In his essay entitled "Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative," Patrick O'Donnell writes that "paranoia, like power after Foucault, ranges across the multi-discursivity of contemporary existence," and is most fully realized within the realm of literature as a response to "systems that oppress the masses and disenfranchise the preterite," such as "history, technology, religion, patriarchy, and bureaucracy." Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is an extended exercise in paranoia, in which the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, endures a harrowing adventure into the heart of paranoia, investigating an endlessly compounding mystery that may or may not be merely a massive conspiracy to confuse her, seemingly couched in an elaborate rejection of bureaucratic oppression, represented by the governmental monopoly on the delivery of mail. The endless accumulation of information in the novel only exacerbates Oedipa's state of paranoia, propelling the protagonist and reader alike to a conclusion that we hope will connect the clues, will somehow validate our paranoia, even as Pynchon's project of ambiguity becomes central to the otherwise meandering text, a way for him to express "a way of thinking about thinking" (O'Donnell).
Ambiguity, in Pynchon's work, also serves to advance "the regime of a totalizing cultural paranoia and its attendant political consequences" (O'Donnell). It is important that nothing comes of Oedipa's descent into paranoia, that nothing is ever really revealed to her, for the novel to reflect the paranoia of American culture in the 1960s, still living in the shadow of Joe McCarthy and his efforts to expose and expel Communists and Communists sympathizers from the government. O'Donnell writes that Oedipa is "a daughter of Joe McCarthy," in the sense that she engages in a futile effort to explicate a narrative of dissent from a mass array of information that may or may not be connected or relevant in any way to her efforts: "In Pynchon's ... engendering of paranoia, Oedipa is aptly named as the female questor in pursuit of the truth; she reduplicates, rather than subverts, the oedipal desire for a singular truth and an origin to the order of things" (O'Donnell). Thus she attempts to align everything into a visible order, an understandable set, a puzzle that she can reconfigure, all while Pynchon leads her further into a state of paranoia from which she will not be able to extricate herself.
Paranoia is everywhere in the novel, starting most aptly with the band that Oedipa encounters at the motel with Metzger -- the Paranoids. From there, Pynchon deals with the concept of paranoia primarily within Oedipa's own mind: "I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike 'clues' were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night" (95). She becomes aware that she is on a search for clues, and consciously acknowledges her expectations for what those clues could offer her. "Yet she wanted it all to be fantasy," writes Pynchon (107), showing us that as the paranoia grips her, Oedipa wants more than anything for it to all be a game that she can eventually escape from, a massive ruse that, however frightening, will come to an end. But this is not something that Pynchon offers her. The web of information provided to Oedipa -- the play, the mysterious horn symbol, the underground networks, etc -- functions only to deepen her paranoia as the connections become less and less apparent. Eventually, one of the other characters asks her: "Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody's putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity [Oedipa's former lover who has died and made her an executor of his will, thus propelling her into this mystery] set up before he died?" (138) Faced with the ultimate paranoid conspiracy, Oedipa chooses to reject this possibility, as though it would invalidate all of her actions, all of her efforts, and would suggest that she is really going crazy.
"Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth," writes Pynchon: "[and] in the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard [the Paranoids] sang was either some fraction of the truth's numinous beauty ... or only a power spectrum" (150). Oedipa decides that there must be meaning somewhere, and that it would greet her suddenly, and transform her. O'Donnell writes that "as a way of knowing, paranoia is a mode of perception that notes the connectedness between things in a hyperbolic metonymizing of reality" (182), which is to say that her state of paranoia has become reality for Oedipa, and thus by extension the reality of America's culture of paranoia -- the "Red Scare" -- which ultimately ended just as Oedipa's journey ends in the novel, engaging with the possibility that it was always based on nothing more than paranoid suspicion, a journey toward nothing. She "knows she is part of a series of orchestrated events over which she has no control, but knowing it confers a kind of legitimacy upon the knower: She can be manipulated but she can't be fooled about being manipulated; she is always prepared for the revelation of deeper plots, more layered conspiracies" (O'Donnell). So it was all just a decision, a series of decisions, an endless web of decisions, which build upon each other into a network of hopes and expectations, the possibility that it can all make sense if we continue to throw ourselves at it, to scourge and investigate and somehow bring it all together in a grand, cathartic finale. But this is a finale that Pynchon withholds from the reader, suggesting only that "Oedipa [is] in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the legacy America, or there was 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" (151). The paranoid subject ends the experience of The Crying of Lot 49 with the frustration of not being allowed to see what it all really meant, what the man behind the curtain has been hiding all along, if there ever really was anything to see. And this ending, when read against McCarthy, is a bold statement against drawing conclusions from manufactured connections, and creating conspiracy through an amateur reading of signs.
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