Bersani - Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature (was: O'Donnell, "Postmodernity and the Symptom of Paranoia")

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at hotmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: <jp4321 at IDT.NET>
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 6:48 PM
Subject: O'Donnell, "Postmodernity and the Symptom of Paranoia"


>
> Bersani, Leo.  "."
>    Representations 25 (1989): 9-118
>
> ... which I do not have at hand
>

So some quotes and thoughts. The essay is great fun and indicates that our
shared interest and making theories about Pynchon's novels here shows to
some degree we're all paranoid (he he he). Moreover it seems to suggest that
paranoia is the natural state of affairs.

Bersani begins with a comparison of how Freud and Pynchon define paranoia,
stating that any "(.) novel that uses the word paranoia as frequently (.) is
likely to make the reader somewhat paranoid about the very frequency of its
use" (99) and he remarks that Pynchon even made a verb out of the word (GR
295).

But if Bersani is right then this must go for other words too, and the most
frequent word is, "as if everyone knew: 'death.'" (GR 32). So paranoia and
death, the paranoia of dying is (at least partly) what GR is about?

"Freud explained paranoia as a defense against a desired homosexual
 "attack," (.) potential benefits of interpretative control are dramatically
illustrated by the ease with which Dr. Schreber, the subject of Freud's most
celebrated analysis, transcends his paranoid anxiety and even changes a plot
of cosmic hostility into an epic of cosmic self-centering. God's desire to
use Schreber as a "wife" in order to engender a new race rewrites
catastrophe as apotheosis (.)" (99).

Interestingly this guy Schreber is mentioned at the very beginning of the
"Anti-Oedipus" by Deleuze-Guattari too: "Himmelsarsch" (italics by D-G, Anti
Ödipus: Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie I, Frankfurt, 1974, 1977, p. 7) and
his paranoia looks a bit like Slothrop's, who realizes that he might been
under surveillance for long (GR 333) and fears that there's someone/thing
out there in heaven/sky who/that is after him (GR 25).

We get the nice binary opposition of truth and delusion here, Freud, in
defending himself against the accusation "of having lifted his theory from
Schreber's book" (100) asks if a theory developed out of the delusions of a
paranoid person can deliver any truth. Bersani quotes his answer and we have
to thank him for this remarkable binary sentence from Freud's pen, making
theory a synonym for truth:

"It remains for the future (.) to decide whether there is more delusion in
my theory that I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in
Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe."
(Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia
[Dementia Paranoides], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols., [London, 1953-74],
12:78-79, Bersani p. 100), [S. Freud: Über einen autobiographisch
beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia, GW Bd. VIII, S. 285].

Bersani remarks that if Freud's theory about paranoia is the "truth" about
this delusion it necessarily must be a replication of those delusions. More,
if he hasn't "stolen" the theory but developed himself does this mean that
he himself is paranoid too? The making of theories already a symptom of
paranoia - what a nice conclusion:

Freud's concluding remarks bizarrely suggest that there is some ordering
truth of paranoia-of paranoia as distinct from the classificatory and
theoretical discourse that in fact constitures it-different from both
paranoid ravings and theories of paranoia (.) as if the "truth" of paranoia
might turn out to be that theory is always a paranoid symptom (.) that (.)
psychoanalytic discourse (.) may be nothing more than a manifestation of
paranoid behavior" (100-101).

This is, according to Bersani, exactly how Pynchon deals with the concept of
paranoia. It's a "reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible" (GR
219), the noteworthy discovery of the paranoid that " everything is
connected, everything in the creation" (GR 820) is put into comparison to
and shown as the symptoms of a disease. What Pynchon is doing here too is
showing how all those transcendental beliefs of cosmic unity and
connectedness which were very prominent among his readers when the book came
out first have another side too. On the other hand this goes for Puritanism
with the concept of predestination too from which all the hippies seeked to
escape. All these theoretical constructs can be deconstructed to paranoid
symptoms this way, in fact are doing so themselves (like Freud's theory
itself does) if taken seriously.

But what would be the consequences for our lives if we knew for sure there
is no such thing like transcendence, Bersani asks:

"Would we ever want a life without paranoid terror? "If there is something
comforting-religious, if you want-about paranoia, there is still also
anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many
of us can bear for long" (506). Not only that: to escape from paranoia would
be to escape from the movement that is life" (103).
Pynchon may call this comforting thought religious, in my opinion he means
it in fact the other way round: he is speaking about the agnostic modern
feeling of absurdity because if nothing is connected where is the sense of
it all? Technically he's speaking about chaos, no order at all, the end of
the universe if it's an open and not a closed system, one of those questions
that can't be answered by scientists, minus 273° - the possibility of an
"Absolute Zero" (GR 3) we've encountered already at the beginning of the
novel, or, as Bersani later says:

"(.) the major anxiety provoked by Gravity's Rainbow is ontological rather
than epistologocial" (107).

Bersani calls to attention a piece of text where Pynchon speculates about
the possibility that through technology a degree of control could be
attained that up to now, at least in the imagination, was limited to the
Gods or that subconscious area we are not controlling according to Freud.
Strange enough a priest, the jesuit Father Rapier says this:

"Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain
degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over
for good" (GR 627).

I've mentioned Slothop's Puritan forefathers, Bersani hasn't forgotten them
and relates their belief to modern information techniques. The undeniable,
according to Bersani inevitable paranoia they can emerge echoes older models
and patterns:

"The Pychonian opposition between They (IG Farben etc.) and We (Slothrop,
Mexico, Pirate Prentice, etc.) is a replay of the opposition of Slothrop's
Puritan forefather's polarity of the Elect and the Preterite. Information
control is the contemporary version of God's eternal knowledge of each
individual's ultimate damnation or salvation, and both theology and computer
technology naturally produce paranoid fears about how we are hooked into the
system, about the connections it has in store for us." (103)

There's some more about the text behind the text (105ff.), about "what
happens when data resist the ordering process" (104) like the novel itself
which "resists analysis-that is, being broken down into distinct units of
meaning" (113), what Bersani calls the main result of any interpretation of
this novel.

regards

Otto