Forget Conspiracy

[William Zantzinger]

--- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> DeLillo, and the Conventional Counterconspiracy
> Narrative," Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of
> Paranoia in Postwar America, ed. Peter Knight (New
> York: NYU Press, 2002), pp. 254-73 ...
> The plot of Gravity's Rainbow ... is driven by the
> protagonist's attempt to uncover a corporate
> conspiracy that has shaped his life.  This
> conspiracy
> ... seems, in turn, to be part of the strucural
> conspiracy of a capitalist order, which, the novel
> argues, has sponsored World War II as a means of
> profit enhancement, corporate consolidation, and
> globalization.  Conspiracies abound in Pynchon's
> other
> work as well ....


Some of the characters argue this or grope toward what
seems to be some sort of capitalist conspiracy and
some of the most paranoid narrators detail such a
conspiracy, extending it to every thing on both sides
of the Wall, but the novel doesn't argue anything.  


>    "Pynchon's and DeLillo's novels tend to rehearse
> and confirm many of the aspects of the 'official
> narrative' of conspiracy.  But they also sharply
> interrogate this narrative, suggesting that
> conspiracies are constitutive of rather than
> epiphenomenal to contemporary civilization, that the
> recommended strategies of counterconspiracy are
> designed to perpetuate conspiratorial power, not to
> eleiminate it, and that, in order to resist
> conspiracy
> at all, we must learn, paradoxically, to 'forget'
> it."
> (pp. 254-5)

Right, but this is not quite possible for the
characters in Pynchon's novels. Paranoia, making
connections or  conspiracy is how the characters make
sense of their worlds. Forgetting would amount to
anti-paranoia and that kind of forgetting is a midless
pleasure the characters can't stand for very long. 
even in the temporary anarchy of the zone, forgetting
is a dangerous mental activity.  It causes Slothrop,
for example, to become cold. Chracters that
paradoxically forget, can not even know the difference
between the evil of the Holocaust and the good of
saving children from death. Paranoia is required,
connections are needed so that the characters can make
sense of the world. 
> 
>    "Given the grip of conspiratorial forces on
> virtually every aspect of the civilization, Pynchon
> and DeLillo suggest, efforts to expose and eliminate
> these forces are doomed to fail...." (p. 257)
> 
>    "If analysis is so compromised as a weapon of
> resistance, then a narrative of counterconspiracy
> that
> commits one to its procedures is cruelly disabling. 
> Even to begin untangling the conspiratorial web,
> Pynchon repeatedly insists, one may have to embrace
> modes of knowledge outlawed by the conventional
> codes
> of counterconspiracy, which celebrate the power of
> enlightened thought ... to penetrate the darkness of
> conspiracy...." (p. 258)
> 
>    "The strong implication of these texts, then, is
> that the directions for resistance encoded in
> conspiracy fiction are instruments of conspiracy
> itself, formulas that trap us in conspiracy and make
> effective resistance (or separation) impossible...."
> (p. 258)

There is no way out! 

> 
>    "To focus relentlessly on conpiracies and their
> dismantling is, in these passages, a waste of time. 
> But what else might one be doing ...?  A possible
> answer surfaces in Gravity's Rainbow.... the
> alternatives are frankly theistic, if in a pagan
> mode....  No negative theology here: Pynchon, like
> William James ... prefers to project a pluralistic
> universe ....  The whole tradition of philosophical
> secularism, he repeatedly sugests ... is an
> instrument
> of an 'order of Analysis and Death' (GR, 722) that
> is
> virtually coterminous with actually existing
> post-Enlightenment civilization.  Its delimitations
> of
> the real ... all function to keep us confined within
> a
> fiction of the real that makes us amenable to all
> sorts of manipulation and deprives us of all sorts
> of
> resources for resistance." (pp. 258-9)

Not sure about that theistic pagan mode, but no doubt
about it, paranoia is a religious/mock-religious thing
for these characters. 

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