PLOTTING THE SIXTIES:

THE CULTURE OF CONSPIRACY IN THE USA

PETER KNIGHT

D.PHIL.

UNIVERSITY OF YORK

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE

SEPTEMBER 1995
 CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................... 111

ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... iv

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1

1. PLOTTING THE ASSASSINATION:

JFK AND THE PRIMAL SCENE OF POSTMODERNISM .................................................. 14

2. NAMING THE PROBLEM:

FEMINISM AND THE FIGURATION OF CONSPIRACy ................................................... 54

3. THOMAS PYNCHON:
THE CULTURE OF CONSPIRACy ................................................................................. 88

4. BODY PANIC:
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS AND THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA .................................... 130

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 175

BIBLIOGRAPHy ............................................................................................................... 179

- 11 -
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisors, Hugh Haughton and Joseph Bristow, for their
generous support during my doctoral studies.

This project was completed with the kind financial assistance of my parents, and of the
British Academy. I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to the British
Association of American Studies, and the F.R. Leavis Fund at the University of York,
for travel grants which enabled me to conduct research for Chapter 1.

Thanks to co-conspirators Kate Davies, Eduardo Limbert, Paul Whitty, and Heather
Middleton; I'm grateful also to John Arnold, Lara Perry, and the Work in Progress
serrunar.

A slightly shorter version of Chapter 2 is forthcoming in Cultural Studies.

- 111 -
 ABSTRACT

This dissertation explores how the discourse of conspiracy shaped and was itself
shaped by the cultural and political landscape of the USA during the 1960s. It focuses
on the popular engagement with notions of conspiracy in four key areas, namely
postmodernism, feminism, the counterculture, and gay rights. Broadly speaking, it
traces the way those groups who had previously been the object of demonological
scrutiny began in the sixties to tell conspiracy theories about those in power-and
about each other. It is concerned with "plotting" both as a form of conspiratorial
organisation, and as a narrative device. Through close readings of the poetics of
conspiracy in both factual and fictional texts, this thesis aims to bring together "realist"
and "symbolist" approaches to the "paranoid style" in American culture.

It consists of four interrelated case studies, each of which examines key texts
from around 1963, in conjunction with works from the 1990s which rethink the earlier
representations. The first chapter explores how conspiracy theories have mounted a
challenge not just to the official "lone gunman" version of the assassination of
President Kennedy, but to the "authorised version" of the 1960s themselves. Through a
reading of Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) and Oliver Stone's JFK (1992), I argue that
narratives about the conspiratorial activities of the authorities have contributed to a
crisis in the authority of narrative, making the Kennedy assassination both a symptom
and a cause of a postmodern culture of paranoia. The second chapter considers the
figuration of conspiracy in popular American feminist writing, from Betty Friedan' s
The Feminine Mystique (1963) to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1990). I argue that
conspiracy tropes have functioned not only to link the personal and the political, but
also to establish a series of implicit divisions within American feminism. The next
chapter traces the emergence of a self-conscious engagement with the culture of
conspiracy in the sixties through the career of Thomas Pynchon. I then examine what
has happened to the conspiracy culture of the sixties, through an analysis of Vineland
(1990). I argue that the earlier paranoid "depth" of secrecy has been flattened out by
the proliferation of the signs of mass culture. The final chapter concentrates on the
highly idiosyncratic paranoid fictions of William S. Burroughs. My aim is not so much
to diagnose him as to locate his writings within postwar discourses of homosexuality,
drug addiction and disease. I examine how his novels of the sixties rework the notion
of paranoia as an externalisation of private fears by highlighting the intemalisation-
and even the literal incorporation-of public surveillance. I then consider the
possibilities and pitfalls of reading Burroughs in the light of the HIV/AIDS epidemic,
and conversely, of reading his novels as a map of the contemporary culture of body
panIC.

- IV -
INTRODUCTION

- 1-
This dissertation explores the ways in which the discourse of conspiracy shaped and
was itself shaped by the cultural and political landscape of the USA during the 1960s.
It focuses on the popular engagement with notions of conspiracy on many fronts but in
particular in four key areas, namely postmodernism, feminism, the counterculture, and
gay rights. Broadly speaking, it traces the way those groups who had previously been
the object of demonological scrutiny began in the sixties to tell conspiracy theories
about those in power-and about each other. As the linguistic equivocation in my title
suggests, this thesis is concerned with "plotting" both as a form of conspiratorial
organisation, and as a narrative strategy for organising and shaping a reader's trajectory
through a text. In short, it deals with the interplay between historical and rhetorical
structures, culture and narrative.
In addition to examining how various intellectual, cultural and social
developments were informed by, and transformed, the language of conspiracy during
the sixties, I also examine the replotting of that decade in the 1990s. The meaning of
the sixties has become fiercely contested in many contemporary debates-frequently in
conspiratorial terms. In the disputes about political correctness, for example,
commentators from the right have argued that the academy was infiltrated by left-wing
radicals in the sixties; some left-wing writers have countered this suggestion with the
charge that the PC campaign has been deliberately orchestrated in order to dismantle
the social gains (primarily in the areas of racial and sexual equality) made during the
sixties. 1 In a similar fashion, some commentators from the Moral Right have
characterised the HIV/ AIDS epidemic as the consequence of-and even a punishment
for-the "permissiveness" of the sixties. Margaret Thatcher, on the other side of the
Atlantic but very much in tune with Reaganite America, gave open voice to what many
privately believed:

We are reaping what was sown in the sixties. The fashionable theories
and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which the old
virtues of discipline and self-restraint were denigrated. 2

In short, the legacy of the sixties has become a key issue in recent political and cultural
struggles. By studying the discourse of conspiracy during the sixties in conjunction
with recent reconfigurations of that period, this dissertation aims not only to reassess
some of the decade's emerging social movements and key texts, but also to cast light on
the rhetorical manreuvres and assumptions which structure current thinking about the

1 The key texts of the anti-PC campaign I have in mind are Allen Bloom, The Closing of the American
Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today 's Students
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted
Our Higher Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); and Charles Sykes, Profscam: Professors and
the Demise of Higher Education (New York: St. Martin's, 1988). A representative selection of pieces
anatomising the logic of the debates is included in Jeffrey Williams, ed., PC Wars: Politics and Theory in
the Academy (London: Routledge, 1995).
2 Quoted in Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities
(1985; London: Routledge, 1993), p.18.

-2-
sixties.
All four chapters therefore have a dual temporal focus. The discussion in each
case begins with a cultural artefact from around 1963, a year which, for many
commentators, marks the beginning of "the sixties," and a new phase in the history of
conspiracy theory in America. For instance, a photo-essay entitled, The Way We Were:
1963, The Year Kennedy Was Shot, outlines how "the shock of hearing that news made
a permanent psychological marker in time, emotionally separating the time before the
assassination and the time after," such that "irresistibly to some it is a turning point: the
moment the first ominous minor chord darkened the music of American life for our
generation."3 Or, for example, in an article on postwar American conspiracy film,
J ames Palmer and Michael Riley claim that:

Conspiracy theories have often found a place in the American

consciousness, but it is hard to think of a time when they have been
more virulent or pervasive than in the period since the wave of political
assassinations that began with that of President Kennedy in 1963. In
recent years, ... something like political and social paranoia has invaded
our national life, becoming a perversely familiar presence. 4

Having begun by discussing four very different examples of conspiracy culture from
around 1963, each chapter then considers items from the late eighties and early nineties
which replay or rethink the earlier representations. The first chapter looks at the
postmodern crisis of political and narrative representation in accounts of the
assassination of President Kennedy from the time it occurred, before going on to
explore the replotting and reshooting of the event in two recent fictional versions,
namely Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), and Oliver Stone's IFK (1992). The next chapter
investigates the by turns avowed and disavowed engagement with conspiracy theory in
popular American feminist writings, focusing the argument around readings of Betty
Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963), and Naomi Wolf's updating of that ground-
breaking work in The Beauty Myth (1990). In the third chapter the discussion of the
emerging (counter)culture of conspiracy is framed by Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V.
(1963), and his latest work, Vineland (1990). The final chapter examines William S.
Burroughs' fictions of body panic, and involves a reading of his work from the early
sixties-in particular the four novels samples of which were made available in the
collection Dead Fingers Talk (1963)-through the lens of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the
eighties and nineties, and David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Burroughs' Naked
Lunch (1992).
The present inquiry into the language of conspiracy in and of the 1960s
participates in a history of debate about the paranoid style of American culture. There

3Robert MacNeil, ed., The Way We Were: 1963, The Year Kennedy Was Shot (New York: Carroll &
Graf, 1988), p.8.
4 James W. Palmer and Michael M. Riley. "America's Conspiracy Syndrome: From Capra to Pakula,"
Studies in the Humanities, 8 (1981), p.21.

-3-
have been two major approaches to the discourse of paranoia, namely (in Michael
Rogin's terminology) realist and symbolist studies. 5 Realist investigations of political
demonology were pioneered by the Progressive historians, and date back to the period
between the two World Wars.6 They are concerned to show how the language of
countersubversion is used by those in power (in collusion with the media) to further
their own ends through the suppression of dissent. Conspiracy theories, on this model,
serve to mark out as undesirable and "alien" all those who would pose a threat to the
interests of the elite, in order to legitimate and facilitate the suppression of the latter,
with, for example, the use of "red scares" to justify anti-labour legislation. Whereas the
realist analysis emphasises material economic structures and rational political
objectives, the symbolist approach concentrates on how that reality is perceived and
distorted. This model was developed by the so-called pluralist or consensus historians
from the late 1950s onwards. Works such as Richard Hofstadter's seminal The
Paranoid Style in American Politics (1963/1965) and David Brion Davis's The Fear of
Conspiracy (1971) develop accounts of the repeated outbreaks in American history of
demonological rhetoric in provincial or marginal groups, whose paranoid fears and
desires are seen as a threat not to those deemed alien to the American political
consensus (as the realists argue), but to the maintenance of a stable society. Whereas
Hofstadter, for example, viewed the rise of McCarthyism as a product of small-minded,
back-water populist prejudice run riot, Rogin, in an early work on The Intellectuals and
McCarthy (1955), argues that Hofstadter et al. failed to take into account how elitist
factions of the Republican Party latched onto McCarthyism to further their own
political ends.
It is therefore apparent that the mode of analysis will influence to a large degree
the choice of research materials. On the realist model, priority is given to sources
which document the visible and conscious aims of those mobilising the language of
conspiracy. This approach is usually concerned with the territory of the political
mainstream, and the key issues of class, race and sex/gender. The symbolist model, on
the other hand, focuses on a symptomatic reading of the psyche of the proponents of a
conspiracy theory; its analysis privileges the imagery, narrative structures and
unconscious implications of paranoid writings. It tends to take its examples from the
more extreme fringes of American political life.

5 Michael Rogin, "American Political Demonology: A Retrospective," in Ronald Reagan, The Movie;
and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp.272-
300. In formulating these issues, I have also found useful Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory
and the Study of American Literature (London: Methuen, 1986), Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth:
Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Eric
Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994).
6 Examples of realist studies would include Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States (1913), Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket (1937), and the literary
criticism of V.L. Parrington.

- 4-
 The symbolist paradigm has itself been developed in two distinct ways. The
first variation is produced in the work of historians like Hofstadter, who draw their
objects of study from political pamphlets, inflammatory tracts, speeches in Congress,
and so on (the work of Hofstadter is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 below). The
other possibility is represented by studies of American literature, such as Tony
Tanner's influential City of Words. In the Introduction to that remarkable survey of
American fiction from 1950 to 1970, Tanner argues that:

there is an abiding dream in American literature that an unpatterned,

unconditioned life is possible, in which your movements and your
stillnesses, choices and repudiations are all your own; and that there is
also an abiding American dread that someone else is patterning your life,
that there are all sorts of invisible plots afoot to rob you of your
autonomy of thought and action, that conditioning is ubiquitous. 7

Much of Tanner's book is taken up with a discussion of the attempt by American

heroes-and behind them, the novelists-to free themselves from dependence on the
controlling patterns of others. Tanner's analysis of "this quite fundamental and
inescapable paradox" places him in the tradition of literary scholarship which reads
American literature as a sequence of attempts by the rugged individualist hero to escape
out of social constraint out into the adamic wild. Works such as Richard Chase's The
American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the
American Novel (1960) give priority to the romance tradition in American literature, of
the self in isolation from the threatening forces of society and history. 8
My choice of materials for this study has been influenced by both the realist and
the symbolist approaches, and, within the latter camp, by both the historical and the
literary versions. In Chapter 1, for example, in addition to novels and films I have
looked at works of history, government enquiries, and magazine articles concerning the
Kennedy assassination. Furthermore, the materials are taken from both the mainstream
and from the "fringe" of American culture. The chapter follows the realist paradigm in
that it discusses the social effects of conspiracy theories of the assassination, how they
participate in larger debates about political and historical representation, and the uses to
which they have been put in mobilising political interests. But it is also concerned to
discuss the rhetorical manreuvres and unconscious narrative mechanisms of both the
fictional and the historical accounts.
My aim, however, is not merely to take the best of both options, but to rethink
the logic by which they are constituted as two distinct positions. I take issue with each
approach in several ways. The problem with the realist method, I would argue, is that it
cannot account for why some elitist proponents actually seem to believe in the content
of their conspiracy theories--over and above the instrumental purpose they may serve.

7 Tony Tanner. City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (London: Jonathan Cape. 1971). p.15.
8 In The Unusable Past Reising maps out the connections between the Counter-progressive historians and
the New Critics of the middle years of the century.

