Pynchon & The Death of Truth.

[Matt Bormet]

Tangentially related, Hofstadter's (posthumous) America At 1750 is a good
read for background on the culture presented in M&D, particularly the Great
Awakening. Here's the NYT review:
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/21/archives/america-at-1750-a-social-portrait-by-richard-hofstadter-293-pp-new.html

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de
> wrote:

> Paranoia as "heated exaggeration", yes. Not necessarily right-wing,
> according to Hofstadter, yes.
>
> Here is the opening paragraph of Hofstadter's essay that Kakutani is
> referring to:
>
> 'American politics has often been an arena for
> angry minds: In recent years we have seen angry
> minds at work mainly among extreme rightwingers,
> who have now demonstrated in the
> Goldwater movement how much political leverage
> can be got out of the animosities and passions of
> a small minority. But behind this I believe there
> is a style of mind that is far from new and
> that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the
> paranoid style simply because no other word
> adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration,
> suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy
> that I have in mind. In using the expression
> "paranoid style" I am not speaking in a clinical
> sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other
> purposes. I have neither the competence nor the
> desire to classify any figures of the past or
> present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea
> of the paranoid style as a force in politics would
> have little contemporary relevance or historical
> value if it were applied only to men with profoundly
> disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid
> modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the
> phenomenon significant.'
>
> Note that Hofstadter uses the term "conspiratorial fantasy" which is much
> better than "conspiracy theory". The meaning of the latter has developed
> over time as to include both reasonable theories about conspiracies and mad
> fantasies about chemtrails and reptiles, thereby making it possible to
> dismiss the one along with the other.
>
> Hofstadter's main subject with regard to the political situation of his
> time is right-wing paranoia -- McCarthyism, the Birchers, "Reds under the
> beds" etc. He provides some interesting examples. Some of these people even
> claimed that there was irrefutable proof that Eisenhower was a Communist
> agent:
>
> 'Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch
> an insight into affairs that is given to few of
> us. "For many reasons and after a lot of study,"
> he wrote some years ago, "I personally believe
> [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent."
> The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of
> Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers was
> "merely a cover-up for Burns's liaison work be
> tween Eisenhower and some of his Communist
> bosses." Eisenhower's brother Milton was "actually
> [his] superior and boss within the Communist
> party." As for Eisenhower himself, Welch
> characterized him, in words that have made the
> candy manufacturer famous, as "a dedicated,
> conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy"-a
> conclusion, he added, "based on an accumulation
> of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable
> that it seems to put this conviction beyond any
> reasonable doubt.'
>
> You couldn't make it up.
>
> At around the same time, however, a different kind of paranoia began to
> spread. There were people who did not believe the official narrative of the
> Kennedy assassination (even without having been able to see the Zapruder
> film which went straight into Henry Luce's vaults on November 23, 1963,
> only to be shown to the public for the first time in all its glory in 1975
> thanks to Robert Groden and Geraldo Rivera). These people started to claim
> in public that they thought that their democratic institutions were lying
> to them about the death of JFK and that the report of the Warren Commission
> was a whitewash. In response, the CIA introduced the term "conspiracy
> theories" as a term of denigration, using it for the first time in its
> modern sense. A highly successful operation, and a gift that keeps on
> giving.
>
> The CIA also made some proposals of what to do to counter these "fake
> news":
>
> "Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization,
> for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The
> aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the
> claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of
> such claims in other countries."
>
> "3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination
> question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where
> discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:
> a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts
> (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren
> Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that
> the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that
> further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.
> Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately
> generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to
> discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.
> b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the
> critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate
> for this purpose."
>
> http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html
>
> When we encounter paranoia in the political sense as a theme in P (not the
> philosophical, psychological or religious aspects of it), it is this second
> kind of paranoia, a distrust of the state and its institutions and the
> self-serving narratives they create, in particular a distrust of law
> enforcement and the secret services. The kind of thinking, in other words,
> that makes the CIA point out to their "friendly elite contacts (especially
> politicians and editors)" that you are a "conspiracy theorist" -- even if
> you do not propose a theory about a conspiracy but merely point out that
> the official narrative cannot possibly be true. As an example: In VL
> COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, REX 84 provide the political/parapolitical
> context. At some point, these were all subjects of "conspiracy theories",
> and in some places they are still treated as such. Not so. Even if some of
> the details may be subject for debate, these are conspiracy facts. Alfonso
> Chardy, Robert Parry, Seymour Hersh (on Operation CHAOS, the Angleton/CIA
> equivalent to COINTELPRO) and others wrote important articles and books
> about it. As it says in VL: Look it up, check it out.
>
> The McCarthyite kind of right-wing paranoia, as addressed by Hofstadter,
> and its impact are of course portrayed highly negatively in VL and BE.
>
>
> Am 05.08.2018 um 14:25 schrieb Mark Kohut:
>
>> In Michiko Kakutani's new book---entitled what appears after the "&"--
>> Pynchon is one of the few writers quoted---many writers of fiction
>> name-checked and alluded to though . She quotes
>> the words from Gravity's Rainbow about how "religious--comforting"
>> paranoia
>> can be and---"there is
>> still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything---a
>> condition not many of us can bear for long."
>>
>> A Pynchon fave, John Le Carre, supplies a chapter epigraph: "Without clear
>> language, there is no standard of truth."
>> Orwell throughout this chapter.
>>
>> And, she quotes Roth [American Pastoral] as defining anew--like an
>> artist--Hofstadter's "paranoid style in America":
>> "this counternarrative Roth entitled "the indigenous American berserk"." I
>> think of another great American writer, Charles Portis, with this phrase.
>>
>> Michiko says that Hofstadter's original essay was
>> "spurred by Goldwater's campaign and the right-wing movement around it."
>> It's seen then in Lot 49.
>>
>> (From another source, a scholar says
>> that the modern bashing of the mainstream media--liberal bias and more--
>> by
>> the Right began then (and even with Goldwater's
>> book, I believe,he says, but I'm not looking anything more up).
>>
>> She focuses on Hofstadter's words: paranoia characterized by "heated
>> exaggerations" and more words but seeing these two
>> in quotes put Woods on Pynchon's "hysterical realism" into my head.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>