MDMD: Paranoia: What is a character?

[Paul Nightingale]

Terrance,

I find it difficult to regard characters in quite that way; 'they' are
elements in a fictional landscape, pretty much as descriptions of the
setting. Obviously, fictional elements known as - to pluck a name at
random - Mason or Dixon serve a purpose that we wouldn't (probably)
associate with non-human elements (where 'human' and 'non-human' become
agreeable fictions: think of Kafka's wonderful mole-narrator, or whatever it
is, in "The Burrow" or Robbe-Grillet's anthropomorphism).

So what purpose is served by saying a character is paranoid? They might
manifest, in the writing, aspects of paranoia; which is to say the author
has ascribed to them the appropriate symptoms. If Slothrop were a 'real
person' (I'm reliably informed they do exist, somewhere) I might be
concerned in anticipation of his likely behaviour; I might wish to avoid him
altogether, merely offering him the good advice to go and seek treatment (I
hope that doesn't sound unsympathetic, I suspect I really wouldn't want to
hold his hand). However, on the page, he remains a wonderful creation, one
of the great heroes of contemporary fiction. I keep coming back to paranoia,
as a fictional device, as Pynchon's way of ordering a narrative.

Certainly, I find this a better approach to understanding Chapter 5 in M&D
and I've tried to answer my own question: what is the function of paranoia
in the writing? Earlier I quoted (part of) Freud's discussion of paranoia in
Civilisation and its Discontents: in context, it is pretty clear that he is
using it as a vehicle for his thoughts on contemporary society. Whether or
not he is trustworthy as a scientist (as in: "Well, I think Jung got it
right on dreams") is of less interest to me; I prefer to think of him as a
producer of fictions (which doesn't mean I think he was 'lying'). In M&D, I
think it interesting that paranoia, the emergence of a plot that seeks to
manipulate Mason/Dixon, appears in Ch5, at the very moment when they, and
we, might speculate about this being the end of their adventure before it
has really begun. For Freud, one of the manifestations of paranoia was
precisely the reordering of events to suit the individual's highly
subjective outlook: they will "try to re-create the world, to build up in
its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated
and replaced by others that are in conformity with one's own wishes". For
Mason/Dixon, being removed from the 'stage of history' by a messy death at
sea would be "unbearable". Hence they will not dream of the battle; which
means they will not know if they've dreamed of it, the dream having been
repressed/lost to consciousness. they will prefer to think of the moment
they become, in the writing of the letter, the target of others' plotting.
What really happened (shitting themselves with fear) is replaced by a text
to be interpreted. And we shouldn't forget that all of this comes to us
courtesy of Cherrycoke: if Mason/Dixon are out of business, what are his
prospects?