-5-
President Reagan's War on Drugs, for example, in many ways served to legitimate
heavy-handed military interference in both Latin American countries and black inner-
city ghettos in the States during the 1980s; despite the campaign's utility in furthering
long-standing American objectives, the fervour of the moral panic seems inexplicable
without reference to the deep-rooted racial fantasies and tensions which it exploited.
Although it is extremely important to draw attention to the insidious political uses to
which the language of conspiracy is put, it is also vital to understand how certain
conspiracy theories speak to existing concerns and fears which cannot be explained
purely in terms of rational, conscious interest. In the case of HIV/AIDS, for example,
unless we have an account of the ongoing logic of homophobia and anti-drug hysteria
in American society, the moral panic surrounding the epidemic will appear as an
inexplicable outbreak, much like a disease itself. This is not to deny that the Moral
Right (in cahoots with the media) has used the epidemic to further its own aims; in
order to comprehend the popularity and power of its demonising of gay men and drug
users, however, it is necessary to understand the campaign in terms of a longer history
of discourses about the body, the family, and the nation. My purpose in focusing on the
unconscious and symbolic aspects of some conspiracy theories is therefore to make
them more, not less, cogent. To make a position explicable is not necessarily to make it
justifiable, but to refuse to investigate the deep structures of such arguments only serves
to foreclose on the possibility of engaging with and resisting their immense popular
attraction as sense-making structures. Furthermore, realist studies have traditionally
concentrated on the nefarious use of conspiracy theories by those in power. By
contrast, in the present study we will also come across populist strategic appropriations
and adaptations of conspiratorial discourse which aim to undermine the manipulations
of the powerful. At the same time as unveiling the rational objectives of those who
stand to gain from moral panics, it is therefore also crucial to keep alive the possibility
that conspiracy theories might be used rationally and intentionally against those very
groups.
By analysing how certain images and rhetorical structures in "factual" historical
materials cohere with, modify and exacerbate wider concerns, I am in effect bringing
the realist position much closer to the symbolic approach. In an analogous fashion, but
from the opposite direction, my readings of fictional texts are intended to make the
psychic and the symbolic less idiosyncratic, by connecting them up to larger and more
central issues of American cultural history. Whereas Tanner, for example, is interested
in writers like Pynchon and Burroughs for their individual style and unique vision, I
strategically endeavour to minimise the abnormality and extremism of their paranoid
fantasies, in order to reconnect their private imagery and narrative technologies with the
broader picture of public life. Similarly, if the romance tradition of American literary
history conceives of the hero as a "lone gunman" (to borrow a famous term from the
Kennedy case), then my readings of postwar writings emphasise the ways in which the

- 6-
individual psyche is implicated in the larger plot of society and history, even if those
terms do not fully cohere into a full-blown conspiracy theory. In short, conspiracy
theories can serve as transcoding metaphors which draw together the political
dimension of personal experience, and, conversely, the personal motivations of political
engagement (this argument is developed more fully in Chapter 2 in connection with the
figuration of feminist imagery in feminist writings).
A major methodological dilemma for studies of the politics and poetics of
paranoia involves the relationship between the factual basis of a conspiracy theory and
its mythical dimensions. Both the realist and the symbolist approaches to the paranoid
style in American politics and literature tend to bracket off the content of particular
conspiracy theories. Neither interpretive strategy is especially concerned to discuss the
"facts" of the case. For example, in an essay on fears of invasion in American culture,
Eric Mottram begins by pointing out that since the British left in 1814, the national
boundaries of the continental USA have only been invaded once, namely by Pancho
Villa. Mottram argues that "the case is therefore neurotic, shifting into the
pathological, and therefore dangerous, and increasingly SO."9 It is true that some
progressive historians begin by refuting the allegations of a certain demonological scare
(such as the "Atom-spy" accusations centred on the Rosenbergs in the 1950s), but their
main emphasis is on the interests which the language of conspiracy serves, whether the
conspiracy theories are true or false. Symbolist historians usually have even less to do
with the "truth" of the matter, since their principal purpose is to investigate the
psychological mechanisms which animate the process of scapegoating. In both cases it
is assumed that conspiracy theories are exaggerated, distorted-if not entirely false-
representations of history. In previous eras, in effect, it has been a reasonable working
assumption that demonological upsurges such as anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism
are in need of explanation rather than corroboration, since they are ideological
constructs, in the sense of imaginary and even fantastical representations of the real
conditions of society.
But in the USA from the 1960s onward, I would argue, it is far less plausible to
ignore the factual claims made by certain conspiracy theories. I must acknowledge that
I find, for example, some conspiratorial versions of the Kennedy assassination
distinctly plausible. The post-Watergate climate of revelation and confirmation thus
presents a particular challenge for an analysis of the discourse of conspiracy, since it is
no longer so easy to discuss the psychological mechanisms or political consequences of
a position to which one is simultaneously attracted. Recently the project of cultural
studies has in fact turned its attention to the question of the status of the intellectual in
relation to the object of investigation. In her article on Star Trek fanzines, for example,
Constance Penley discusses the difficulties she encountered in attending Trekkie

9 Eric Mottram. "Out of Sight But Never Out of Mind: Fears of Invasion in American Culture." Blood on
the Nash Ambassador: Investigations in American Culture (London: Hutchinson Radius. 1989). p.138.

-7-
conventions as both scholar and fan, critic and participant. The Cultural Studies
collection in which Penley's article appears contains several heated exchanges on the
issue of the intellectual-as-fan which the latter's contribution raised. For instance, in
response to John Fiske's suggestion that David Glover and Cora Kaplan's paper
occupies the traditional intellectual role of "privileged readers" of a popular genre,
Kaplan accuses Fiske of creating a "Manichean division between sympathetic populist
fan-niks, and sinister, snooty Privileged Readers."l0 I would agree with Kaplan that this
is an unhelpful and misleading distinction. It is surely possible to be both sympathetic
and critical; indeed, a sympathetic allegiance can be a consequence of a critical
engagement with a subculture. Giving credence to the content of a conspiracy theory
does not therefore prevent a study being made of its historical origins, rhetorical
resonances, psychological mechanisms, social significances, and ideological
consequences.
In this way it becomes necessary to read the language of conspiracy in post-
sixties America in both a literal and a metaphorical fashion, or, in other words, to take
seriously the content of a particular conspiracy theory, at the same time as instituting a
serious analysis of its formal inflections and narrative pleasures. Each of the chapters
of this study, however, finds evidence that the categories of the factual and the fictional
become unstable at crucial points. My intention is therefore not so much to give equal
weight to the material and the rhetorical, but to investigate, on the one hand, how the
rhetorical produces material effects, and on the other, how the very category of the
material is itself rhetorically constructed. 11 What is to count as a piece of factual
evidence or fictive embellishment cannot be decided in advance, but results from the
negotiations between plausibility and possibility which conspiracy theories carry out.
Furthermore, in each of the case studies there are examples of the literalisation of what
had previously been understood in a metaphorical way. Sometimes this takes the form
of a deliberate and parodic materialisation of paranoid fears. In Chapter 2, for instance,
I discuss Lavender Menace, a lesbian feminist group of the early seventies formed and
named as a mocking confirmation of widespread fears at the time that lesbianism
constituted what Betty Friedan called a "lavender menace" to the women's movement.
In other cases, however, history produces a disturbing literalisation of fictional
conspiracy theories. Chapter 4, for example, describes how some of Burroughs'
fantastic scenarios of viral invasion became instantiated in the scientific reports in
HIV/ AIDS epidemic. My purpose in reading together both fictional and factual texts is

10 Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds, Cultural Studies (London: Routledge.
1992), p.224.
11 In developing this approach I have been influenced by Judith Butl~r's ~iscu.ss~on o.~ th~
"materialisation" of the category of the physical in Bodies that Matter: On the D,scurs,ve Limas of Sex
(London: Routledge, 1993), and by Andrew Ross's argument in The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life:
Nature's Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994) that what counts as the "natural" is always politically
and rhetorically constructed.
-8-
therefore not so much to contextualise or confirm the former by reference to the latter,
but to uncover the ways in which each mode reflects upon, and is refracted by, the logic
and poetics of conspiracy theory.
A study of conspiracy theory in the 1960s must also confront the issue of
whether to select research materials from popular or "highbrow" sources. The decision
will in part be dictated by the distinction between the realist concern with mainstream
issues, and the symbolist tendency to investigate more marginal examples. But since it
is of course possible for some of the central issues of society to be encoded in high
culture, and, conversely, for some extremist examples of the paranoid style to be
popular, the selection of research materials still remains an issue. It is certainly
plausible that the postmodernisation of culture since the sixties has made it increasingly
difficult to maintain the high/low distinction, even if the borrowings and cross-overs
have not been entirely reciprocal. 12 What is more significant, however, is that key texts
of this period institute, explicitly or otherwise, conspiracy theories about the threat of
mass culture. In an analogous fashion to the previous argument, then, I want to claim
that the dichotomy between elite and popular conspiracy culture needs to be rethought
in the light of recent conspiracy theories which serve to demarcate the boundary
between the sophisticated and the vulgar. In other words, examples of conspiracy
theories cannot easily be taken from or placed upon either side of this heuristic division,
since they are themselves one of the representational strategies by which the distinction
is itself configured.
Choosing materials for an investigation of the culture of conspiracy presents one
final methodological difficulty, namely the risk that such a study may also mirror the
hermeneutic strategies of conspiracy theories. As forms of historiographic knowledge,
conspiracy theories in part aim to expose the hidden agendas of history by linking
together seemingly unconnected details into a coherent plot. They function by
reinterpreting the accidental and the coincidental as part of a co-ordinated scheme.
They enable every detail of social and cultural life to be read in theory as a clue to an
invisible but pervasive force. In this light it is possible to see how a study of the
discourse of conspiracy is also in danger of also producing a conspiracy theory of
conspiracy theories. Under the gaze of the conspiracy-conscious researcher, each item
of culture can yield itself up to re-examination for traces of the logic of conspiracy.
Moreover, I want to argue, the sixties witnessed the development of a self-reflexive
awareness of conspiracy theory (as opposed to conspiracies) as a distinct cultural
phenomenon. Previously unrelated novels, political tracts, works of history, films,
magazine articles, and so on, can become linked together into a unified rewriting of
cultural history. For example, in Brian McHale's discussion of post modern conspiracy

12In addition to Fredric Jameson's panoramic survey, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), I have in mind Linda Hutcheon's The Politics of Postmodernism
(London: Routledge, 1989).
-9-
 fictions which depict the creation of a conspiracy as an "ontological side-effect" of its
prior representation, he finds that "there are a number of instances of ontological side-
effects that are uncannily akin to those in [Umberto Eco's] Foucault's Pendulum,
indicating not the direct influence of one text on another ... but rather an internal logic
that, inhering in the postmodernist repertoire itself, manifests itself differently in
different texts."13 While not wholly conspiratorial, the idea of an uncanny logic, which
influences seemingly unconnected texts, gestures towards a paranoid view of literary
history as a story of secret influences and hidden forces. The possibility of a tentative
conspiracy theory of culture becomes more apparent if the materials are all gathered
from a single period-not to mention a single year. It is as though there existed if not
exactly a coordinated cabal, then certainly a hidden logic, or, in the title of one recent
work of conspiracy theory which draws on an old image, an "unseen hand" which
"manipulates" cultural production. 14
This unseen influence corresponds to the Althusserian diagnosis of "expressive
causality," the notion that each part of a totality somehow expresses its inner essence.
In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson neatly summarises the implications of
this view:

The fullest form of what Althusser calls the "expressive causality" ...
will thus prove to be a vast interpretive allegory in which a sequence of
historical events or texts and artefacts is rewritten in terms of some
deeper, underlying and more "fundamental" narrative, of a hidden
master narrative. 15

An examination of the conspiratorial logic of various cultural items from around 1963
might therefore be in danger of constructing a "hidden master narrative" not only for
that year, but also, implicitly, for the post-1960s period as a whole. Although in many
ways my concern will be to highlight a sometimes unrecognised dependence on the
logic of conspiracy theory in social and political formations of that era, the dissertation
as a whole does not reveal conspiracy as the "expressive causality" of the sixties, or of
1963 in particular. It avoids such a narrative in three ways. Firstly, as the Kennedy
chapter will argue in detail, the positing of 1963 as a decisive year in American life is in
part an effect of subsequent events which the assassination of JFK helped to bring into
focus. In other words, the master narrative of innocence and experience into which the
sixties are frequently written has a confused and contradictory causality, such that the
decade's beginning is partly an effect of its "ending"-tragic or otherwise-in the
present. The form of the present study further emphasises this problematic teleology in

13 Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.180-81.

14A. Ralph Epperson. The Unseen Hand: Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History (Tucson,
AZ: Publius Press, 1985).
15Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; London: Routledge:
1986), p.28. Jameson attempts to rethink the notion of a historical "period" in the light of his analysis of
Althusser in "Periodizing the 60s," in The Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1988), II,
pp.178-2 IO.
- 10 -
the way that the four chapters play over the same chronological celluloid strip of
cultural history, producing different takes on the same "film" with each showing.
Secondly, the four case studies do not produce a single, unified picture of the
cultural logic of paranoia in the sixties, but rather accounts of the various ways in which
the language of conspiracy is enmeshed in larger debates, so that it sometimes enforces
and sometimes undermines those wider concerns. So, for example, paranoid fears
about the connections between gay men serve to structure the political conspiracy
theory of Stone's film, JFK; conversely, Burroughs' conspiratorial associations of
same-sex desire are played down in Cronenberg's film adaptation of Naked Lunch.
Lastly, it is not my contention that paranoia constitutes the "inner essence" of
the Zeitgeist, since conspiracy theory is only one of many discourses which plays a
significant role in articulating and delimiting life in sixties America. Figurations of
conspiracy are not the unique key to unlock, for example, the development of feminism
in and after the sixties, yet an analysis of this rhetoric can shed light on otherwise
hidden tensions and tendencies in the women's movement. In summary, then, while the
focus on 1963 clarifies some of the connections and antagonisms between the various
writers and movements under discussion, it also emphasises the discontinuities and
incommensurabilities of cultural artefacts whose only common denominator is that they
appeared in the same year. 16

To date there have been no full-length studies of paranoia in the 1960s, although there
have been articles on the concern with the conspiratorial aspects of the decade in
relation to DeLillo, Pynchon and Burroughs. 17 The value of the present study, I believe,
is to focus attention on the rhetorical strategies and narrative structures in some of the
key fictional, historical and theoretical plottings in and of the 1960s. 18 My inquiry into
the poetics of conspiracy is situated at the intersection between three related fields,
namely histories of the paranoid style in American culture, characterisations of
sixties/postmodern American fiction, and surveys of the decade and its rewriting. It
begins by investigating the constitution of 1963 through the culture of paranoia
constellated around the assassination of President Kennedy. I argue that the

