In other words, I am fixated on what I must regularly confront yet cannot control. It is a very human condition, if not the human condition. Philip K. Dick once said that “the ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you.” Who has not experienced this? It is, in a basic way that has to do with subjectivity and the limits of individual free will, the premise of existence, its inaugural bad deal. We wake up each day to find our environments aligned against us; whatever lies outside our bodies’ jurisdiction is evidence of the world’s ongoing disregard for our inner wishes and designs. We cannot assert our will on life, or move the furniture with our minds; we can only feel unease about the baroque and bewildering prearrangements of both. Why are things like this? And: Who put that chair there?
The claustrophobia of “the room that knows” might connect Oedipa to her forebears, the mad wives and mistresses of Gothic fiction, but her paranoia is a product of her political moment—the social collapse of postwar California. It emerges when she’s asked to execute the will of Pierce Inverarity, the aforementioned ex-boyfriend (her dark thought was about his death; it was indeed pretty funny). Because Pierce was a rich and evil man with hearty investments in California’s defense industry, his accumulated estate is considerable. Sifting through it requires Oedipa to take a ranging tour of 1960s California, where she meets the state’s preeminent outcasts and kooks: John Birchers, retired anarchists, a suicidal playwright—all the people stuck, wriggling, to the underside of the rock of respectable society. The novel’s atmosphere strikes the dreamy balance between eccentricity and artifice peculiar to the West Coast. The college campuses heave with youthful radicalism, while the gay bars of San Francisco suffer, even then, from busloads of out-of-towners looking for some pre-authenticated thrills. Traveling through these circles, Oedipa learns of a secret, privatized postal service called WASTE; like a dream or an algorithm, her world auto-populates with symbols and messages in a “malignant, deliberate replication.”
Oedipa is one of the few well-known paranoiacs of literature who is also a woman, and for her, WASTE is not merely an abstract conundrum. Her apophenia begins and ends at the personal terminus of her ex-lover. Every sign of or clue about the network’s existence is connected to Pierce Inverarity, to an industry or investment he once touched. Did Inverarity concoct WASTE to torment Oedipa, as “some grandiose practical joke” from beyond the grave? Paranoia, here, leads not to the government or the World Bank but back to Pierce’s bed. It bears the still-warm imprint of a single human body, which makes it all the more terrifying.
If we’re tempted to say that Oedipa represents a female brand of paranoia, that’s only to emphasize that hers is actually a realistic version of the condition. American culture so often construes paranoia as an intellectual—and thus masculine—problem, rather than an emotional one. The truth is that it’s both. Rather than the dry thought exercises we associate with male conspiracy theorists, Pynchon gives us, in Oedipa, a view of what true paranoia is: a gut response to society’s collapse, to the deadening force of American capitalism—a way, maybe, of thrashing about in one’s loneliness and alienation. Knowledge under paranoia takes on emotional dimensions: it feels bad; it feels addictive. This becomes especially true for paranoiacs who aren’t white men, because for them, conspiracies—if you define a conspiracy as “the targeted wielding of systemic violence by the powerful against the powerless”—are often real, which makes unraveling them all the more imperative. What does it feel like to be constantly educating yourself about your own precarity, your own proximity to violence and death?
The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once wrote that the paranoiac has a facile “faith in exposure”—a belief that revealing the contours of a vast regime of cruelty is the same thing as eradicating it. Non-white and non-male paranoiacs know it’s not that easy. Knowledge can save or kill us; sometimes, over the long slog of trying to outwit a murderous system, it’ll do both. The only way to survive is by seeking out other people who know this truth, and to find solidarity in the shared condition of knowing, intimately, all the problems but none of the solutions.
This is what Oedipa does. Her paranoia pushes her not inward but outward, into America’s tattered public sphere, into whatever social life is possible in a jealously individualistic country. Maybe Oedipa is susceptible to paranoia because of this individualism—its isolating and suburban rhythms—but the sickness, in its full bloom, starts looking like salvation. In searching for and hoarding information, Oedipa swings from one conversation to another; she rides municipal buses all night, talks to strangers in cafés. She meets a drunken sailor and, finding herself “overcome all at once by a need to touch him,” puts him to bed. These small acts of generosity are what remain when the answers don’t come. Paranoia presents an excuse to delve into the social: the people Oedipa speaks to are also suspicious and insane, but they still speak to one another. WASTE, which is ultimately a communications network, could be a ruse. But that network—and, by implication, Oedipa’s search for it—could also be “a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know.”
by Zoe Hu, The Believer | Read more:
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[ed. Social bonding and paranoia seem to co-exist rather easily in many conspiratorial and domestic terrorism groups (and in fact, are probably membership drivers). A good example can be found Richard Power's fictional novel The Overstory.]
