Simons: Postmodern Paranoia? Pynchon and Jameson

[jbor at bigpond.com]

'Postmodern Paranoia? Pynchon and Jameson' by Jon Simons.
_Paragraph_ 23.2, 2000, pp. 207-221. (pdf)

Excerpts:
"This essay is an exercise in the reversal of interpretation. It begins 
by presenting and applying a theoretical interpretative framework, 
provided in this case by Fredric Jameson's notions of the postmodern 
sublime and the paranoia associated with it, to one of the novels of 
Thomas Pynchon, _The Crying of Lot 49_, with more occasional references 
to _Gravity's Rainbow_. The essay then turns against this usual 
practice, arguing not only that such a Jamesonian reading is 
inappropriate, but that Jameson's approach to understanding or 
cognitively mapping the contemporary world is deeply problematic. So, 
rather than applying Jameson to Pynchon to read off postmodern 
pathologies that prevent representation of the world, I use a Pynchon 
theoretically reinforced by his commentators and Nietzsche to criticize 
Jameson.

My argument is that Jameson's insistence on the very possibility of 
total and untranscendable cognition of the world understood as a single 
system is inimical to his political aim of interpreting the world in 
order to change it. [...] Jameson's excessive ambitions for his Marxist 
science undermine the possibilities for political action. (207)

Jameson's commitment to total theory can be understood as a paranoid 
reading of the text of the contemporary world. It must, he says, be 
'understood that social life is in its fundamental reality one and 
indivisible'. Under the systematic totality of the mode of production, 
as in Pynchon's paranoia, '*everything is connected*'. McHale (among 
others) argues that Pynchon engages our paranoid tendencies as readers 
to prove to ourselves that 'everything is connected'. This 'drive for 
certitude' has also led good modernist literary critics to 'ascribe ... 
a greater degree of ontological stability to the fictional world than 
the text actually warrants'. [...]" (216)

It is faith in the sublime authority of his Marxist science which leads 
Jameson to his own paranoia. [...]" (217)

It's a very interesting essay.

best