16 In his Preface to Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (London:
Longman, 1991), Douglas Tallack begins by pointing out the "bewildering" variety of items listed. in his
Chronology for a sample year. "The aim," he argues, "should not ?e. to .smooth out the kIn? of
discontinuities evident in the entry for 1933, but to examine them "as a dIstmctIve problem of twentleth-
century America (p.xiv).
17 I discuss the designation of the sixties in general and the decade's literature in particular as a "golden
age of paranoia" in Chapter 3.
18 Although most surveys of the 1960s focus on either the literature or the history of the period, Robert. S.
Levine in Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Me/nile
(CUP, 1989) provides a useful model of an analysis that attends to the continuities between fiction and
history in terms of genre and narrative.
- 11 -
 •

assassination forms the primal scene of postmodernism and, metonymic ally , of the
construct which passes under the sign of "the sixties." A close reading of Libra and
JFK shows that the facts of the conspiracy plot are always implicated in and formulated
by the narrative structures of plot in which they are inscripted. Furthermore, though
obviously a brute, material event, the shooting of JFK and the instantly and endlessly
replayed shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald "live" on national television are significant as
inaugural moments in the formation of the mediated "reality" of postmodern society.
The second chapter takes up the issue of what is to count as the real or the
representational in a discussion of feminism's engagement with the figuration of
conspiracy. It argues that popular American feminism has increasingly been caught up
in a crisis of representation over the last three decades, in which its terms and images-
in particular its fraught engagement with the figure of conspiracy-have repeatedly
needed to be reconfirmed and rematerialised. Through a detailed analysis of books by
Betty Friedan and N aomi Wolf, the chapter concludes that the notion of conspiracy has
also served to implement a series of implicit divisions within feminism, which emerge
in the self-conscious textual anxieties generated by the term "conspiracy theory."
The next chapter follows up on the suggestion that a self-aware diagnosis of a
certain mode of argument as a conspiracy theory must now be factored into any account
of the history of the paranoid style of American culture. In particular it reads the novels
of Thomas Pynchon in conjunction with and as a reflection on a developing tendency in
popular and academic discussions to identify the practice of conspiracy theorising as
such. I argue that the sixties are not so much the "age of paranoia," as the era in which
such diagnoses became part of the political and cultural landscape of America. In
addition to its focus on the culture of conspiracy, this chapter continues the analysis of
conspiracy theories of mass culture broached by the previous chapter. I read Pynchon's
Vineland as a commentary on and a product of the implosion of the cultural logic of
paranoia in the face of the global saturation of signs in the nineties, a situation which,
the novel suggests, has been brought about by the domination of mass media.
The final chapter picks up on the free use of the psychiatric terminology of
"paranoia" in the preceding chapters, and discusses the pre-history of these terms
together with the psychological intricacies and social parameters of Burroughs' fictions
of corporeal horror. Burroughs' novels feature distinct and disturbing paranoid
fantasies which draw on society's nightmares about the body's powers and pleasures.
My aim is less to diagnose him than to understand how his conspiratorial writings
support and undermine larger debates about homosexuality, drug addiction and disease.
In the first half of the chapter I argue that as much as Burroughs' novels work to
psychologise the mechanisms of history, they also serve to historicise the institutions of
psychology; furthermore, his writings also satirically materialise some of society's most
paranoid fears. In the second half of the chapter I read Burroughs' sixties fiction of
body panic through the lens of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic of the 1980' s and '90s. I argue

- 12 -
that, on the one hand, the epidemic has brought about a deeply disturbing literalisation
of the latter's fantastical scenarios of corporeal paranoia. On the other hand, his novels
uncannily anticipate and prescript some of the scenarios of bodily infiltration, drug
addiction, viral epidemic and sexual paranoia in which the HIV/ AIDS epidemic has
been written.

- 13 -
 CHAPTER!

PLOTTING THE ASSASSINATION:

JFK AND THE PRIMAL SCENE OF POSTMODERNISM

- 14 -
 •

In the thirty years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy over 5000
books, articles, and films have appeared which engage with the event. If anything, the
1990s have witnessed a boom in the assassination industry; half the books on the New
York Times top-ten bestseller list in early 1992 were about the case.! Significantly, all
of them promoted conspiracy theories of one kind or another. This chapter will explore
how conspiracy theories have mounted a challenge not just to the official "lone
gunman" version of the assassination, but to the "authorised version" of the 1960s
themselves. Narratives about the conspiratorial activities of the authorities have
contributed to a crisis in the authority of narrative, making the Kennedy assassination
both a symptom and a cause of a postmodern culture of paranoia. This crisis of
political and historical representation, I want to suggest, becomes particularly acute
with accounts which merge narrative plot and conspiracy plot.
The first section briefly outlines how the assassination has been plotted in a
variety of cultural forms, from government inquiries to investigative journalism, and
from museum exhibits to fictional re-enactments. The second section examines in
detail two recent fictionalised versions of the shooting (Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) and
Oliver Stone's JFK (1992)), both of which became the centres of fierce debates about
the fictionalisation of history. Having examined how their narrative plots by turns
confirm and undermine their conspiracy plots, the third section goes on to argue that
there is a similar disruption in narratives of postmodernism, in which the Kennedy
assassination is itself deeply imbricated. Finally I suggest that Freud's theory of the
primal scene offers the most profitable way to plot both the assassination and
postmodemism.

LONE GUNMAN

The official "lone gunman" version of the assassination was very quickly
established. Within an hour and a half of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald had
been arrested by police at the Texas movie theatre in connection with the murder of
Police Officer J.D. Tippit which had taken place some thirty minutes earlier. Later that
same evening at the Dallas Police and Courts Building Oswald was charged with the
murder of the President. 2 Two days later, after Oswald had himself been shot by Jack
Ruby, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade gave a press conference in which he
outlined the progress of the investigation. Several witnesses had seen Oswald in the

!See Stephen E. Ambrose, "Writers on the Grassy Knoll: A Reader's Guide," New York Times Book
Review, 2 February 1992, pp.23-25.
2 0 ld was in fact initially accused of conspiring with Communists to take the life of the President,
tho~;ha these charges were quickly dropped. Reported in the BBC Timewatch documentary broadcast on
22 November 1993.
- 15 -
 -
"sniper's lair" in the School Book Depository, Wade announced, and his palm print was
found on the rifle which had been hidden there. The gun had been purchased in
Oswald's name, and he was seen carrying a long package into work that morning. 3
Within forty-eight hours, then, the "official" version of the assassination as the work of
a lone gunman, Lee Oswald, had been fixed.
On November 29th President Johnson appointed a commission to investigate the
assassination, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The FBI and the Secret Service
each conducted enquiries and handed over their lengthy reports to the Warren
Commission by the middle of December. The Commission began hearing testimony in
February, and finally produced its 888-page report in September 1964, though the
twenty-five accompanying volumes of evidence and testimony were not released until
the following month. It concluded that Oswald had carried out the assassination alone.
"The Commission has found no evidence," the Report announced, "that either Lee
Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to
assassinate President Kennedy."4 Having emphatically denied any conspiratorial
involvement, the Commission argued that "to determine the motives for the
assassination of President Kennedy, one must look to the assassin himself' (RPC, 22).
And, having examined "his family history, his education or lack of it, his acts, his
writings, and the recollections of those who had close contacts with him" (RPC, 22), it
concluded that:
Oswald was motivated by an overriding hostility to his environment. He
does not appear to have been able to establish meaningful relationships
with other people. He was perpetually discontented with the world
around him. Long before the assassination he expressed his hatred for
American society and acted in protest against it. . . . He sought for
himself a place in history . . . His commitment to Marxism and
communism appears to have been another important factor in his
motivation. He also had demonstrated a capacity to act decisively and
without regard to the consequences when such action would further his
aims of the moment. Out of these and the many other factors which may
have molded the character of Lee Harvey Oswald there emerged a man
capable of assassinating President Kennedy. (RPC, 423)

As one Commission staff lawyer allegedly complained, this list reads like a series of
cliches from a TV soap opera. 5 Although the Report reassured its readers that "the
Commission does not believe that the relation between Oswald and his wife caused him
to assassinate the President," it draws on a host of other pop psychology favourites in
its portrait of Oswald as a disaffected loner. With its dual emphasis on Oswald's

3 "Dallas Prosecutor's News Conference," New York Times, November 26th, 1963, p.14.
4Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Was~ington,
DC: Unites States Government Printing Office, 1964), p.2l. References to the Report (abbreViated as
RPC) are hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
5 Reported in Bob Callahan, Who Shot JFK?: A Guide to the Major Conspiracy Theories (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1993), p.35.
- 16 -
 -
political sympathies and his maladjustment, the Commission was caught between, on
the one hand, the need to make some sense of the assassination for the general public
by ascribing to Oswald rational political motives, and, on the other hand, the desire to
conclude that the killing of an American president was an inexplicable and
psychopathic act. So the assassination, on this view, was simultaneously the work of a
dissatisfied but otherwise unremarkable American, and something no right-minded
American would consider.
This dilemma over Oswald's rationality and responsibility has continued
throughout the three decades of research. "Lone gunman" theories in particular
frequently pathologise the assassin. For example, Gerald Posner, author of the 1992
study, Case Closed, which revived interest in the single assassin version, asserts that
"Lee Harvey Oswald, driven by his own twisted and impenetrable furies, was the only
assassin at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963."6 But conspiracy theories, whether of
the left or the right, likewise discount Oswald's agency, seeing him as a victim of
forces beyond his knowledge or control-"just a patsy," as Oswald famously shouted to
news reporters in the Dallas Police Building. A few commentators, however, have tried
to restore some content to Oswald's "impenetrable" action. Alexander Cockburn,
writing in the New Statesman & Society in 1993, argues that, however misguided,
"Oswald acted out of radical political motives," in a pre-emptive strike against the
President whom some suspected even then of ordering CIA plots to kill Castro.? As
Cockburn points out, it is in this light that we can make sense of Malcolm X's sardonic
comment in response to the news of the assassination, that "the chickens have come
home to roost."
Since Oswald was effectively "silenced" by Ruby, many commentators feel
obliged to read between the lines of Oswald's actions, to find out what he was trying to
"communicate" by the assassination. The Commission's attempt at amateur
psychology was only the first of many. Dr Renatus Hartogs, who had conducted a
psychiatric evaluation on Oswald as a teenage truant, argued in The Two Assassins that
Oswald had assassinated the substitute father figure of Kennedy out of a repressed
Oedipal desire for his own mother. 8 Kerry Thomley, a would-be novelist and friend of
Oswald during his Marine Corps days, presented the assassin as a dedicated
intellectua1. 9 Even Gerald Ford, Commission member and future president, produced a

6 Gerald Posner, "It Was Him All Along," Mail on Sunday, 2 October 1993, p.13.
? Alexander Cockburn, "Propaganda of the Deed," New Statesman & Society, 19 November 1993, pp.30-
31. Similarly, in an early article on the assassination, I.F. Stone urged his readers to "ask ourselves
honest questions," such as "how many Americans ~~ve not assum~d-with approval-.that the CIA was
probably trying to find a way to assassinate Castro? Stone recogmsed that through taCIt support of such
covert operations, "we all reach for the dagger, or the gun, in our thinking when it suits our political
thinking to do so" (I.F. Stone, "We All Had a Finger on That Trigger," I.F. Stone's Weekly, 9 December
1963, p.I-2).
8 Dr Renatus Hartogs, The Two Assassins (New York: T. Cromwell, 1965).

9 Kerry Thornley, Oswald (Chicago: New Classics House, 1965).

- 17 -
 -
biography of Oswald. Portrait of the Assassin was not much more than a recapitulation
of the Warren Commission's findings, although it did offer some behind-the-scenes
glimpses of the Commission struggling to make sense of the claims that Oswald had
been an FBI undercover agent. 10 One implication of this surprising admission is that
Oswald was more than he seemed: every seemingly incoherent action and contradictory
gesture could be reinterpreted as a part of a deliberate cover story, a possibility which
the Commission choose to ignore in favour of an Oswald scarcely in control of his own
feelings.
These biographies aim to make sense of the assassination by making sense of
Oswald. The concern to read Oswald is never very far from a desire to diagnose him.
The authors of a 1970 textbook on paranoia, for example, include an appendix which
offers thumbnail case histories not only of Oswald, but of all those who had carried out
or attempted assassinations on American presidents or presidential candidates. 11 Drs
Swanson, Bohnert, and Smith point out how Oswald's childhood "was disrupted by the
death of his father prior to the subject's birth," and how "his mother was suspicious,
grandiose and had unrealistic beliefs." They proceed to reveal that Oswald was "a
slight man, 5'7" in height," and that "he did not work but read many books, including
John Kennedy's biography." Reviewing previous and subsequent presidential pot-
shots, Swanson et el. find a similar pattern in each of the stories. We learn, for
example, that Charles Guiteau, who killed Pres. Garfield in 1881, was "of slight build
and 5' 5" tall. He had had an erratic work record and relied on swindling and theft to
support himself." If this were not enough to diagnose him as paranoid, it also emerges
that he "sulked and daydreamed, was litigious and had grandiose ideas of starting a
newspaper." But perhaps his principal manifestation of paranoia was that he "dropped
out of high school at age 18 [only 18?] and spent the remainder of the year reading the
Bible." This psychological blueprint is repeated for the majority of the ten "lone
gunmen." All the assassins, according to Swanson et aI., "were nationally displaced
individuals"; furthermore, "all had an erratic work adjustment," "all were slim and
between 5' and 5' 8" ," and "all had a paranoid diagnosis at the time of their homicidal
act." The obvious conclusion must surely be that most of the assassins were poor
immigrants on poor diets, with an understandable-and often explicitly articulated-
grudge against a country that failed to live up to their expectations. For example, Leon
Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley in 1901, declared in his last words that, "I
killed the President because he was an enemy of the good people. I am not sorry for
my crime." The logic and rhetoric behind the Warren Commission's firm denial of

10 Gerald Ford, Portrait of the Assassin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965).
11David Swanson, Philip Bohnert and Jackson Smith, The Paranoid (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970),
378-94 There have of course, been many Presidential assassination attempts since 1970: an attempt
PP'N' 'two on Ger~ld Ford one on Reagan, Bush's claim that a group of Iraqis plotted to kill him.
on lxon, ' . .' h d . h WhO
and, most recently, we might want to include the mystenous lIght aircraft that cras e Into t e Ite
House in 1994.
- 18 -
 -
political or conspiratorial motives also governs the retrospective positing by Swanson et
al. of paranoia as the "predominant cause" of all presidential assassination attempts.
According to the latter, in each case any political meaning of an assassination is
emptied out into the language of personal pathology. Likewise in a 1971 collection of
essays by social scientists, Assassinations and the Political Order, three essays seek to
explore, in the words of one of the titles, "the psychopathology of assassination."12 But
the volume also broadens the discussion into questions of social psychology and
sociology, with articles on the culture of violence in America and other countries. 13 In
both cases, assassination becomes slightly more explicable if regarded as the result of
either a personal or social malaise. The hope is that, once identified and theorised, this
pattern of violent "self-realization" can be prevented. The collection, it must be noted,
developed out of the work of the editor, William J. Crotty, as co-director of the Task
Force on Assassination and Political Violence of the National Commission on the
Causes of and Prevention of Violence.
The attention in both the Swanson and Crotty volumes to the history of political
assassinations in the USA takes its place within a larger debate about the
"Americanness" of lone gunmen, which developed soon after the shooting of President
Kennedy. In the New York Times on November 26th, 1963 Foster Hailey wrote that:

there is one clear distinction between most of the attempts to kill

Government figures in other countries and those in the United States. In
Russia and Japan the assassinations generally were the culmination of
the detailed plans made by well-organized groups, usually involving
high Government figures. The motivations were political, or
nationalistic. In the United States, in all except two cases, the attempts
were made by a single person often without advance planning, and often
without any real grievance against the personage attacked. That seems
to have been the case with Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of President
Kennedy. 14

