(Fwd) Re: Trust-Love, Paranoia-Chaos, Leni
Thomas Vieth
whoge at hotmail.com
Fri Aug 1 06:58:04 CDT 1997
I've read a dissertation once where TRP's approach to paranoia was
qualified as "operational paranoia", probably meaning he uses this
concept as a literary tool of sorts.
Thomas Vieth
Down with Triolahidi
Long live Hollerodullyo
----Original Message Follows----
Subject: Re: (Fwd) Re: Trust-Love, Paranoia-Chaos, Leni
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 97 10:16:50 -0700
From: David Casseres <casseres at apple.com>
To: "Pynchon list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Byrnes Weir sez
> An unusual paranoid: Salvador Dali.
> He either stole or said: Paranoids? They are always right.
The first time I read Gravity's Rainbow, I was hanging out with a buddy
who was a doctor, working in emergency rooms. We talked about paranoia
and he told me that on the one hand there's a popular notion of
paranoia,
which gets picked up and amplified in literature, and then there's
clinical paranoia that you see in the emergency room, in the
psychiatrist's office, and in the mental hospitals.
He said the two are completely different things; that the essential
thing
in clinical paranoia isn't the delusions of persecution or the
perception
of conspiracies, but a particular sort of solipsism -- the perception of
the entire universe as revolving about the paranoid, motivated solely in
terms of the paranoid. Who therefore needs to control the entire thing;
this is what leads to delusions of persecution, of course, when he's
unable to feel in control, which is often. The need for control fits in
with paranoids' being well in control of all the quotidian details, the
credit cards, the memorized numbers, usw., while being in agony because
nothing else is under control. My friend emphasized that this is a
horrible condition, a life of pain and terror.
But it fits with being "always right," and I think there is a connection
between this paranoia-as-an-illness and the "paranoid personality" that
we often see in Pynchon. I think it's interesting that Slothrop, who
has
perhaps the best reasons for feeling conspired against -- like, he *is*
-- isn't particularly "paranoid"; he's more innocent than that.
But Slothrop's story is a "paranoid story," if you will; and many a
reader goes through most of the book feeling that everything is a
conspiracy of some sort, centered on Slothrop, and Pynchon constantly
plays with things like the "Proverbs for Paranoids." But look what
happens: Slothrop actually fades out of sight as if to prove to us that
everything *isn't* all about him, which by that time we already realize
pretty clearly. We've been shown that the actual conspiracy of Them is
so vast and so universal that it hardly makes sense to think of it as
conspiracy -- it's just the way things are, the way They work. And who
is it that has the big flashy almost-funny paranoid break? It's poor
Roger Mexico, so injured in love that yes, maybe everything *is* about
him in his own universe, but who hasn't really been *personally*
conspired against in any big way.
Pynchon offers a very direct explanation of what he means by and about
paranoia when he tells us that it's just the onset, the leading edge, of
the perception that Everything is Connected. In other words, it's not
the whole story at all, and a paranoid is someone who is stuck there at
the leading edge, unable to explore the connections any further and find
out, perhaps, that somewhere there's a Soul in Ev'ry Stone.
Cheers,
David
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