Paranoia and the Normalization of the Deviant Psychic Fringe

[Mark Kohut]

Fine find, esp. the linking of a sentence/word of Laing's---I had read of him as a possible source---with a sentence of Pynchon's...."constellation'....TRPs genius, as with other writers of genius, does take this or that bit/word/notion and combine, redefine,---with him, carry to a "crazy" comic-logic end---.

Shall I project a World?...is in Eliade on how indigenous societies see religion....and 'projection' is also a psychoanalytic word/concept....

A-And:
"which works “to endow the present age itself” with what Fredric Jameson labels “an impalpable but omnipresent culture of paranoia”.........

In the Vienna section of Against the Day, I think we learn how and when
paranoia became an omnipresent part of our [Western] culture......


--- On Thu, 11/6/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: Paranoia and the Normalization of the Deviant Psychic Fringe
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, November 6, 2008, 9:19 AM
> 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/