Likewise Time magazine declared that "assassination has never been an instrument of
politics in the USA."15 Some disagreed with this perversely patriotic conclusion.
Thomas Buchanan, for instance, writing in I' Express, countered Time's assertions that
"the three assassins whose bullets killed the Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley
were lonely psychopaths," pointing out that there was evidence of political motivation

12 The three essays are: Lawrence Zelic Freedman, "Psychopathology of the Assassin"; David A.
Rothstein, "Presidential Assassination Syndrome: A Psychiatric Study of the Threat, the Deed, and the
Message"; and Thomas Greening, "The Psychological Study of Assassins," in Assassinations and the
Political Order, William J. Crotty, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp.143-266.
13 See in particular William J. Crotty, "~ssassina~ions and Their Interpretation within the American
Context" and Ivo K. Feierabend, Rosahnd L. Felerabend, Betty A. Nesvold, and Franz M. Jaggar,
"Politic~l Violence and Assassination: A Cross-National Assessment," in Crotty, pp.3-140.
14 Foster Hailey, "Lone Assassin the Rule in U.S.; Plotting More Prevalent Abroad," New York Times, 25
November 1963, p.9.
15 Unnamed author, "The Earlier Assassins," Time, 29 November 1963, p.16.
- 19 -
 l
in each example-and even a conspiracy in the case of Lincoln. 16 In the light of this
i
,
,

debate about the national styles of political assassination, it is therefore significant that
the first critical responses to the contradictions apparent in the Kennedy case came from
European journalists, or those writing in European journals. Buchanan was soon joined
in his attack on the official version, both of the Kennedy case and of America's political
history, by Nerin E. Gun, Leo Sauvage, Hans Habe, and Joachim Joesten. It was
almost as if the rugged individualism of the American dream demanded that even
assassins must be perceived as lone agents, with conspiracies and their subsequent
conspiracy theories belonging to European tradition. So, for example, the American
historian, Richard Hofstadter, added an additional footnote to the revised version of his
paper, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which was first delivered in Oxford
in early November 1963, and then published in Harper's Magazine in 1964.
"Conspiratorial explanations of Kennedy's assassination," writes Hofstadter, "have a
far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States."17 Coup d'etats were
felt to be part of an alien tradition; American presidents were shot by disaffected and
paranoid loners, products of a small-minded, populist and violent streak in American
politics. The irony was that the intelligence agencies of the American government were
indeed plotting the overthrow of foreign leaders by assassination. American
exceptionalism once again proved to be a comforting myth.
From the outset the liberal and radical left was divided on what to think about
the assassination. For some, belief in a conspiracy was part of the "paranoid" mentality
which had dominated the McCarthyite years of the Cold War, and was therefore to be
rejected. Hofstadter is quick to locate conspiracy theories about the event as either a
European or minority political phenomenon in his concern to attack the "paranoid
style" as a dangerous and unwelcome tendency in American political life. With his
reference to "a far wider currency in Europe," he is probably alluding to the formation
by Bertrand Russell of a "Who Killed Kennedy Committee", whose members included
Michael Foot, Hugh Trevor-Roper, William Empson, John Arden, J.B. Priestley and the
film director Tony Richardson. In an article in the September 1964 issue of the radical
journal, The Minority of One, Russell represents the other possibility of critical
response, which appeared first in Europe but quickly spread to America. Russell
declared that "the official version of the assassination of President Kennedy has been so
riddled with contradictions that it has been abandoned and rewritten no less than three

16 Thomas Buchanan, i'Express, February 1964; cited in Callahan, Who Shot JFK?, pp.21-22.
17 Hofstadter goes on to claim that "no European, to my knowledge, has matched the ingenuity of
Professor Revilo P. Oliver of the University of Illinois," who was eventually dismissed from his post for
his far-right allegations that JFK was shot by the International Communist Conspiracy because he was
becoming too "American." Hofstadter's basic argument-t.hat the para~oid style is favoured only by
minority movements in Americ,a-is th.erefore .only cO~~lrmed by thIS apparent counter~ex?mple.
Richard Hofstadter, The ParanOid Style In Amencan PolitiCS and Other Essays (New York. VIDtage,
1967), p.7.
- 20-
times."18 He went on to allege that "photographs, evidence and affidavits have been
doctored out of recognition," and that "the FBI, the police and the Secret Service have
tried to silence key witnesses or instruct them in what evidence to give." In short,
Russell argued that the composition of the Commission was bound to produce a biased
report, if not a cover-up. It was the duty of intellectuals to oppose the orthodox version
of events.
Russell's article was, however, immediately countered by the independent
political columnist I.F. Stone in his one-man newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly. Like
Hofstadter, Stone made clear that the left should have no truck with political
demonology:

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting in defense of

the Left and of sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history,
character assassination, guilt by association and demonology . Now I see
elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the
Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report. I believe
that the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our
country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. 19

Stone was not the only commentator on the critical left to be totally convinced by the
Warren Commission's work, and to be relieved that America was not about to be
absorbed in an escalating spiral of mutually assured destruction by the assassin's bullet.
Herbert L. Packer, writing in The Nation, admired the "conscientious and at times
brilliant job the commission has done," in the way that it "admirably fulfilled its central
objective by producing an account of the circumstances under which President Kennedy
was assassinated that is adequate to satisfy all reasonable doubts."20 Even when the
editors of The Nation published an essay on the contradictions which emerged from a
close reading of the delayed volumes of testimony, they prefaced Fred J. Cook's piece
with the reassurance that they still shared Herbert Packer's original conclusions about
the success of the Report. 21
Yet it was not only leftist commentators like Stone, Packer and the editors of
The Nation who expressed satisfaction with the Commission's findings. Political
affiliations became confused over the assassination. Establishment magazines like
Time, for example, announced that "the Report is amazing in its detail, remarkable in its
judicial caution and restraint, yet utterly convincing in all of its major conclusions. "22
Likewise Life proclaimed that "the Report is a great public document that reflects credit

18 Bertrand Russell, "16 Questions on the Assassination," The Minority of One, 6 September 1964, pp.6-
8.
19 I.F. Stone, "The Left and the Warren Commission Report," I. F. Stone's Weekly, 5 October 1964, p.l-
2.
20 Herbert L. Packer, "The Warren Report: A Measure of the Achievement," The Nation. 2 November
1964, p.295.
21 Fred J. Cooke, "Some Unanswered Questions," The Nation, 13 June 1966, p.705.
22 Unnamed author, "The Warren Commission Report," Time, 2 October 1964, p.19.
- 21 -
on its author, and the nation it represents."23 The Report, and the "lone gunman" theory
it detailed, gained enormous credence in the United States in the first years after its
publication. The New York Times printed the entire Report in a special supplement, and
went on to publish selections from the hearings in a Bantam paperback which sold a
million copies. In many ways the Warren Commission succeeded in allaying fears that
the assassination was the work of Soviet or Cuban forces, which was perhaps one of
President Johnson's immediate concerns only a year after the Cuban missile crisis.
Only 29 percent of Americans believed Oswald acted alone before the Warren Report
was released; after its findings became public in late 1964, 87 percent believed the
Commission's version. 24 In a period of intense Cold War paranoia, it was therefore
expeditious to believe that political assassinations were not in the American tradition.
But in its concern to reassure the America public, the Warren Commission Report
demonstrated an almost paranoid concern to dispel any suggestion of conspiracy.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Since the Warren Commission Report was felt by so many to be "utterly

convincing," proponents of the "lone gunman" version began to speculate on the
motives of those who "refused" to accept the Commissions findings. In his article in
The Nation, Herbert Packer expressed this concern when he argued that "what the
Warren Commission has done is to refute or render irrelevant the speculations of those
who, out of whatever aberrant needs, still refuse to believe that Oswald, Ruby and the
Dallas authorities were what they appear to be and not something more sinister."25
Since then many commentators have focused attention on the "aberrant needs" of
conspiracy theorists. In the same way that Oswald's action is viewed as making sense
of his life, conspiracy plots are regarded as making sense of what would otherwise
appear as a brutally random act. William Manchester, author of the classic elegy,
Death of a President, summed up in a letter to the New York Times in 1993 what for
many had become a standard analysis of conspiracy approaches:

if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a
scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn't
balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would
invest the President's death with meaning, endowing him with
martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of
course, do the job nicely.26

23 Loudon Wainwright, "The Book for All to Read," Life, 16 October 1964, p.35.
24 Gallup opinion polls cited in Max Holland, "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination,"
Reviews in American History, 22 (1994), p.203.
25 Packer, "A Measure of the Achievement," p.299.
26 Cited in Holland, "Making Sense," p.192. In D.M. Thomas's assassination novel, Flying in to Love
- 22-
 According to this reasoning, then, conspiracy theories satisfy a psychological need, and
the proliferation of books and articles on the JFK case only serves to demonstrate how
great the shock of the assassination was to the American psyche.
Yet with the publication of the full twenty-six volumes, a few writers found
nagging inconsistencies between the evidence and the Commission's conclusions. 27 For
them, what needed explanation was not so much the dark psychology of either Oswald
or even those who refused to accept the "official" version, but the Commission's
motives in papering over the cracks in its own Report. There arises a situation, then, in
which a psychologised account of how conspiracy theories satisfy the needs of those
unable to come to terms with the tragedy is matched against a picture of how the
Warren Commission tried to satisfy the needs of an American public anxious about the
collapse of the political system.
Conspiracy theories about the assassination gradually became more popular. In
addition to the articles by European correspondents, those in The Nation and a whole
series in The Minority of One during 1964 and 1965, the first two major books
cri ticising the Commission's conclusions appeared in the summer of 1966. Both
Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest and Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement examined the
contradictions and inconsistencies in the "official" version. 28 The investigation into the
Warren Commission's actions and motives formed a critical mirror of the
Commission's own investigation of the assassin. Epstein explored how the
Commission dealt with allegations that Oswald worked for the FBI, how it developed
the single bullet theory, and how it rejected the account of two FBI agents present at the
autopsy which contradicted the official report by the pathologist. He came to the
conclusion that the Commission was inevitably undermined by its desire to establish the
whole truth, but to do so without compromising national security-an impossible task
if, as many have claimed, Oswald was involved with various intelligence agencies.
Epstein argued that "there was thus a dualism in purpose." If the "explicit purpose was
to ascertain and expose the facts, the implicit purpose was to protect the national
interest by dispelling rumours. "29 Epstein's reconstruction of the Commissioners'
motives thus produced an account of duplicity that was patriotic, even if ultimately

(1992; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), Sister Agnes, a nun obsessed with the Kennedy shooting,
expresses the logic of this position in a more colloquial fashion: "History ~as what happened to you-to
Sister Agnes, to quiet Tessa Mason, a hard-up teacher's daughter-and It made no sense. It began to
make a glimmer of sense if you could see that death as the result of a conspiracy-a plot" (p.165).
27 Most people's access to both the findings and the hearings was through two selective editions put out
by the New York Times. In Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities and the
Report (1964; New York: Vintage, 1992), Sylvia Meagher pointed out the many ways in which the
selections in the edited version avoided many of the inconsistencies which were apparent in the full-
length version.
28 Edward Jay Epstein, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of the Truth (London:
Hutchinson, 1966), and Mark Lane, Rush to Judgement: A Critique of the Warren Commission's Inquiry
into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London:
The Bodley Head, 1966).
29 Epstein, Inquest. p.xii.
- 23 -
misguided.
In Mark Lane's verSIon, however, the Commission was dictated less by
inherently contradictory conflicts of interest, than by an outright desire to cover up the
truth. In his re-examination of aspects such as the "magic bullet" theory, the capability
of Oswald as a marksman, and the eye-witness testimony which pointed to a second
gunman on the grassy knoll, Lane developed not only a conspiracy theory about the
assassination of President Kennedy, but also a second conspiracy about the subsequent
cover-up by the various intelligence agencies.
The doubling of conspiracies was compounded in future research by the
discovery of evidence of Oswald doubles who kept on appearing in the months leading
up to the assassination. 30 In addition to these numerous sightings, contradictory
portraits of the assassin emerged: he was both a Castro supporter, and part of the anti-
Castro campaign; both a committed Marxist, and a member of the violently anti-Soviet
White Russian exile community in Dallas; and both an intelligence agent and someone
under surveillance by the intelligence agencies. The more evidence that was gathered,
the less things seemed to add up-unless one held the doubly paranoid belief that the
contradictions had been the deliberately planted as false clues. The increasingly
detailed research into the six seconds of the assassination seemed to promise some form
of final resolution, but it only succeeded in ramifying outwards into the larger time
frame of the postwar period, and into the larger interconnections between intelligence
agencies, organised crime and Cold War politics. 31
The case for a conspiracy reached a new level of public exposure in 1967 with
New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's indictment of businessman Clay Shaw
for conspiring with other anti-Castro activists to murder the President. 32 The case
didn't reach court until 1969; it lasted five weeks and was thrown out by the jury in less
than an hour's deliberation. Both Garrison and his conspiracy theories were discredited
as the work of an egomaniac with political ambitions, and the upper hand once again
returned to the advocates of the "lone gunman" theory. So, for example, in 1967-68
Attorney General Ramsey Clark convened two panels to review the medical testimony
of the Warren Commission which had ignored the autopsy X-rays and photographs, an
omission which had prompted much criticism. 33 But the Clark Panels only reconfirmed
the Warren Commission's conclusions that Kennedy and Connally had been shot from

30 For a representative account of Oswald's doublings see Matthew Smith, JFK: The Second PLot
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992).
31 Such an argument is made by Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1993).

