O'Donnell, Latent Destinies

[Dave Monroe]

... well, first off, Happy Thanksgiving, at LEAST to those celebrating
it today, and then some.  Does that explain the slowdown here?  At least
amongst the US contingent?  Between the election and the holiday ...
anyway, I'm giving thanks today not only to coworkers for bringing me
dinner, but also to Duke University Press for sending me a complete copy
(had been missing several chapters worth of endnotes, as well as an
index, so, if you get it, check) of Patrick O'Donnell's  Latent
Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Durham:
Duke UP, 2000), from which ...

Cultural paranoia can be seen as a symptomatic response to these
contradictions [of gender, race, sexuality, nation, historical epoch],
operating through an elision of temporality and a fantasizing of
historical centrality in which, for example, self an nation become
one.   In the identificatory fantasies of cultural paranoia, history
become sthe conspiratorial siting of the confluence of destinies where
the latent omnipotence of the "individual"--an empowerment underwritten
by the abailability and flow of capital--become storied into the
narrative of nation or its displacements in other narraitives of
identity.  (12-3)

Haecceitic temporality, or the segmentation of time into dispersed
instances whole unto themselves that randomly intersect and cohere into
events, is the material of a conspiratorial, destinal history founded on
the retrospective forging of connections between those scattered
instances.  Such a view of temporality both withholds and promises to
reveal the one, true, secret history of the real--the latent
destiny--that was always there, awiting discovery by the canny witness,
participant, or historian.  Postmodernist senses of identity as multiple
and fluid, both at the periphery and yet the center of disconnected
events awaiting amalgamation in a revelatory history, constitute the
agency of cultural paranoia ... (147)

... history under this rubric is merely the totalized backdrop--a
"homogeneous, empty time" that could be characterized as a
spatiotemporal collage of particular instances--for the titanic struggle
between them and us as these agenting tags become attached to the
mobilities of self, party, clan, or nation.  (ibid.)

Again, O'Donnell was the editor of Cambridge UP's New Essays on The
Crying of Lot 49 (q.v.).  Latent Destinies, of course, covers TCOL49 as
well (via Jean-Joseph Goux, of all people), as well as Don DeLillo's
Libra and Underworld, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, Norman
Mailer's The Executioner's Song and Oswald's Tale, and such films as
JFK, Reservoir Dogs, The Truman Show and Groundhog Day (!).  Have been
skipping around, but, so far, so good.  Also, saw a trailer today for a
forthcoming film (Finding Forrester) in which Sean Connery plays a
reclusive writer, albeit more Salinger than Pynchon, I suspect ...