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| The X-Files believed in the truth. (source: x-files.wikia.com) |
Paranoia is a
trendy mental state. Paranoid delusions have been recorded throughout
history, but the
form that they take is a remarkable mirror to contemporaneous
society. Feelings of persecution and conspiracy were, in the
sixteenth century, likely to be blamed on demonic possession or
witchcraft; in the twenty-first, they are more likely to be seen as
some kind of government conspiracy, or to feature plot-lines lifted
from The Truman Show
or The Matrix.
Reality dissolves into a complex, almost convincing facsimile;
unending webs of clues offer continual and provocative hints that
something is awry.
If
the forms of paranoid delusions are based on the cultural tropes
surrounding the sufferer, then it logically follows that by examining
the delusions one could seek to understand the larger culture. Such a
process has, for much of his career, been the goal of Thomas Pynchon.
His works tend to follow confused, isolated figures who traverse
landscapes fecund with hyper-signifying clues; often the realities of
his worlds will fragment, for a moment – glitches in the Matrix,
pauses where things don't quite make sense. Shadowy enemies pursue
manic protagonists, maybe. The uncertain ontological state of
Pynchon's world – is it reality or simulation, everyday 1999 or
computer generated prison? - infects the fiction itself on a sort of
meta level. We never know if the conspiracies actually exist; we
never know if Pynchon's stories contain a shred of realism. “For
there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of
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 an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle unto
some paranoia.” This is the situation for Oedipa Maas, the hero of
The Crying of Lot
49
(1965), and, in Pynchon's eyes, it may well be the situation of the
average American too.
Pynchon
views American culture as fundamentally paranoid. This dates back to
the hard-line Calvinism of the first Pilgrims (conspiracies have
deep roots). Puritan theology views the world as another revelation,
a coded message from God to man. Observation of natural phenomena can
therefore offer access to deeper truths. The poet Edward Taylor, for
example, observes a spider:
Hell's Spider gets
His
intrails Spun to whip Cords thus
And
wove to nets
and
sets.
To
tangle Adams race
In's
stratagems
To
their destructions ('Upon a Spider Catching a Fly', 1680-2)
Or,
more briefly: a spider catching a fly is like Satan tempting humanity
into sin. Or, briefer still: the world is out to get you.
Puritanism's fairly harsh stance on predetermination – that
everyone, pretty much, will be damned, and even if you're not, you
can't know it – and the doctrine of Original Sin – everyone
carries the burden of an earlier fall from God's grace – foster a
fairly negative attitude. Everything in the world is a symbol of
man's fall and imminent damnation.
To
gloss quickly over three-hundred or so years of history, not much has
changed. National traumas (JFK's assassination, Pearl Harbour) spawn
fairly mainstream conspiracy
theories; there are theories about a bunch of really innocuous
seeming stuff like the Federal Reserve and water fluoridation.
Conspiracy theories have even gained mainstream political
recognition: see the embarrassing débâcle about Barack Obama's
birth certificate. The '90s saw the enormous popularity of The
X-Files,
a show where basically every known conspiracy was realised on screen,
and where UFO-loving crackpot Agent Fox Mulder is proved correct at
every turn, in small towns like yours all across America. Death in
the woods? 'It's probably aliens,' speculates Mulder, and it is.
Death in an office building? 'It's probably a rogue Central Operating
System,' guesses Mulder, and he's right again. The show, however, is
careful to prevent Mulder from ever finding the definitive proof he
needs to go public. Instead, it 'proves' it to the viewer, by showing
on-screen the paranormal elements, and then having hazy
pseudo-bureaucrats cover it up. The genius of the show was in weaving
the variably-crazy paranormal/UFO/evil computer/ghost/monster
delusions into the larger tapestry of governmental conspiracy. After
all, the idea that your own government might be against you is surely
scarier and more plausible than the fear of rogue Neanderthals.