32 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

33 U.S. Dept of Justice, "1968 Panel Review of Photographs, X-Ray Films, Documents and Oth~r
Evidence Pertaining to the Fatal Wounding of President John F. Kennedy on November. 22, 1963 In
Dallas. Texas," rpt. in Harold Weisberg, Post Mortem: JFK Cover-Up Smashed (Fredenck, MD: H.
Weisberg, 1975).
- 24-
 the rear and from a downwards angle, with no evidence of a second trajectory, and
hence a second assassin.
The critics of the "lone gunman" version were relegated to the world of the
tabloids and small press "crackpot" publications, until the emergence of revelations
about the covert and illegal operations of intelligence agencies in connection with
Watergate. In response to pressure from the media, Congress formed the Rockefeller
Commission in 1975 and then the Church Committee in 1976, to investigate the
domestic and foreign activities of the FBI and CIA.34 Amongst the many findings were
disclosures about Operation Mongoose (the CIA's continuation of the supposedly
defunct campaign to regain Cuba), along with its covert contract with various Mafia
figures to assassinate Castro. Although both committees included denials that there
was any involvement by the intelligence agencies in the assassination of President
Kennedy, there was sufficient public concern for Congress to re-open the investigation
with the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which looked
into the murder of President Kennedy, as well as the shooting of Robert Kennedy and
Martin Luther King in 1968. 35 The Report (another large 14-volume effort) appeared in
1979, and concluded that though Oswald had fired the fatal shots, there was a 95
percent probability that a second gunman had fired from the grassy knoll. Without
producing conclusive evidence of a conspiracy, the Committee recommended that the
Justice Department look into the affairs of Mafia members Santos Trafficante and
Johnny Roselli. Like so many other potential witnesses in the Kennedy case, both these
men died violent deaths before they could give testimony, a phenomenon which then
spawned a whole new group of conspiracy theories about the silencing of witnesses. 36
Throughout the eighties and into the nineties new books and articles continued
to appear, and old ones were reprinted. By 1993 roughly 80 percent of Americans-
including even President Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore-believed in some form
of conspiracy theory about the assassination. 37 Nearly every major television station
and newspaper ran special features during the week of the thirtieth anniversary, but
there was no consistent pattern to the coverage. Some concentrated on assessing the
legacy of Kennedy; others recycled some of the more popular conspiracy theories; but

34 U.S. President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission),
Report to the President (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); U.S. Senate Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Operations, (Church
Committee), Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1975); and The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F.
Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, Book 5, Final Report (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1976).
35 U.S. House of Representatives, Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1979).
36 For an account of the fate of witnesses, see, for example, Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy
(1980; revised edn., London: Warner, 1992).
37 Opinion polls cited in "The Death of a President," Economist, 9 October 1993. p.133. Report about
Clinton and Gore in Callahan, Who Shot JFK?, p.147. ,-,

- 25-
quite a few published versions of Posner's 1993 vindication of the "lone gunman"
theory, Case Closed.
The opinion polls I have cited seem to tell a story of a loss of innocence, as
Americans came to believe that the political process could have been interrupted by a
conspiracy, and even that the government could have plotted against its own citizens-
not to mention its own president. But the development of accounts of the assassination
has not proceeded along a straightforward narrative line from innocence to experience.
Even the story of official investigations is convoluted. The first government inquiry
found no evidence of conspiracy, nor did the second or third. The House Select
Committee in 1979 was prepared to admit some form of Mob involvement, but in 1982
the Justice Department asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the
acoustical evidence. Having found what it took to be grave errors in the 1979 Report,
the Justice Department once again formally closed the case in 1988. 38 Then in response
to the public outcry and heavy lobbying following Oliver Stone's 1992 film, JFK,
Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act
(1992) which ordered the release of all files pertaining to the case, subject to a security
vetting procedure. If the government has never agreed on how to read the
assassination, nor have its critics. As we have seen, it has remained hotly contested
from the outset whether it is more "naive" to believe in the "lone gunman" version or a
conspiracy theory. Each side psychologises the other, and each denial of conspiracy is
taken as further proof of the existence of a cover-up conspiracy. There is no firm
guarantee in advance what will be the political valency of any interpretation of the
assassination. What can be agreed on, however, is that research into the Kennedy
assassination has offered an increasing challenge to conventional histories and politics.
It also provides a vehicle for expressing popular distrust of the authorities. Even
Congress came to take seriously the language of conspiracy, as it contested the political
territory of expertise with its own intelligence agencies. In short, the investigation and
presentation of minute particles of evidence in Dealey Plaza became an extremely
visible though displaced figuration of a larger crisis in political and historical authority
during and after the sixties.

PUBLIC ACCESS

We have seen, then, how the details and meanings of the assassination are
disputed by many different parties: by the authorities and their experts (consisting of
judges, senators, security chiefs, lawyers, scientists, criminal investigators, etc.), by
political commentators, by independent researchers from a variety of backgrounds, by

38 Reported in Summers. The Kennedy Conspiracy.

- 26-
biographers, by academic psychologists and sociologists, and so on. With the
increasing volume and technical difficulty of evidence relating to the assassination, the
question of who is qualified to analyse the case and who has access to the materials
becomes an important issue. I now want to consider how the case has been constructed
in cultural forms which have an oblique relationship to the protocols of scholarship and
evidence underpinning the examples outlined above. Before going on to look at how
the case has been presented in fictional formats, I want to consider how the
assassination is constructed in a number of institutions which range from the official to
the unorthodox. So far the uneven development of discussions about the assassination
has been plotted into a circuitous chronology which unravels itself over the last three
decades. This development could-in another meaning of the term-be plotted
geographically across the United States, with an account of the institutional locations of
the various archives, museums and libraries relating to the case. In brief, the further
west one travels, the less orthodox the resources. 39
The official repository for all materials deemed to be relevant to the case is the
annex of the National Archives, a huge new building forty minutes from downtown
Washington, DC, on the outskirts of the University of Maryland campus. Under the
terms of the JFK Act the government is working on releasing approximately 800,000
pages of records, but the total amount of all related materials could reach as high as
three million pages, if, as some researchers claim, there is a vast interrelation between
all of the postwar assassinations, cover-ups, and intelligence agency activities. 40 The
sheer amount of material deters any "amateur" research into the Kennedy case, even
before the complexity of the medical, ballistics and acoustical evidence is taken into
account. This situation is hardly improved by the organisation of the collection: the
visitor to the National Archives is shown into a room that is empty except for half a
dozen extremely confusing lists of the materials with their approximate shelf length in
feet. The staff are too busy processing the collection to assist the researcher, who is
placed in the circular position of having to know in advance what to look for. Many of
the documents are, in any case, so heavily blacked out by security censors that they no
longer contain any significant information.
Also in Washington are the independently run Assassination Archives and
Research Center. Housed in three small offices in a crumbling Victorian brownstone
building, the Center is managed by Jim Lesar, an attorney specialising in cases
involving the retrieval of documents through the Freedom of Information Act. The
AARC mission is to "acquire, present and disseminate information on political

39 As with every detail of the Kennedy case, this geographical plotting itself tells a story. In The Yankee
and Cowboy War (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976), Carl Oglesby argues that the
sequence of events from Dallas to Watergate is part of a larger transfer of power from the East to the
West coast.
40 Information on the potential size of Kennedy files is from the Assassination Archives and Resource
Center (Washington, DC), "Newsletter," 1993.
- 27 -
assassinations," and it extends its services to scholarly researchers and "crackpot"
theorists alike. It was instrumental in the campaign that led to the signing of the JFK
Act, and under the terms of the Act it receives a copy of all new documents released to
the National Archives-a bonus that was beginning to backfire as the offices were
rapidly running out of space when I visited them in December 1994. Amongst its
holdings the AARC lists "some twenty four-drawer file cabinets which contain
voluminous records pertaining to political assassinations," and more than 2000 books
on conspiracies of all kinds.
Next comes The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, on the top floor of what is now
the Dallas County Administration Building. Occupying the site of Lee Harvey
Oswald's alleged "sniper's lair," the Museum presents its materials (in the words of its
leaflet) to "help those who remember come to grips with a powerful memory, and
educate younger audiences about an unforgettable chapter in American history."
Although obviously having a vested interest in the "lone gunman" version, the museum
does give space to some of the conspiracy theories. Its main focus, however, is more
on the legacy of Kennedy as a president than the details of his death. What is important
about the museum is that it is a popular site (1.5 million visitors a year) where people
can interpret the assassination in their own way, which for many involves writing "their
recollections and thoughts in memory books," and visiting the shop to purchase
anything from videos to "I'm just a patsy" badges. It is tempting to dismiss
immediately such commercialisation of the case, but the very accessibility of the
museum speaks to the fact that the "official" resources are so inaccessible. Making
sense of the assassination is something on which the experts do not have a monopoly.
Finally in this westwards journey through assassination sites we arrive at the
Mae Brussell Library, which was last located in Seaside, California. Brussell, shocked
to the core by the Kennedy assassination, gave up her life as a Californian housewife to
become a full-time conspiracy researcher, eventually ending up with her own regular
radio programme, broadcast from a small listener-funded radio station in the Monterey
peninsula area. 41 After her death in 1988 (she believed she had contracted cancer as the
result of a CIA plot), Brussell's personal library and notes-which purportedly
document the existence of a secret network of Nazi-influenced power in the USA-
became the object of controversy in the various attempts to establish a research centre
in her name. I was informed by the woman who took over Brussell' s radio slot that her
personal library was safe in storage "in somebody's garage," but she could not reveal

41 Jonathan Vankin gives a brief biographical sketch in Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes: PoliticaL
Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: ~aragon ~ouse, ,~991), pp.86-1 00. Othe,r ~etails
are included in several local newspaper profiles: Judith A. Elsner, Mae Brussell: Fears Hidden
Government' Plans Assassinations," The Pine Cone (Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA), 21 September 1972.
pp.43-44; David Cole, "Fascinating Search f~r Fas~ist Conspiracy," Herald (Monterey, CA), 18 January
1976, magazine section, pp.15-17; and an obituary In HeraLd, 4 October 1988.

- 28 -
 where. 42
Brussell's hidden library is interesting in that it represents the boundary between
the official and the unorthodox, the professional and the amateur. Her work is located
on the fringes of the "crackpot" and the scholarly. Brussell' s writings and collections
mark the cross-over point between conspiracy theory as a factual representation of
What Is Really Going On, and conspiracy theory as a figurative, allusive articulation of
the interconnections of social and economic power through the displaced
documentation of a shadowy cabal. Her few published articles proceed by the
cumulative interweaving of names and institutions, which do not quite amount to a firm
conspiracy, but Brussell's rhetorical manreuvres nevertheless create an atmosphere of
nervous anticipation and patterned expectation. 43

LITERARY COMMISSION

Mae Brussell' s legacy is situated in the contested territory that forms the
borderlands between fact and fiction. In general, the Kennedy case has seen more than
its share of official versions which turn out to be fabrications, factual allegations which
read like nothing so much as fiction, and fictional accounts which tum out to be more
accurate than any non-fictional theory. An example of a factual account that reads like
fantasy is the privately printed pamphlet by James M. Beasely and Jerald Lee
Cockburn, "The Assassination Festival of Jacqueline the Praying Mantis" (1971),
which argues that the murder ultimately represented the fulfilment of a century-old
grudge between the French Bouvier and Irish Kennedy clans. Or there is a privately
printed 1964 book, The Quest for Truth: (A Quizzical Look at the Warren Report), or
How President Kennedy Was Really Assassinated, by Southern Californian swimming
pool engineer, George C. Thomson. It argues that 22 shots were fired at President
Kennedy, and in the cross-fire five people were killed, including Officer J.D. Tippit,
who was in fact impersonating JFK. According to Thomson, Kennedy escaped, and
was seen a year later attending a private birthday party for Truman Capote. 44 Is this a
product of wish fulfilment or creative investigation? Does Beasely and Cockburn's
account transform the Kennedy presidency into a historical romance, or were the
"Camelot" years lived through that genre at the time? What are these authors really
trying to say? These and other improbable accounts seem to demand interpretation, in

42 The woman (who did not want to be named) apparently lived just further up the Californian coast in
Aptos. The 1994 edition of Pynchon Notes revealed that Thomas Pynchon's last driving license was
taken out in Aptos, CA.
43 See, for example, Mae Brussell, "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination," The
Rebel, 22 November 1983, pp.22-35.
44 Cited in Callahan, Who Shot JFK?, pp.143, 63.

- 29-
the same way that Oswald's actions are perpetually in need of further explication.
Neither wholly factual nor explicitly fictional, these conspiracy theories perhaps say
more about their authors' political fantasies than they do about the assassination. They
also tell a story about the professionalisation of knowledge with regard to conspiracy
research. Rather than rejecting the methods of documentation associated with "official"
versions, alternative accounts often strive to mimic those very standards. The content
might present a radical challenge to orthodoxy, but the form remains indebted to the
very modes of historical inquiry which its authors repudiate.
If "fringe" research is ambiguous in its relationship to factual evidence, other
cultural engagements with the assassination have been more open about their status as
fiction. In a review of Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement, Norman Mailer called for the
establishment of a Writers' Commission to replace the Warren Commission. "One
would propose one last new commission," Mailer writes, "one real commission-a
literary commission supported by public subscription to spend a few years on the case."
He goes on to declare that he "would trust a commission headed by Edmund Wilson
before I trusted another by Earl Warren. Wouldn't yoU?"45 In many ways Mailer's
challenge has been fulfilled over the last three decades, with a large number of novels,
plays, poetry and films about the Kennedy case. For some authors the fictional format
has undoubtedly allowed them to pursue speculations without the threat of libel. For
others, though, fiction has allowed a popular engagement with the case that is at least
partially freed from the strictures of evidence and legal argumentation.
Two of the most interesting assassination novels are by thriller writer Richard
Condon. The first of these was The Manchurian Candidate, first published as a novel
in 1959, and turned into a film in 1962. 46 The story involves a political assassination
carried out by an ex-army officer who is brainwashed by the communist Chinese. After
the Kennedy assassination, many people were disturbed by the seemingly prophetic
nature of the book/film. Condon himself was invited by The Nation to comment on the
similarities between his novel and the Kennedy case. He found parallels between
Oswald and his protagonist Raymond Shaw in terms of their unpopularity, and their
mutual inheritance of paranoid suspicions from the mother, and their resentment of
authority. Condon also found discrepancies, noting that whereas Shaw had been
programmed by the enemy, Oswald was merely a product of America's culture of
violence. 47 But during the 1970s Congressional inquiries, revelations emerged about
the CIA's Project ARTICHOKE, which had unsuccessfully tried during the fifties to
create brainwashed assassins. Fiction turned out to be uncannily closer to fact than it

45 Norman Mailer, "The Great American Mystery," Book Week Washington Post, 28 August 1966, pp.l,
11-13.
46 Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (1959; Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1993); The
Manchurian Candidate, dir. John Frankenheimer (1962).
~7 Condon, "Manchurian Candidate in Dallas," The Nation, 28 December 1963, pp.'+'+9-50.

