MDMD Chapter 5: Paranoia

[John Bailey]

Aaaah. Didn't take long for the old Pynchonian Paranoid Ponderings to begin, 
and Chapter 5 marks the first really serious musings on the machinations of 
Higher Forces by our dynamic duo. Mason & Dixon begin to wonderwhy they were 
sent on a doomed mission, and it appears to me, at least with the amount of 
information we are provided with *within* the novel, that Conclusions Are 
Being Leapt To. This is not the carefully reasoned, horribly and inhumanely 
logical description of sinister plots such as we find in COL49, or esp. GR. 
It feels more like a writer's habit to me, an old coat that fits so well 
even if it's lost its external shape.

Although it does complicate matters for the writers who have linked 
Pynchonian Paranoia to a specific post-war sensibility, unless we either see 
it as a) something Pynchon has no control over, as in he really IS paranoid, 
the writer I mean (not a very popular opinion) or b) M&D isn't about 
colonial times at all, but is about OUR times. I'm of the opinion that M&D 
is about many times. That's why time is such an important recurring trope in 
the book. Watches, clocks, calendars, memories, histories etc. But is 
Pynchon universalising Paranoia? I don't know.

I just...don't know.

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