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| This is what life was like in the '90s: carefree fun, not even worrying about all the calories in those 'shakes. (source: bilmoore.com) |
It
is against this backdrop that Bleeding
Edge,
Pynchon's most recent novel, opens. Maxine Tornow, mother-of-two and
fraud investigator, beings to poke around some dodgy start ups in New
York. The year is 2001; the first dotcom bubble has just burst, and
hasn't yet reinflated. Mark Zuckerburg is just about to start at
Harvard, and will later go on to inspire a movie staring Jesse
Eisenberg. Seinfeld
has been off the air for three years, although Friends
is still going strong. Predictably – inevitably, fatedly – Maxine
starts to uncover hints of a large scale X-Files-style governmental conspiracy. There are dodgy payments and time-travelling
assassins, glimpses of the full vast bureaucracy of the
military-industrial complex in full swing. The whole thing is
enjoyable, Pynchonian, fairly light-hearted, swathed in '90s
nostalgia and exquisite references (name me one other major work of
literature that features jokes about Pokémon).
And
then, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, on the 9th
of September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 and American Airlines
Flight 175 are hijacked and flown into the World Trade Centre.
Bleeding Edge
is so grounded in 2001, and 9/11 so seared onto our collective
memory, that there's no way you don't see it coming. And yet, you
never expect 9/11 to happen during the novel's narrative. Like the
conspiracies of V.
or The Crying of
Lot 49
or Gravity's
Rainbow,
you didn't expect payoff, just paranoia.
This
is the genius of Pynchon's new book then: that the paranoia finally
gets made real. The shocking thing is that no one really expects it
to happen; part of being paranoid, after all, relies on the
conspiracy remaining shadowy, hidden, obscure. The moment Pynchon
stages in Bleeding
Edge
feels like a recapitulation of classic Puritan lapsarian theology,
made relevant for the computer age. Before 9/11 – before 'The Fall'
– the novel is vibrant and exuberant, the conspiracies threatening,
sure, but more interesting and quirky than terrifying. The internet
is an anarchic playground, the tech sector filled with ideologues and
hackers, open-sourcers who promote knowledge and experimentation. New
York is still a city: Giuliani hasn't yet managed to gentrify and
yuppify and sanitise the whole of Manhattan.
But
all of these innocences are being eroded. Urban gentrification, the
corporatisation and monetisation of the internet, the establishment
of cyber-spying and intelligence gathering: all act to attack the
Edenic idyll of 'Silicon Alley' – or, more broadly, of the '90s
culture where The
X-Files
existed, where conspiracies were about alien cover ups and monsters
who ate livers. The erosion had already started, but 9/11 is the
singularity that marks the transition, the gunshot the marks the
death-knell of an already terminal patient.
Soon
after the attack, paranoia starts up again. There are whisperings
about Jewish involvement, pan-Islamic involvement, military
involvement. There are inconclusive evidences that the government
staged, or knew about, or something, the attacks. Pynchon doesn't
side with the 9/11 conspiracists, and refuses to validate any of the
various theories in the novel. In a sense, 9/11 is, for New York,
beyond conspiracy; the comfort provided intellectually or emotionally
by the coherent, certain knowledge of the conspiracy world view is
scant comfort if your home is under attack.
But
in a more figurative sense, paranoia is the right response to the
post-9/11 world. There is an
episode of The
Simpsons,
also from the late '90s, where Bart is proscribed a drug called
Focusyn. A side effect of this drug is that Bart becomes increasingly
paranoid, and eventually convinced that he is being spied on by Major
League Baseball. Obvious he seems crazy; when he steals a tank, he
seems crazier. Then Bart shoots down the actually MLB spying
satellite, and it turns out his paranoia was true. In 1999, the
concept is pretty funny, and faintly absurd. In 2013, the idea of
being spied on to this degree by corporations is commonplace;
furthermore, the government are doing it too. It's the path from this
absurd late '90s paranoia to its actualisation ten years later that
Pynchon follows in Bleeding
Edge;
he tells a Fall narrative where humanity falls not because it gains
more knowledge, but because it becomes more ignorant, more in the
dark.
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