- 30-
was intended to be. Condon produced a second assassination novel in 1974 (turned into
a film in 1979), which responded to the climate of suspicion and distrust at the time of
Watergate. 48 In Winter Kills, the dead President's brother spends the entire novel
pursuing one conspiracy theory after another, each of which at first seems entirely
convincing. All in turn prove to be red herrings, and the novel thus sets up the
possibility that the truth can never be reached. But the plunge into the abyss of
epistemological scepticism is halted in the last few pages of the novel when we learn
that in fact all the clues have been deliberately fabricated and planted for Nick, the
President's brother, by a real conspiracy of the secret ruling elite led by his father. In
this way the novel toys with the idea of an endless deferral of ultimate revelation and an
insuperable instability of knowledge, only for this hermeneutic experiment to be
recuperated at the last minute in the name of realism, causality and agency. 49
Other engagements with the assassination, however, have not offered such an
easily assimilated explanation for the staginess and contradictions of the evidence. An
alternative canon of assassination literature has emerged, in which the emphasis is less
on producing a plausible account, than on exploring the implausibilities of the case, and
defamiliarising its litany of established terms and points of reference. In this category
might be placed J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, which includes, for example, a
surreal version of events, entitled "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Considered as a Downhill Motor Race."50 Or there is D.M. Thomas's Flying in to Love,
a "postmodern" novel which attracted much criticism for its scene of a nun
masturbating to the Zapruder film.51 But this episode is no more strange than the fact
that avant-garde film-makers in New York in the early seventies were circulating a
bootlegged copy of the Zapruder footage intercut with hardcore porn. Their aim was to
shock viewers into viewing the film as a highly charged representation rather than a
transparent documentary record of the event. 52 Jello Biafra's "magic bullet music
lyrics" for the punk group, The Dead Kennedys, likewise focused on the fascination
with violence that the case attracted. Other writers have dealt with the unreality that
now seems to hang over the event. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's
Illuminatus! trilogy, for example, gratuitously mixes plausible and apocryphal

48 Condon, Winter Kills (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974);Winter Kills, dir. William Richert
(1979).
49 A similar recuperation is performed at the end of The Manchurian Candidate. For most of its length
the novel is a vicious satire on the kind of right-wing Cold War paranoia represented by Senator
McCarthy, but at the end it turns out that the Senator's wife is not p~ of the ultra-right but is in fact in
the pay of the Russians, thereby seeming to justify the very paranOIa that has been the target of the
novel's satire.
50 J .G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, revised edn., with a Preface by William Burroughs (1970;
London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1993), pp.122-25.
51 For example, Maureen Freely, "Wet Dreams in Dallas: Flying in to Love," Independent on Sunday, 2
February 1992, p. 28.
52 Discussed in a BBC Late Show special on the Zapruder footage, screened during the week of the
thirtieth anniversary, 22 November 1993.
- 31 -
conspiracy theories, such as the world being secretly controlled by the Dealy Lama
whose hideout is beneath the Dealey Plaza. The ludicrous proliferation of suspicion
and revelation in the novel is fuelled by the belief that "illumination is on the other side
of absolute terror," until paranoia is the only sane response to contemporary politics. 53
One of the most intriguing rewritings of the assassination is Derek Pell' s
Assassination Rhapsody, published in 1989 in the Foreign Agents series by
Semiotext(e). In some of the pieces which make up the collection, Pell processes the
language of the Warren Commission Report through a series of defamiliarising
permutations and fragmentations with the aid of a thesaurus: "For a soldier armed with
a rifle bang situated on the sixth level of a building bang in a Southern State of the U.S.
bang (area, 267,339 sq. mi.-pop., 7,711,000; capital, Austin), a book used for study in
schools bang, a place where things are put for safe-keeping, anything that is built, the
attempts to hit bang with a missile were at a slow-moving object that is shot at bang
bang bang, proceeding on a downward slope in virtually a straight fine strong cord with
a hook bang used in fishing, with the arrangement in a straight line of the member bang
of a medieval band of hashish-eating Moslems," and so on the account proceeds. 54 For
Pell, the assassin's shots produce a literal interruption in the flow of language, a
disturbance between signifier and signified which dislocates the relationship between
fact and fiction.

MIXING FACT AND FICTION

The Kennedy assassination, then, has become a site of cultural contestation

between the official and the unorthodox, the popular and the scholarly, and the factual
and the fictional, in which political allegiances can never be guaranteed in advance. I
now want to explore in more detail the cultural politics surrounding two recent and
popular fictionalised re-plottings of the Kennedy assassination, namely Don DeLillo's
Libra (1988) and Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). Both became the centres of fierce debates
which spoke of larger anxieties about Kennedy, the sixties, and questions of literary and
political representation. DeLillo received surprisingly harsh newspaper reviews for his
novel. In his column for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley attacked him for
creating in Libra an "ideological fiction," an analysis which focused as much on the
novel's literariness as its "ideological" bias. In the same newspaper, George Will
accused DeLillo of being a "bad citizen" and a "literary vandal" who dared to distort

53 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, llluminatus! (New York: Dell, 1975: repr. 1988), p.278.
54 Derek Pell. Assassination Rhapsody (New York: AutonomediaiSemiotext(e). 1989). p.47.

- 32 -
one of America's most sacred memories. 55 The vehemence of the attack on DeLillo
exceeds what might be expected in the light of its adoption of a critical conspiracy
theory involving renegade CIA agents and anti-Castro forces. What seemed to rile
critics was its very fictionality. Similarly, unfavourable reviewers of JFK were
incensed by the "mixing of fact and fiction" in the film's now infamous mingling of
authentic assassination footage with artfully reconstructed documentary clips. 56 The
Washington Post and Time began a fierce assault on J F K whilst it was still In

production. As a Washington Post headline put it, JFK was a "Dallas in

Wonderland."57 As with DeLillo, the conspiracy theory the film espoused was far from
new (mostly it was a recycling of Garrison's case), yet the film seemed to touch a nerve
that factual presentations of the same case had missed. Why should fictional rewritings
of the assassination cause such concern?

PLOTS

Both DeLillo and Stone addressed the question of the fictional status of their
works. In various interviews and op-ed pages, Stone was keen to reiterate the factual,
historical premises of his film. 58 He did not take too many liberties with the evidence,
he said, "because the material is important and sacred to the public. "59 When
confronted over some of the details, however, he conceded that his film functioned
more as a "myth," to counter the "myths" of the Warren Commission Report. For
Stone, then, JFK was intended as a factual contribution to the debate, up to the point
when he was forced to use the notion of a deeper truth of fiction in order to defend the
fabrications contained in the film.
Whereas Stone tried to fudge the issue of its status as fiction, DeLillo engaged
with the question more directly; indeed, the notion of fabrication forms one of the

55 Frank Lentricchia discusses the reception of Libra in "The American Writer as Bad Citizen," in
Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), pp.I-6.
56 For an account of the media coverage of JFK see Art Simon, "The Making of Alert Viewers: The
Mixing of Fact and Fiction in JFK," Cineaste, 19 (1992), 14-15. Somewhat surprisingly, two review
essays in the American Historical Review praised the film for its historical accuracy. Marcus Raskin,
"JFK and the Culture of Violence," and Robert A. Rosenstone, "JFK: Historical FactlHistorical Film,"
AHR, 97 (1992),487-99, and 506-511.
57 Other films have appeared in the last decade which also involve the Kennedy assassination, yet none
has provoked anything like the passions which attended the release of Stone's film. The list includes The
Parallax View (1974), Love Field (1992), In the Line of Fire (1993), Ruby (1992), Malcolm X (1993),
and a feature-length episode of Quantum Leap broadcast on BBC2 on the assassination thirtieth
anniversary in 1993.
58 Oliver Stone, New York Times, 3 February 1992, p.AI4, and 2 April 1992, p.B4; The Nation, 18 May
1992, p.650.
59 Quoted in Gary Crowdus, "Clarifying the Conspiracy: An Interview with Oliver Stone," Cineaste, 19
(1992), 25-27.
- 33 -
major themes of Libra. As if anticipating the stormy reaction Libra was to provoke in
some reviewers, DeLillo was concerned in his first major interviews to explain why he
had decided to rewrite the assassination as a novel. He had in fact first dealt with the
Kennedy and other presidential shootings in an essay he wrote for Rolling Stone in
1983, five years before Libra was published. When asked why he had expanded and
transformed the essay into a novel, DeLillo replied that:

When I did the 1983 piece in Rolling Stone, I began to realize how
enormously wide-reaching the material was and how much more deeply
I would have to search before I could begin to do justice to it. Because
I'm a novelist, I guess I defined "justice" in terms of a much more full-
bodied work than the nonfiction piece I had done, and so I began to
think seriously about a novel. 60

There is, however, something disingenuous about DeLillo's tautological confession that
he wrote about the assassination in a novel because he is a novelist.
He reveals more about what "doing justice" to the case involves when he goes
on to talk about the Nicholas Branch character in Libra, who is a retired CIA
researcher, commissioned by the Agency to write the secret history of the assassination:

Branch feels overwhelmed by the massive data he has to deal with ....
He despairs of being able to complete a coherent account of this
extraordinarily complex event. I think the fiction writer tries to redeem
this despair. Stories can be a consolation-at least in theory. The
novelist can try to leap across the barrier of fact, and the reader is willing
to take that leap with him as long as there's a kind of redemptive truth
waiting on the other side, a sense that we've arrived at a resolution. I
think fiction rescues history from its confusions .... So the novel which
is within history can also operate outside it-correcting, clearing up,
and, perhaps most important of all, finding rhythms and symmetries that
we simply don't encounter elsewhere. 61

DeLillo here suggests an almost religious purpose for fiction. Literature provides
consolation, redemption, resolution and hidden symmetries for those in despair in the
information age. The novel offers the reader confronted with too much data the
possibility of transcending the chaos of the mundane, into a pleasurable world of
narrative coherence and resolution. Once again this will tum out to be a disingenuous
reply in the light of what Libra manages to perform, but for the moment I want to
follow up DeLillo's suggestions about the role of fiction, and in particular the historical
connections between novel plots and conspiracy plots.
Several critics have told a similar story about the emergence of literary plots in
62
the eighteenth century as secularised versions of the Christian eschatological plot.

60 Anthony DeCurtis, "'An Outsider in This Society': An Interview with Don DeLillo," in Introducing
Don DeLiI/o, p.49.
61 DeCurtis, '''An Outsider in This Society,''' p.56.
62See for example Robert Caserio, Plot, Story and the Novel: From Dickens and Po~ to the Mo~ern
Period (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), Leo Bersani. The Culture of Redemp~IO~' (Cambndge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and FictIOn (New York

- 34-
Belief in God as Providence, so the story goes, ensured that every aspect of the creation
made sense, that every detail and twist of history was a clue to the larger and
harmonically structured divine plan. But once belief in God began to disappear (with
the rise of the Enlightenment), so a substitute had to be found for the all-embracing plot
of Providence. This was found in novel plots as much as conspiracy plots, both of
which presented history not as a product of divine will, but as an effect of rational,
purposeful human plotting.
In Libra the narrator offers the following thoughts on conspiracy as an
affirmation of rational agency:

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working

?f a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy
IS everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure,
undistracted, forever closed off to us .... Conspirators have a logic and a
daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men
who find coherence in some criminal act. 63

Conspiracies, on this model, are self-realised fantasies of perfect, teleological agency,

fantasies of masculinist control. With their figuration of heroic agents uncovering
conspiracies, thrillers and detective novels can be seen to offer aesthetic compensations
for the lack of such agency in "ordinary life."64 Both the creation and the uncovering of
plots can become a way for men to organise and shape their desires into a "taut story."
In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks expands on the idea of the organisation of
pleasure in and through plotting. Noting that the plot of much modern fiction is a
conspiracy plot, Brooks argues that plot does not merely relate disparate elements into
one coherent and meaning-granting structure. It also shapes the path of desire through
time, moulding the reader's motivation to "read forward, seeking in the unfolding of a
narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress
towards meaning." The notion of progressing forwards towards meaning-narrative
teleology-is given a strongly sexual inflection. Brooks writes of narrative desire as
"the arousal that creates the narratable as a condition of tumescence, appetency,
ambition, quest, and gives narrative a forward-looking intention." Plot becomes a
device for creating and constraining this phallic desire for progress and end-orientation.
It therefore comes as no surprise that Brooks' analysis is principally derived from a
study of the "great nineteenth-century narrative tradition" of male novelists. 65

and London: Methuen, 1987), Leo Braudy, "Providence, Paranoia and the Novel," ELH, 48 (1981), 619-
37, and John A. McClure, "Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy," in
Introducing Don DeLillo, pp.99-116.
63 Don DeLillo, Libra (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p.440. All page references to Libra
hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.
64 A good example of a novel which fetishises the hard-man "i~side game". is James EIlroy's
assassination novel, American Tabloid (London: Century, 1995), whIch opens WIth Howard Hughes
shooting up by TV light.
65 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1984), p.xiii. p.103 and p.xi.

- 35 -
 The shared sexual and religious dynamic of both literary plots and conspiracy
plots ensure that they become impossibly tangled in their mutual emergence in the
wake of the Enlightenment. Lennard Davis adds a further twist to this tale, a story
which, it must be noted, is itself heavily implicated in the forms of detective plotting
which require the retrospective discovery of a dead body-and here it is the death of
God-in order to trace the hidden agenda to history. Davis suggests that novel plots
differ from traditional mythos plots of epic and classical drama, and that they emerge
with the rise of the Enlightenment. 66 The new kind of plotting comes about when the
traditional communally owned story-structures are replaced by the novel-as-
commodity. The plot is the selling feature that demarcates the latest novel as a novel
commodity. It is no coincidence, Davis argues, that the rise of the novelistic form of
plot coincides with the rise of the notion of private property (plots of land), with the
corresponding notion of intellectual property, and authority instituted in the copyright
laws.
The etymology of the word "plot" in the OED suggests that all three senses of
"plot" might be intertwined. The sense of "plot" as "a sketch or outline of a literary
work" makes its first recorded appearance in 1548. This meaning is an extension of
the earlier usage of the idea of a mapping out (of a "plat," a parcel of land, itself an
earlier word still). The conspiratorial sense of the word makes its first recorded
appearance around 1575, and is in fact a case of mistaken identity. The OED explains:
"It might be even more correct to view plot in this sense as short for complot [the
French word for a conspiracy plot] under the influence of the sense 'plan, scheme or
device. '" The confusion becomes popularised into permanence following the
Gunpowder Plot. But the chronology is suggestive: the literary usage of the term
antedates the conspiratorial one by a quarter of a century, indicating that maybe the
latter was modelled on the former. This would suggest that the modern sense of
political conspiracy was derived from an understanding of the attractions of the
aesthetic resonance and shaping provided by literary plots, producing a mutual
dependence of history and its representations-perhaps, even, a disturbance in the
causal plot of history, with the representation preceding the event.

