Paranoid Interference on Maxine's Antennas (Kurt Mondaugen revisited)

[Fiona Shnapple]

I think Maxine is paranoid.

What kind of paranoia does she suffer from?

What has this paranoia to do with the economy (late capitalism?)? In
the Kugelblitzian system, psychological depression and the Great
Depression shared a cycle.

How is her current stage of psycho-sexual development or middle age
paranoia in the Kugelblitzian System, an effect and continuation of
her sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood sage?

The novel makes much of her entry-level adulthood and explains
Maxine's attraction, and indeed,  the attraction of several women,
including Heidi and Vyrva to males who play a part in a high school
drama that has two male types that take girls for two very different
rides. The choice of mate problem or conflict is never quite resolved,
though the  dei ex machina or the business cycles, like leading
indicators, push the women on to new plot lines and acts.

All that aside, there is something malfunctioning in Maxine's
antennas. She thinks she has a gift, but does she? Lots of other
characters do. The magic delivery guy. Horst. Heidi. The Nose. But
does Maxine have a gift, antennas as she likes to fancy them? And if
so, isn't there something interfering with the signals she's picking
up? At the end of novel we see so much of Maxine's apparent gift is
little more than paranoia. And, the conclusions she reaches for are
wrong. She misreads and misjudges people. Not good if your an
investigator. She's defensive and insecure. She's too quick to take
ethnic offense, even from idiot zealots like the cab driver. She
thinks people from the West Coast are slow, but the irony is that
she's the slow one. Slow to figure out what lots of other people, many
of them transplants from places much further  away than The Valley.

Why can't Maxine read the zeroes and ones? It's not like she's in SW Africa.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l