Dugdale, "A Fierce Ambivalence"

[Dave Monroe]

... from John Dugdale, Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power
(London: Macmillan, 1990), Chapter 2, "V.," pp. 77-123.  The page
numbers within these excerpt are to pages in the various texts under
discussion.  Those after the excerpts are the page numbers in Dugdale
...

It seems reasonable to assume that the treatment of paranoia throughout
Pynchon's work relies on the discussion of the condition in three of
Freud's publications in the years before the Great War, namely the case
history of Schreber (1911), Totem and Taboo (1912-13) and On Narcissism:
An Introduction (1914); and that the characterisation of Stencil the
conspiracy-theorist is influenced by the figure of Schreber.  There are
many parallels between the two men (notably the latter's key fantasy of
transformation into a woman, cf. 'soul-transvestitism', 226) and  a
possible clue to the connection (the insistence on the Senatsprasident's
birthplace, Leipzig, as the city of Karl Baedeker and Mondaugen, 408,
229) but the supposition rests principally on the extent to which
Schreber anticipates Stencil's mediative status.  Reminiscent of Fascism
or other forms of autocracy in his megalomania, and his belief that the
conflict with the Enemy will result in the end of the world, he is also
a fantastic author, who sets out his fictions--delusional formations,
'deliria'--in his Denkwurdigkeiten [Memoirs of my Nervous Illness]
(1903).  He resembles moreover a Modernist author, uniting in himself,
as Stencil does, those aspects of Modernism with which the novel is
particularly concerned.  He is a 'true paranoid for whom all is
organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of
himself' (Lot 49, 89); he has eschatological longings and expectations,
which Freud compares to those of Isolde and faust; he invents an
imaginary system that explains everything in the world, described in the
case history as a myth.  Through the characterisation of Stencil, and
through his various stories and identities, Pynchon develops a
particular paranoia so that it becomes a parody of a modern political
leader, and a parody of the modern artist; but this potential is already
present in Schreber, the probable model--he can be found to be what
Stencil is.  (115-6)

In Lot 49 the urban world with which the novel is principally concerned,
San Narciso, is actually 'made up' by its paranoid founding father, and
is little more than the sum of his 'projects'.  In V. the domain of
tourism is referred to as '(let us be honest) a world if not created
then at least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig'
(408).  The conceit that it has been brought into being by books written
by someone from Schreber's birthplace enables Pynchon to hold together
the ideas of fiction and the city, to envisage the latter as if it were
the construction of an individual paranoid.  Related on one side to
Stencil's fantasies, and on the other to colonialism (cf. 'a colony of
the Kingdom of Death' [411]) and to Benny Profane's New York (cf. 'the
Street ... the Street's own' [409]), Baedeker-land looks forward to the
corresponding image of the superimposed world in Lot 49, which also has
a mediative status.  (119)

In Totem and Taboo Freud links Schreber to the primitive, and the
primitive in turn to the artist, who operates in the 'single field' in
our civilisation in which the narcissistic omnipotence of thought still
seems possible.  Pynchon reinforces the implicit association of Freud's
'autocratic' figure of the artist with paranoia; and expand the
constellation to include any 'power structure' (Lot 49, 110), any
political or corporate organisation.  (120)

... again, see ...

Schreber, Daniel Paul.  Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.
    New York: NYRB, 2000

Santner, Eric. L.  My Own Private Germany:
    Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity.
    Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.

I posted some excerpts from the latter here a while back, see ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0102&msg=186&sort=thread

Let me know ...