Paranoia and the Normalization of the Deviant Psychic Fringe

[Dave Monroe]

Paranoia and the Normalization of the Deviant Psychic Fringe
Kevin Hilke

Wednesday, 11. 5. 2008  –

Ms. Oedipa Maas, protagonist of Thomas Pynchon's 1965 novella The
Crying of Lot 49, in the process of executing the sizeable estate of
her former boyfriend, California real-estate mogul Pierce Inverarity,
stumbles upon or imagines, all on her own or courtesy of Pierce's
pre-death machinations, Trystero: a long-established underground
organization of mail couriers whose power has killed off, figuratively
and literally, Thurn and Taxis, the dominant European mail service
from 1290 to 1867, and the early U.S. private posts, Wells, Fargo, and
the Pony Express. Trystero's geographic and temporal scopes extend
frighteningly from the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire to Oedipa's
present in the 1960s, postwar United States, where Trystero
capitalizes on atmospheric mistrust of the federal government to set
itself up as a rival to the national communication network controlled
by the government, the United States Postal Service.

All this, of course, only if there is a Trystero: Oedipa's haphazard
investigation into the matter, which takes her up and down the
California coast between Berkeley and Los Angeles, is inconclusive.
Early on she supposes that "[e]ither Trystero [does] exist, in its own
right, or" that she has "presumed, perhaps fantasized" its existence.
Weeks later she is little further, telling herself

Either you have stumbled indeed […] onto a network by which X number
of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies,
recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the
official government delivery system […]. Or you are hallucinating it.
Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate,
involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant
surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over
San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors
and Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of
the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your
non-legal mind to know even though you are co-executor, so
labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke.
Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut,
Oedipa, out of your skull.

"Those," the narrator tells us, "now that she was looking at them,"
were "the alternatives": either genuine global conspiracy,
manufactured global conspiracy, or pure hallucination; either "some
Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or […] just
America, and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she
could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an
alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia."
Paranoia—springing not from the notion that there is a Trystero but
from the notion that there could be; springing from the unrelenting
tension of either, or.

This paranoia is an integral part of the bulk of readings of The
Crying of Lot 49, which works "to endow the present age itself" with
what Fredric Jameson labels "an impalpable but omnipresent culture of
paranoia" through a sustained effort to "contaminate its readers" with
an analogous paranoia—taking them along with Oedipa as she becomes
less and less sure about the constitution and character of her mind
and her world. Pynchon's scrupulous adherence to the historical record
will likely contribute to this paranoia for readers who choose to
check his tale against the history books. Nearly every piece of
historical information offered in The Crying of Lot 49 is historically
accurate, and those that are not (such as mistaking or misrepresenting
the date of an event by a few years) are largely inconsequential. And
as Manfred Puetz details in his "Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot
49: the World is a Tristero System," Thurn and Taxis did develop and
die out almost precisely as Pynchon presents; and though there is no
known history of a "Trystero" by name, the historical Thurn and Taxis
did have rivals that plagued them precisely as Trystero does in
Pynchon's text. It would be easy, in light of the substantial
similarities between Oedipa's world and our own, to become, like
Jameson's reader, contaminated with our own Pynchonian paranoia.
Puetz, for his part, turns to medical science to find a way to cast
this paranoia as a disorder, to explain it away by assigning it an
etiology, and finds a man he characterizes as a version of Oedipa's
Nazi-turned-Freudian psychoanalyst Dr. Hilarius (Oedipa: "I came […]
hoping you would talk me out of a fantasy"; Hilarius: "Cherish it!"):
the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst R.D. Laing, who maintains
"that so-called mental illness is not some mysterious inner
disruption, primarily caused by internal failures, but rather stems
from an outer constellation of things" (Pynchon: "[Oedipa] would give
them order, she would create constellations"; Oedipa: "Shall I project
a world?"), "the contradictory and mutually exclusive demands of which
force a patient into absurd reactions we then label from a vantage
point of assumed 'normality' as insane." If our paranoia is a
psychological disorder, that is, then its etiology may well be
external, calculated, and systemic. Thus, as David Foster Wallace
says, does Pynchon "reorient our view of paranoia from deviant psychic
fringe to central thread." Oedipa might be paranoid, but then again,
so might we.

http://plasmapool.org/2008/11/05/paranoia-and-the-normalization-of-the-deviant-psychic-fringe/