The Influence of Pynchon's Paranoia or Postulations for Paranoid

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

Was listening to WNYC and re-reading AGTD some more, when a program on
the influence of Melville's Moby-Dick ("Call Me Influential")  caught
my ear. After 150-odd years-- and we should remember that M-D was a
failure, Melville only "discovered and constructed by the academy"
begiinning in the 1920s-- Moby-Dick continues to inspire songs, poems
operas, dramas, paintings, sculptures, musical compositions around the
world and so on. The program asked why? Why has such a difficult
nearly biblical text inspired and continue to engender so many
incredible works of art?

I wonder too, why Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has not influenced
more works of art. And, why Pynchon has inspired so many. And, why has
Pynchon has been such a darling of the academics? Has been? A has been
Pynchon? Hmmmmph. Yeah, as George Harrison sez, All Things Must Pass.
IV simply makes it easier for the academy to move on. The demand for
flesh and blood characters, for hearts that beat ... for a little more
paranoid world and a lot less of the sophomoric sex with sheep stuff
has more to do with a shift in the academy than anything Pynchon has
done for them lately.

That much despised critic for the NYT admires DFW's flesh and blood.
She can enjoy the antics they hysterical prose and not feel cheated
out of a beating heart. Wood, hate him if you like, is the kid. Did
anyone else notice that Weisneburger and Kraft were interviewd by
THEIR Newspaper the Wall Street Journal? ;------------)


In her fascinating artcle, "On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World
System," Emily Apter identifies and examines the paranoid canon of
American paranoid fiction: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe,
William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison,
and Joan Didion are among the legions of American writers who also
warrant inclusion in the canon of American paranoid fiction," a canon
she says Pynchon is the postmodern catalyst for.

"Paranoia consistently emerges as a preeminent topos in major works of
the post-World War II American canon. Taken together, Thomas Pynchon's
V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973),
Don DeLillo's The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao
II (1991), and Underworld (1997), John Kennedy O'Toole's The
Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Philip Roth's The Plot Against America
(2004), and William T. Vollmann's fictional panoplies of conquest and
fear in American history (from the Seven Dreams project to his
polemical magnum opus Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on
Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means [2003]) suggest narrative
articulations of oneworldedness that enshrine paranoia as the
preferred trope of national allegory.  Pynchon remains the catalyst;
his invention of a literature of conspiracy steeped in the ethos of
CIA operatives, McCarthyism, cybernetics, and hallucinogenic drugs
takes paranoia beyond Cold War spy fiction and into the realm of a new
literarity. The interior monologues of Oedipa Maas, Pynchon's addled
protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, invariably construct paranoia as
a world system:

Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge and/or Leonard, baby, she
advised her reflection in the half-light of that afternoon's vanity
mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have
stumbled, indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids,
onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; 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; maybe
even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of
surprise to life, that harrows the head of everything American you
know, and you too sweetie. 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 posthorns all over San Francisco, bribing
of librarians, hiring of professional actors. . . . Or you are
fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut Oedipa, out of
your skull. (140–41)

"They," used as a free-standing sentence, confirms the cybernetic
on-off, us-them circuit board to which paranoid thinking is hardwired,
dissolving the discrete limits of an autonomous self, abolishing
mechanisms of agency, and internalizing the schizoid "ontology of the
enemy" (identified by Peter Galison with reference to Norbert Weiner's
cybernetic war games).4 Oedipa's mind no longer distinguishes where it
begins or ends, whether it posits a thought, or whether it is being
thought by the network of "X number of Americans." Either way, this
cognitive oneworldism is exitless. As has been oft-noted, Pynchon
draws on theories of biofeedback, quantum mechanics, Fibonacci
sequences, behaviorism, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence,
black boxes, game systems, and probability theory hatched in the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s by Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, John von
Neumann, Oscar Morgenstern, Warren Weaver, Claude Shannon, Anatol
Rapoport, and Marshall McLuhan among others. The writing of Pynchon
and DeLillo, one could argue, is as much a symptom of this postwar
paranoid culture as its literary archive. Their work imports into
literature the mesh of cognitive modeling and conspiratorial globalism
that gives rise to theories of paranoid planetarity.

