five separate organizations. In the long, rich history of paranoia literature, from Kafka's The Trial to Eco's Foucault's Pendulum , no work of fiction has made a bolder attempt to find conspiracies within conspiracies and masks behind masks.
It would be easy to laugh at the bizarre and extraordinary events presented in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. But, like Vonnegut and Pynchon , those other masters of Cold War paranoia literature, Wilson and Shea deliberately embrace absurdity and farce as a mask for more serious concerns. In the course of this book, you will encounter talking dolphins, Adolf Hitler as an old man, the ancient kingdom of Atlantis, mind-reading and Tarot card prognostication, as well as a bunch of other newsworthy discoveries that even The National Enquirer would scorn as implausible. Those who claim truth is stranger than fiction, haven’t read this kind of fiction. Typical example: When the characters discuss Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan , a real-life Leviathan shows up a few pages later. They fear for their lives… but then take some comfort in realizing that they are merely characters in a book. Yet one speaks up with a sobering view: "In the absolute sense, none of us is real. But in the relative sense that anything is real, if that creature eats us we will certainly die—in this universe, or in this book. Since this is the only universe, or only book, we know, we'll be totally dead, in terms of our own knowing."
Did you get that? Fortunately, the Leviathan decides to marry some smart computer software and live happily every after. And this is one of the more coherent subplots in a book that constantly veers in the direction of an acid trip style of realism.
Yet as I look back at my description of this book, I realize that I have misled you. Because this book is just as serious as it is absurd. Even as Shea and Wilson pile up ludicrous incidents on top of one another, they also want to convey words of wisdom. As strange as it sounds, given my summary above, The Illuminatus! Trilogy wants to possess the authority of non-fiction. The authors add footnotes and appendices, and work hard to substantiate many of their claims with citations and evidence. Not all of the sources are real ones—I am rightly skeptical when any author backs up claims with references to the Necronomicon by the "mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. But much of the documentation withstands scrutiny. Shea and Wilson add to the peculiar flavor of their work by frequently inserting long passages that can only be described as a counterculture philosophy of life. When you reach the final pages of this work, you will find that your greatest challenge as a reader is not evaluating the literary merits of the trilogy, but determining how much of it the authors themselves actually believe—and, by extension, how much credence you ought to give to their claims.
At a minimum, grant these audacious authors credit for uncanny predictions about their future (and our present). When forced to specify the goals of the dominant conspirators, they offer this wish list:
"Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, blood tests and urinanalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel…."
This list was published in 1975, but could show up in a current-day editorial, and none of the items would seem out-of-place. Of course, many items on this wish list are no longer wishes, having come true during the intervening years. On a host of other issues, from gay rights to the decriminalization of marijuana, the authors shrewdly anticipated a future in which libertarian and authoritarian impulses have both managed to implement aspects of their conflicting agendas.
But I do need to mention the literary merits of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, even if the work itself asks for evaluation on other grounds. In an era when sci-fi books pushed the boundaries and adopted many of the devices of highbrow fiction, few authors raised the stakes higher than Wilson and Shea. The shifts in chronology, perspective and tone are as dramatic as anything you will find in the most fashionable postmodern authors of the day. The clever and cryptic allusions to other works of fiction could keep scholars busy for years. (Try counting the references to H.P. Lovecraft, for example—you might find a hundred or more in these pages.) With the exception of Samuel R. Delany , no sci-fi writer of this period drew more heavily on James Joyce; you will even encounter a recurring soliloquy toward the conclusion of The Illuminatus! Trilogy that emulates the stream-of-consciousness of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake and Molly Bloom in Ulysses .
In short, The Illuminatus! Trilogy ranks among the most ambitious works of the middle decades of the twentieth century, even as it resists categorization. Crazy and sane by turns, the work may best be represented by a symbol that recurs in its pages: the Ouroboros or serpent swallowing its own tail. In this instance, the reader is also asked to swallow a very tall tale. But the strangest part of this very strange story may be how much of it has come true.