THE DOUBLE LOGIC OF JFK

I now want to examIne In detail how these notions of plot and the
compensations of fiction work themselves out in JFK and Libra. As we have seen,
conspiracy theories rescue history from its confusions by restoring a myth of ruthlessly
efficient agency-albeit at the price of making the believer a paranoid victim of

66 Davis, Resisting Novels, pp. 201-205.

- 36-
historical events plotted in secret. The proliferation of conspiracy theories about the
Kennedy assassination suggests that the only thing worse than the spectre of a hidden
agenda to history is the possibility that history is composed of random events-and, the
argument continues, there can be few events more brutally random than the killing of
Kennedy by a "lone nut gunman." Stone's film can be viewed as an over-compensation
in the face of this possibility, since, in the world of JFK, nothing happens by accident.
The bullet-proof bubble-top of the presidential limousine, the film suggests, was left off
on the treasonous orders of the conspiring Secret Service agents. The car slowed to a
virtual standstill after the first shot, and just before the fatal last shot, not because the
Secret Service driver was stunned into confusion, but because it was part of the
incredibly devious planning of the conspirators. JFK's conspirators take care not only
of the minor details, but they also have the grand sweep of history in their grasp. The
argument of the film is that the conspirators planned to replace Kennedy with the more
bellicose Johnson in order to promote their military-industrial interests through the
escalation of the Vietnam war. In Stone's version of history there are no accidents, no
coincidences, and no signs of incompetence in the assassination and its subsequent
cover-up. What cannot be tolerated is the conclusion reached by Nicholas Branch, the
internal CIA historian in Libra: "He has learned enough about the days and months
preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a
determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that
succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence
and fixed will and what the weather was like" (441). Whereas for Stone there must be
either total coherence or total randomness, DeLillo is keen to keep alive both
possibilities at the same time, playing one off against the other.
Stone's disbelief in anything other than insidiously masterful agency speaks in
an older language of historical causality, a mode of thinking which itself played an
important role in the history of the Cold War. Senator McCarthy made the definitive
statement of this attitude in the post-war period:
How can we account for the present situation unless we believe that men
high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This
must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so im-
mense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A
conspiracy of infamy so black t~at, when it is ~in.ally exposed, its
principals shall be forever deservIng of the maledIctIons of all honest
men .... What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts
contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to
incompetence. 67
Both Stone and McCarthy rely on a notion of effective, conspiring agency to underpin
their analysis of how the path of history has been deflected from what each sees as its
rightful course. They also rely on a model of causality that features individual action as

67 Senator McCarthy, Congressional Record, 82nd Cong., 1st sess. (June 14 1951), p.6602: quoted in
Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, p.8.
- 37 -
the sufficient antecedent to subsequent effects. JFK presents the Vietnam war, the
student and race riots, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy as part of an "unbroken
series" of events which the assassination conspiracy set in motion. The Present
Situation, for Stone as much for McCarthy, is the result not of a complex and
overdetermined set of events, processes and representations, but the inexorable
consequence of purposeful decisions by individual agents.
The revival of faith in rigorous agency is compounded in JFK by its borrowings
from hard-boiled detective fiction. When Garrison first submitted to the publishers a
draft of On the Trail of the Assassins, on which Stone's film is based, it was a
"straightforward" presentation of the case. But he was persuaded to rewrite the book,
making it into more of a detective story, into a "chronicle of the experiences of one man
who tried to get to truth about the murder."68 Garrison takes eagerly to the genre, and
his self-stylisation as a real-life Philip Marlowe carries over into J F K, with its
heroicisation of the rugged individualist detective. In both the book and the film the
"lone gunman" theory is rigorously repudiated, only for it to return in a displaced form
as Garrison's Lone Detective. In keeping with its hard-boiled detective fiction fantasies
of lone agency, the film contains many other noirish elements, not least in its lighting:
Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is frequently haloed by a glaring brightness, whose
obvious connotations of moral and intellectual clarity are contrasted with the murky
scenes of the New Orleans "gay underworld" and the shadowy glimpses of Pentagon
meetings.
There is, however, a narrative counter-current in JFK which works against the
McCarthyite model of historical agency and causality. The detective fiction structure
which gives the film its forward-moving pace and narrative drive towards the
"resolution" of the case in the final courtroom scene also produces a backwards-
spiralling movement which undermines and delays its narrative drive. In conventional
detective fiction the episodes of the investigation lead on teleologically to the ending,
set in motion and motivated by the desire to solve the initial crime. But the ending is
also a ghostly, anticipated presence at the beginning. It is the conclusion that allows the
beginning of the sequence of events to be identified as such; only in a completed
sequence can the significance of individual episodes be grasped as so many clues to the
reconstruction of the underlying story. Once the ending has been reached, no incident
or detail will appear as arbitrary or accidental. The ending therefore seems to demand a
return to the beginning, in order to at last insert all the details and confusions into one
coherent story. In JFK there is indeed a gradual progression of discovery through the
investigation to the revelations in the courtroom. The direction of the film, following
the life of Garrison, leads from innocence to experience. But the final court sequence
pieces together and replays the fragments of the assassination with which the film

68 Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p.xi.

- 38 -
began. The ending thus begins to revise and colour the beginning. The initial chaos of
the opening scene's black and white camera and gun shots in Dealey Plaza retroactively
transform themselves into the comparative clarity and colour of the Zapruder film,
which Garrison shows to the jurors. What seem like unintelligible and meaningless
fragments at the beginning are coalesced into significance by Garrison's narrative
commentary at the end of the film. The ending thus spreads its influence backwards
over the narrative, initiating a retrograde movement that undermines the strong end-
orientation which Brooks, for example, views as "the basic 'pulsation'" of plot. As
much as the opening event of the assassination determines the chain of detection, those
events are themselves replotted by the subsequent detection; the beginning determines
the ending, but it is the ending that shapes the beginning as a necessary origin.
Jonathan Culler detects a similar "double logic" at work in the Oedipus story, a
narrative with which IFK has much in common. The first "logic" Culler discovers in
Oedipus Rex is the forward-moving process of detection. The murder of the father-king
is the episode that sets in motion future events and determines their significance. In
IFK Kennedy's death results in Garrison's investigation. It also is the unknown origin
behind Garrison's current sexual and political dissatisfaction, becoming a necessary but
hidden cause which works its logic out in the course of the film. The second "logic"
Culler identifies is one whose influence seeps backwards from the ending. The original
murder in Oedipus Rex is not merely a causal origin, but also symbolically and
aesthetically necessary, demanded by the narrative coherence of the play. As Culler
explains:
Oedipus himself and all his readers are convinced of his guilt but our
conviction does not come from the prior revelation of the deed. Instead
of the revelation of a prior deed determining meaning, we could say that
it is meaning, the convergence of meaning in the narrative discourse,
that leads us to posit this deed as its appropriate manifestation. 69

Instead of a prior event being the cause of significance for subsequent happenings, it is
as if the unbearable significance felt by Oedipus in the present of the play "causes" him
to imaginatively posit the original event. Culler concludes: "here meaning is not the
effect of a prior event but its cause." Translating this analysis into IFK, we see how
Garrison feels the need to posit a grand, tragic event, an origin for the decline of both
Jim Garrison and America. The state of decline felt by Garrison is so pronounced that
only a correspondingly momentous original murder can do justice to the grandeur of his
feelings. In IFK, the rhetoric of treason and the references to Kennedy as Hamlet
Senior are matched only by the John Williams score, whose bombastic, funereal title
music underlines the way in which the film recreates JFK as the fallen warrior-king.
The Oedipal sub-text of the assassination also produces a disturbance in the

69 Jonathan Culler, "Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative," in The Pursuit of Signs (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p.174.
- 39-
"proper" teleological path of Garrison's sexuality. In J F K, one effect of the
assassination is Garrison's loss of heterosexual desire for his wife, played by Sissy
Spacek (Kevin Costner plays Garrison). She complains that he cares more about
Kennedy than herself, as he sits up all night, poring over the details of the Warren
Commission Report with fetishistic interest. The homoerotic desire that Stone's
Garrison feels for Kennedy (but can't admit) manifests itself in two ways. The first is
in Garrison's Hamlet-like obsession for the figure whom he eulogises in speech as the
"slain father-leader," a retrospective idealisation of the young, beautiful President. The
second way in which a repressed homosexuality returns to haunt the case is the
emphasis Garrison places on the perversion of the New Orleans conspirators. Although
On the Trail of the Assassins hardly makes reference to the New Orleans gay
underworld, Stone lavishes much visual attention-another form of fetishism-in the
scene of the confusedly intertwined and decadent bodies of Shaw, Ferrie (two of the
principal conspirators) and a black servant, filmed in close-up and edited into a frenzied
montage. 70 The strength of Garrison's case in the film seems to depend on proving the
improper connections between Shaw and the CIA in Washington. But the film
insinuates that the improper connections were not the complex association of military
and industrial vested interests, but the "perverted" sexual coupling of the conspirators.
The film thus presents homosexual association as both the result of the assassination (in
Garrison's fixation on the fallen father-king, and his loss of desire for his wife), and
also the cause of the assassination. For Stone, the assassination becomes the event that
un-manned America. 71 But the weight of repressed homosexual desire felt by Garrison
in the present of the film also leads him to posit retrospectively the assassination as the
slaying of a father-king by the primal (homosexual) horde. The effect of the
assassination "produces" its cause. The play of sexual desire in the film thus sets in
motion a double logic that serves to undermine the notion of plot as masculine
heterosexual desire striving towards its proper conclusion that Brooks, as we have seen,
characterises as a "condition of tumescence, appetency, ambition, [and] quest."

70Michael Rogin develops a similar argument about the homophobic impulse in JFK, in "Body a~d Soul
Murder: JFK," in Media Spectacles, Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock and Rebecca L. Walkowltz, eds
(London: Routledge, 1993), pp.3-22. In Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels: The Caseboo~ of all
Investigative Reporter (New York: Random House, 1992), James Phelan makes the accusatIOn that
Garrison in fact believed the assassination was a "gay thrill kill."
71 The un-manning of America is a familiar theme in Stone~s work. In Born on the ~ourth of July
(1989), for example, Vietnam is the episode that induces the Impotence of the ~on KOVIC character. a
patriotic young soldier who returns from Vietnam physically, sexually and emotIOnally paraly~ed. JFK
thus acts as a postscript to Born all the Fourth of July, making Vietnam not an unhappy aCCIdent that
befell America, but the direct result of a homosexual plot.
- 40-
"YOU'RE A COINCIDENCE"

In JFK the two narrative logics work against one another, producing a series of
attempts to disguise the tensions which nevertheless return in the displaced realm of the
sexual. Libra, on the other hand, separates out the two logics into two distinct plot
lines. It maintains them uncannily side by side, resisting the temptation to synthesise
the two into one smooth narrative flow. The chapters alternate between the two plot
lines, which, unlike JFK, are not structured by a detective frame. The first plot is the
story of Lee Harvey Oswald, a confused yet passionate young man who, in order to get
Cuba to take an interest in him, decides-with a little prompting from the "real"
conspiracy-to take a pot -shot at the President. The second plot line features the
conspiracy of renegade CIA operatives who want to get Cuba back on the agenda, and
so decide to stage a (failed) assassination attempt whose deliberately planted clues will
point back to pro-Castro interests. The two plot lines seem to converge inexorably, but
in the final analysis they do not cohere. The novel circumvents the limited choice
between a lone assassin and a conspiracy theory by including both Oswald as "crazed"
gunman, and a conspiracy of government agents. Libra revives the "lone gunman"
option, only to create an Oswald who is less "alone" than we would ever have
imagined, as he is re-inserted into the vast social fabric of America. Oswald is both a
lone agent in control of his actions, and a pawn of the conspiracy. Libra utilises a
conspiracy theory which evokes, but ultimately undermines, the notion of effective
plotting on which JFK relies. DeLillo's novel shows the intimate connections and
contradictions between the two theories, never quite allowing either to establish itself as
fully convincing, thereby transforming both versions.
Like JFK, the CIA conspirators in Libra initially offer a picture of clinically
efficient agency. We see semi-retired CIA operative Win Everett (a DeLillo creation)
crafting the life of a fictional patsy out of "pocket litter," feeling once again
"marvellously alert, sure of himself' (145). "These are men," as one of the
conspirator's wives thinks to herself, "who believed history was in their care" (127).
The plot on the President's life provides the conspirators with an opportunity not only
to shape history, but also to regain the teleological shape that their lives seemed to have
lost after the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation. The conspiracy in Libra thus
promises to build towards the taut plot which JFK delivers.
But the conspiracy slips out of its initiators' control. The first disturbance of
Everett's careful plans is caused by the plot taking on a momentum of its own. Instead
of preparing for a "spectacular miss," Everett realises, the plot takes on a life of its own
as it turns into a full-blown assassination attempt. The CIA operative theorises this
tendency in the following way:
Plots carry their own logic. T~ere is a tende~cy of plo~s to move toward
death. He believed that the Idea of death IS woven mto the nature of

- 41 -
 every. plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men.
The ~Igh~er. the plot of. a st0IJ:, the more likely it will come to death. A
plot .In flchon, he belIeved, IS the way we localize the force of death
outsIde the book, play it off, contain it. (221)

This passage repeats earlier formulations by DeLillo characters of the notion that "all
plots tend to move deathward,"72 and it provides a very close echo of Brooks's analysis
of plot as the necessary circuitous route from Eros to Thanatos, in an attempt to wrest
some meaning for life in the face of death.73 DeLillo goes one stage further than
Brooks, and links fictional plots up to the conspiracy plots which the conspirators use to
shape their lives and history. Everett's forebodings of course come true, and the fact
that the reader can hardly avoid knowing that this prophecy will be fulfilled heightens
the sense of inexorability. In Libra the personal designs of the conspirators are taken
over by the impersonal force of narrative dynamic, leaving us to feel that the CIA is
misnamed: not exactly central, not particularly intelligent, and hardly in control of its
own agency.
There is, however, a much more significant and disturbing challenge to the
conspirators' sense of agency and the teleology of the plot: Lee Harvey Oswald. The
incisive, rational planning of the CIA operatives is confounded by Oswald, who turns
up on their doorstep, matching exactly their pre-scripted and fictional patsy. Oswald is
a living coincidence who walks right into the middle of the conspiracy plot.
Coincidences cause embarrassment to most historians, and the Kennedy assassination
has more than its fair share. 74 In JFK coincidence is always the sign of a conspiracy. In
the film the District Attorney and his deputy go to the quarter of New Orleans where
Guy Banister, private detective and linchpin in the anti-Castro movement, had his
offices, which turns out to be the same building which housed Oswald's "Fair Play for
Cuba" office for a time. Looking around, they see in close proximity buildings used by
the CIA, Naval Intelligence, the FBI and Banister. For the two investigators there can
be no such thing as an idle coincidence, and they immediately connect all the addresses

72 Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984; London: Picador, 1986), p.26.