Pynchonesque paranoia imbued a host of films made in the 1960s and
1970s (many of them the subject of recent revivals) that cued their
plot structures to patterns of narrative encirclement and psychic
targeting, mushrooming out of the brains of scientists, politicians,
and hapless employees. They included the original 1962 version of the
Manchurian Candidate directed by John Frankenheimer; Alan Pakula's The
Parallax View (1974); the Watergate classic All the President's Men
(1976); Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman
as a wiretapper who dismantles his own apartment in a fit of debugging
mania; Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) in which
Robert Redford must solve why everyone in his foreign embassy is being
assassinated; and Peter Hyam's Capricorn One (1978), in which three
astronauts simulate a landing on Mars to be telemetrically broadcast
by NASA as part of a plot to keep a flawed space program funded. In
all these films the world is large insofar as it is small, that is to
say, susceptible to being shrunken to the scale of a human mind that
anamorphically images the twisted byways of preemptive government
intelligence operations and counter-maneuver. The films anticipate
Dotcom-era visions of the all-controlling network society, typified by
Manuel Castells's critique in The Information Age: Economy, Society,
and Culture (1996) of network enterprises (lateral rather than
vertical corporate organizational systems), McKenzie Wark's A Hacker
Manifesto (2004) a paean to information piracy whose
capitalism-inverting motto is "We do not own what we produce—it owns
us," as well as the late artist Mark Lombardi's diagrams of global
scandals of the 1980s and 1990s that painstakingly "follow the money"
through offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and pyramid schemes.

Now, as then, paranoia assumes the guise of a delusional democracy
buoyed by cascading national cataclysms: the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy
and King assassinations, Kent State, the FBI hunt for Black Panthers,
Symbionese Liberation Army and Weather Underground radicals,
Watergate, Iran-Contra, Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, and 9/11. As
the second-term Bush administration [End Page 368] continues to act in
the name of an ill-founded hypothesis that American-style democracy
exports readily to Islamic countries, a new form of manifest destiny
has emerged that builds on a mandate for open-ended war justified by
an unfathomably deep sense of injury, a conviction that the entire
life of the world would not be enough to compensate for 9/11. A group
psychosis of defense has taken hold, defined by a homeland security
apparatus committed to invasive forms of domestic policing; economic
priorities that ensure the diversion of the world's resources to
military spending; the suspension of civil liberties in Guantánamo and
Iraq, top-down judicial authorizations of vote-rigging; a rampant
unilateralism that flouts the Geneva Conventions and the Kyoto
Protocols; and the cynical use of a "war on terror" to impose "a state
of emergency" that suffers few legal restraints.

Paranoia has returned with a vengeance as the ordre du jour in the
aftermath of 9/11 and in the more immediate wake of Mark Felt's
revelations in spring 2005 of his role as "Deep Throat" in the
Watergate era. The memory of Watergate brings back the incredible
images of a Nixon White House biting its own tail: recording the very
tapes that would be used to prove criminal charges and authorizing the
FBI to investigate its own cover-up of the Watergate break-in. The
paradigm here resembles that of the leaf insect described by Jacques
Lacan, disguising itself as a leaf in order to hide from birds,
thereby inviting predators that feast on leaves. Current
administration policy replays the Watergate scenario insofar as it
justifies its worst fears by setting up the conditions whereby those
worst fears will be realized. We have been exhorted by Washington to
connect the dots, to posit connections between weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and the World Trade Center attacks, to see
"shadowy" global networks of jihadists masking themselves as ordinary
citizens, to upgrade Palestinian terrorist groups to the status of
international terrorism, or to decipher what Richard A. Clarke called
a "worldwide political conspiracy masquerading as a religious sect"
(qtd in Raban 24).5 In this scheme, what we are told is connected is
rivaled only by what we are asked to believe is not connected: there
is apparently no link between oil and the Iraq invasion, no
coincidence between electioneering politics and war, no cause–effect
relationship between the media-hyped epistemology of insecurity and
the abrogation of civil liberties, no common thread of sadism between
Iraqi and US treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This logic of
nonconnectivity condemns you as a paranoid if you suspect that the
case for war is less than solid, and doubts your credibility if you
fail to see that only when it comes to terrorism are all the dots
connected. Ultimately, though, such connect/do-not-connect injunctions
rely on the same conspiratorial logic of supranational oneworldedness.
This [End Page 369] is a globalism in which there are no front lines
in war, in which civilian and military cultures are interchangeable,
in which quotidian gestures and words invite surcodage ("just some
alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence" in the
words of one of DeLillo's characters [DeLillo, Mao II 77]), and in
which "thinking like the enemy" (to the point of being "thought" as
the enemy would think you) locks the mind into a loop of
intersubjective projection that brooks no outside world.6 In this
picture, as the world expands to include everybody, it paradoxically
shrinks into a claustrophobic all-inclusiveness. Paranoid
oneworldedness obeys a basic law of entropy that posits that increased
disorder diminishes available energy within the confines of a closed
system.

On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System
Emily Apter,  Am Lit Hist.2006; 18: 365-389