am i paranoid?

[Seb Thirlway]

From: michael baird <shotgunbilly2 at hotmail.com>

[snip]
>now [my brother] is diagnosed and treated as paranoid
schizophrenic. at the moment he
>is doing quite well, but when he was in the throes of his
'sickness'
>(forgive all of the quotations, but i use them in recognition of
the fact
>that these terms are loaded with heaps and mounds of cultural
bias), his
>delusional system was so complete that he believed he was the
only 'real'
>person alive.
>he now remembers telephone conversations we had where he thought
i was a
>mere robot of his brother sent by god to fool him. etc, etc...
>
>it was him who, a few years before, had turned me onto pynchon.
i remain in
>love with the beauty of his writing, however i am not
impressed with his
>depictions of paranoia in GR, or CL49. nowhere does it seem to
ring true
>with the shit-in-your-drawers desparation in whose grip my
brother was held
>for so long. instead it seems rather a speculative exploration
and or
>exageration of your above-average joe's quotidian paranoia. that
is great,
>but it seems to deserve some other name than paranoia.

"Operational paranoia" perhaps?  There's a passage very early on
in the book where someone (Tantivy, I think) sets out this idea
very clearly: just that feeling like that, that the V-2 has your
name on it for instance, can be a useful fiction.  Clearly we're
not talking about the kind of desperation your brother went
through here - or is Tantivy misunderstanding just how disturbed
Slothrop is by it?

At that point my sympathies are with Slothrop, and while Tantivy
is genuinely trying to help he doesn't seem to be engaging with
exactly what Slothrop is going through.  It's hard to recall just
how convincing the earlier depictions of paranoia in GR are at
this point in the Group Read, by which time paranoia has become
more and more playful, and the paranoiacs more and more aware
that their paranoia is a device (something they're doing, rather
than something that's doing them).  It's very easy to read GR for
the nth time and bear this in mind from the start - which makes
Slothrop's more intense paranoia something you read and take in
your stride.

Mind you, you're right, I don't ever see Slothrop's paranoia
getting in his way - quite the opposite.  I think we _are_
talking about two different things if we talk about your brother
on the one hand and Slothrop on the other.
One thing about the paranoia in GR is that it _may_ be thoroughly
justified, and it's not just the paranoiac but the reader as well
who thinks so: Pynchon presents enough evidence outside the
paranoiacs' minds to make you wonder whether maybe there isn't a
Them controlling what looks like the anarchy of the Zone.  For
this reason the GR paranoiacs don't ever get rid of their
paranoia - there's no moment where they say "I was imagining it,
I know it's not true now, I was just paranoid".  They just give
up on it, as if they'll never know whether they were just
paranoid or not.  Or maybe TRP just stops telling us about it.
Or maybe (and I think this is closer to the text) paranoia just
becomes something to deal with as a not very interesting or
promising fact of daily life, like rain or a bad knee.

You mentioned your brother's "delusional system".  I've no idea
how it felt, whether it was a system that gave all the answers
(just strange ones) - but if so that would make it different from
what TRP is writing about as well, and make Pynchon's paranoia
something else in other way: in GR no paranoiac has all the
answers, the System that explains all is not in them but Out
There, and occasionally gives a glimpse of itself.  If the
Pynchon-paranoiacs are obsessive or have a conviction about
anything, it's not the truth of their System - because they
haven't grasped it yet -  it's about trying to get hold of a
System which they see hints of here and there.  Pynchon-paranoia
comes as questions, disquieting questions that you can't stop
wondering about, rather than convictions that take hold of you.
I suppose that's why it doesn't cause trouble for the characters
in GR: the paranoia is kept internal and is rarely if ever
voiced, because the Pynchon-paranoiac thinks he's got the answer
or maybe the Answer but he's just not sure.

Mason's obsession with his dead wife (is that what you were
referring to in M&D?) is much closer to the sort of paranoia
you're talking about, if I understand you right.




seb