73 "We emerge from reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle with a dynamic model that structures ends
(death, quiescence, nonnarratability) against beginnings (Eros, stimulation into tension, the desire of
narrative) in a manner that necessitates the middle as detour, as struggle toward the end under the
compulsion of imposed delay, as an arabesque in the dilatory space of the text. The model proposes that
we live in order to die, hence that the intentionality of plot lies in its orientation toward the end even
while the end must be achieved only through detour." Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p.108.
74 Some of the coincidences surrounding the assassination are intriguing, whilst others are wildly
gratuitous. As part of his study of the history of the Illuminati, Neil Wilgus spends some time in spelling
out some of the seemingly incomprehensible coincidences and interconnections in the Kennedy case. For
example, he doesn't comment upon the intriguing fact that "Nixon, having .atte.nded a convention of
Pepsi-Cola executives in Dallas, leaves for New York an hour before the assassmatIOn and was one of the
few people who later forgot where he was at the time" (Neil Wilgus, The Illuminoids: Secret Societies
and Political Paranoia (Albuquerque: Sun, 1980), p.222). In the gift shop at the Lincoln memorial in
Washington I picked a list of coincidences between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations ("reproduced
on antiqued parchment that looks and feels old"), which includes gems such as "Lincoln's secretary,
whose name was Kennedy, advised him not to go to the theatre; Kennedy's secretary, whose name was
Lincoln, advised him not to go to Dallas."
- 42-
into one big interconnecting conspiracy. Bizarre coincidences often seem to bear
the stamp of the literary, forming part of the "compression and numinous sheen" which
Win Everett believes distinguishes real from fictional life. The more he becomes
involved in the intricacies of the assassination plot, the more he is convinced this
distinction is untenable:

We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in

plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, carefully
examined in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive
meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed
ourselves to see completely. (78)

In a sentence which could be read as characterising DeLillo's project as much as his

own, Everett believes he "would show the secret symmetries in a non-descript life"
(78). In the form of "secret symmetries," coincidences are part of the apparatus of
comforting compensation and redemption which the novel can provide. But the
coincidences of Libra resist the recuperation which JFK performs, resolutely
undermining the kind of rational and realistic conspiracy theory the CIA-conspiracy
half of the book might be trying to generate.
The process by which Oswald ends up on the conspirators' doorstep is far from
obvious. He drifts through life, and it is only through a long series of chance
connections and events that he ends up in New Orleans in the office of Guy Banister.
The conspirators are then forced to realise that "it was no longer possible to hide from
the fact the Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot" (178). Most of the
conspirators refuse to dwell on the strangeness of this fact, but it is vitally important for
David Ferrie, the manic, homosexual ex -airline pilot, a sufferer from alopecia, and, in
DeLillo's rendering, a believer in the all pervasive power of cancer and coincidence.
Ferrie informs Oswald that "they" are interested in the "signs that you exist," or, in
other words, "evidence that Lee Oswald matches the cardboard cut-out they've been
shaping all along." In this way Libra offers a convincing, realistic explanation for the
artificiality which hovers over much of the evidence, with its scenes of the CIA plotters
fabricating clues to a fictional patsy. But it turns out that Oswald actually exists,
matching his pre-scripted double. What is remarkable about Libra, then, is that having
alerted the reader to the inherent fictionality of the case, it manages to make this
atmosphere of fabrication a condition of "ordinary life." As we have seen, Richard
Condon's Winter Kills holds out the promise of an ineradicable instability of historical
fact, only to restore faith in rational causality at the last minute. Conversely, Libra
offers a convincing explanation for the strangeness surrounding the assassination, only
then to undermine its plausibility through the narrative sleight-of-hand which duplicates
the plotting, leaving the rational explanation in limbo.
Ferrie becomes the spokesman for this disturbance of causality. He tells
Oswald that: "'You're a quirk of history. You're a coincidence. They devise a plan,
you fit it perfectly. They lose you, here you are'" (330). Yet for Ferrie "coincidence"

- 43 -
is just a convenient word: "'we don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It
goes deeper'" (172). There seems to be no cause and effect story that could account
for-in rational terms-just how Lee Oswald comes to match his forged counterpart.
"'I've studied patterns of coincidence,'" Ferrie says to Lee on the second of their three
fortuitous meetings. "'Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns
emerge beyond the bounds of cause and effect, '" he concludes (44).
Yet coincidence is less of a science than an intrusion of the irrational into the
scientific world. The novel's title refers in part to the notion of astrology as a science
of strange coincidences and hidden determinations. Coincidence is a force which all
characters in the novel feel to varying degrees. Some are alive to its language, others
try to resist it. It is perhaps another description of the feeling for which the term
"paranoia" is merely a convenient shorthand. Branch believes that he is "writing a
history, not a study of the way in which people succumb to paranoia" (57). Perhaps,
Libra suggests, a history of contemporary America just is a study of the ways in which
people cope with coincidence, how they resist or encourage the attractions of paranoia.
The emphasis on the paranormal and strange forms of causality in Libra, however, does
not subsume the rational and teleological plot of the conspirators entirely into its power.
In the final analysis Kennedy is killed by a group of determined and more or less co-
ordinated conspirators, for which we can trace a reasonably clear and coherent cause-
and-effect story. But it cannot also be denied that Lee Oswald, in DeLillo's version, is
a living coincidence, for whom there is no all-encompassing plot that would explain
away his anomalous presence. The rational history of the assassination plot is forced to
co-exist uneasily with an illogical disturbance of that plot.
Not only does the entrance of Oswald into the conspiracy plot produce a
disturbance of its teleological narrative logic; his own life story is itself stretched out
between his desire for the narrative coherence of destiny, and the dispersal of that
intention into aimless, inconsequential details. DeLillo manages to pull off a
remarkable narrative feat in Libra, in that despite the reader's certain knowledge of the
ending and Oswald's own attempts to plot his life, the involvement of Oswald in the
assassination still comes as a surprise. The even-numbered chapters of Libra feature
the preparations of the conspirators, and carry as titles dates in the months leading up to
22nd November: "26 April," "20 May," etc. The odd chapters, on the other hand,
consist of episodes from Lee Oswald's life, and are headed by place names: "In the
Bronx", "In New Orleans," and so on. The conspiracy plot is marked by a
chronological tightening, as the increment between dates becomes less and less in the
approach to 22 November. But the Oswald chapters drift geographically, only hitting
upon Dallas at the end, as if by accident. The novel starts with a few scenes from
Oswald's adolescence in the Bronx. We see him playing truant and riding the subway,
trying to read Marx and Trotsky in the local library , and we hear his interior monologue
as he lives cooped up with his mother Marguerite. The events of Lee's life are never

- 44-
quite the momentous ones we would expect from a boy heading towards tragedy. We
read about him joining the Marines, being sent to Japan, even about his having sex for
the first time, but these episodes never coalesce into the inexorable teleology and
destiny that a presidential assassin ought to command. The episodes are too diffuse, too
full of inconsequential details; in short, they lack the "compression" of a plotted life.
The young Oswald desperately wants to feel the force of such a plot in his life.
Serving a term in the brig in Japan, he imagines himself as Trotsky, waiting in a small
room in exile for the force of history to sweep over him: "he tried to feel history in the
cell. .. He could see how he'd been headed here since the day he was born" (100).
DeLillo's Oswald repeatedly provides a narration (both to himself and to an absent
friend) that situates itself within the grand teleological plot of Marxism, trying to
conjure up a purposiveness which life always seems to deny him. He also narrates his
own actions as he performs them, utilising the language and generic conventions of the
thrillers he reads. Oswald casts himself as a mean, purposeful agent:

He lay near sleep, falling into reverie, the powerful world of Oswald-
hero, guns flashing in the dark. The reverie of control, perfection of
rage, perfection of desire, the fantasy of night, rain-slick streets, the
heightened shadows of men in dark coats, like men on movie posters.
(46)

But Oswald's life never quite turns out like the pre-scripted version, not even in the
case of the assassination. As he becomes entangled in the conspiracy, he begins to feel
that "summer was building towards a vision, a history" (322). Even though he does not
feel that he is exactly in control of this destiny ("He felt he was being swept up, swept
along"), he does feel that he is a willing and witting instrument of the plot. But the plot
does not turn out to be what Oswald expected at all. He believes he is a lone assassin
striking a blow for "little Cuba" that will make Castro welcome him with open arms.
Yet just as he is about to fire a third and fatal shot from the Texas School Book
Depository, Kennedy's head explodes. The one last thing which Oswald has latched
onto to give his life shape and meaning has been taken out of his hands: there are other
snipers. He realises that he has been a dupe; in the famous phrase he utters on being
arrested, "I didn't kill no-one-I'm just a patsy." His life slips from thriller into farce:
the genre in which he tries to live his life is not the one in which his story unfolds.
The confusion with which Oswald's life ends produces several narrative effects
in DeLillo's version of events. The first thing to notice is that the lack of a clear ending
means that there is a corresponding absence-or, more accurately, a belatedness-of
origin in the story of Oswald. The opening scene of the young Lee riding a subway car
does not present itself as a point of origin, as a moment retrospectively imbued with
significance, recognisable as the time when it all began. In fact, the conventional
teleological marker, "that was how it all began," appears belatedly, some 317 pages into
the novel, after Oswald is already deeply embroiled in the conspiracy plot: whatever
"it" is, its moment of definition is long overdue.

- 45-
 The second consequence of the missing sense of an ending to Oswald's life
concerns the welter of incidental details which are scattered throughout the novel. The
detritus of his life is not retrospectively translated into significant clues, but instead
remain just trivial facts. We learn exactly what the parakeet cage was like that Oswald
gave his mother, just which make of car it was in which he travelled to New York in
1948, precisely how much the coat cost which he bought with his first wage packet, and
so on. Though precisely the kind of details which flesh out conspiracy theories, these
details refuse to add up to any revelation, resisting incorporation into an all-embracing
plot.
The incidental and the trivial are not confined to Oswald's story alone. They
also seep into the conspiracy plot, simultaneously invoking but undermining the generic
conventions of the thriller. When, for example, Win Everett is forging the documents
for the fictional patsy the scene is narrated in the following way: "He unscrewed the top
of the Elmer's Glue-All. He used his X-Acto knife to cut a new signature strip from a
sheet of opaque paper" (147). Why "X-Acto"? Why "Elmer's"? Or, similarly: "Then
Mary Frances [Win's wife] in her Viyella robe began to remove things from the table, a
series of light clear sounds hanging in the air, discreet as hand bells" (19). What is the
significance of its being a "Viyella" robe? If this had been written by Thomas
Pynchon, there would doubtless be a paranoiacally convoluted story to be told which
linked all three products up into some vast multinational chain, whose clandestine
activities played a significant role in the plot. But in Libra these details refuse to
coalesce into such a plot. Perhaps this is no more than a realist rhetoric of
verisimilitude, but somehow it seems to matter that it should be a Viyella robe. Yet
there can be no conceivable plot which could accommodate all these details as clues.
In a literal way, however, there is indeed a hidden hand behind some of the
incidental details in the novel. As we have seen, Win Everett works on "script[ing] a
person or persons out of ordinary pocket litter" (28), producing a fabrication which is
full of "local color, background, connections for investigators to ponder" (138). Some
details, then, are there because they have been placed there. But there is a meta-
fictional explanation for the air of pre-scriptedness that lingers over the novel, over and
above its exploration of the fictiveness of "ordinary life." It must be remembered that
many of the seemingly incidental details and turns of phrase in Libra are taken from the
copious pages of the Warren Commission Report. DeLillo's novel therefore reads as a
palimpsest, in which traces of clues from the original investigation show through,
producing a ghostly determination for all that is said and thought. Through the voice of
Nicholas Branch, the CIA historian in Libra, DeLillo offers his recognition of the
Report as one of the great works of modem writing:

There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six

accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millio~s of ~or~s.
Branch thinks this is the novel James Joyce would have wntten If he d
moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.

- 46-
 What still amazes Branch is that "everything is here":

Baptismal. rec?rds, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled

checks, dally t1meshe~ts, tax returns, property lists, postoperative x-rays,
phot?s ~f knot~ed strIng,. thousands of pages of testimony, of voices
dronIng In hearIng rooms In old courthouse buildings, an incredible haul
of human utterance. (181)

There is no easy division to be made between irrelevant foreground minutiae and the
real underlying forces of history: whatever there is, is all here on the surface, both
intensely significant and impossibly trivial at the same time. Pulling on the thread of
the assassination reveals not the last thirty years of American history, but the entirety of
America, from photos of Oswald's pubic hair to old shoes and pyjama tops. The death
of a President is matched by the death of the biographical subject, with the identity of
the assassin dispersed amid the welter of trivial evidence.

THE PRIMAL SCENE OF POSTMODERNISM

In Libra, then, DeLillo deconstructs the master-narrative of the Warren

Commission Report, re-reading its central plot about the assassination of the President
as if it were the first postmodernist novel. It is an encyclopaedic fiction whose wealth
of details, discourses and images cannot be held together by an overarching mythic
code or a master plot. Its mixture of the extremely serious with the utterly trivial begins
to blur the boundaries between high and low culture. 75 Moreover, one of its central
pieces of evidence is a representation of the event, the now legendary home-movie shot
by Abraham Zapruder. Like the Zapruder footage, the assassination itself has become
endlessly displayed, bought, sold, and replayed, turned into countless representations,
commodities, and museum "experiences."
The Sixth Floor museum carefully recreates out of fully authentic-looking
period details the scene the police discovered at the south-east window minutes after the
assassination, only to reassure visitors that none of the exhibits are originals. Perhaps
the same could be said of the original assassination: with the proliferation of second-by-
second accounts of what took place in Dealey Plaza, access to the brute event before or
outside of its endless mediated versions proves to be an illusory goal. On the twenty-
fifth anniversary of the assassination crowds gathered, as they do every year, in Dealey
Plaza in a form of unofficial memorial ceremony. Some were taking photos of people
taking photos, while others held up "original" photos from 1963 in order to see how the

75A claim for the Warren Report as postmodernist novel is made by Harold laffe in his Introduction to
Pell, Assassination Rhapsody, pp.7-8.

- 47 -
real thing lived up to its representations; everywhere tourists and sympathisers jostled
with the TV cameras recording the "event."76 The assassination marks a significant
moment in the history of the society of the spectacle, since it is one of the first events to
be experienced as a media event. Vast numbers of Americans were hooked to their
TVs during that long weekend which culminated in the shooting of Oswald by Jack
Ruby live on TV. It has been estimated that on average each person watched 32 hours
of TV that weekend. The memory of where they were when they heard the news that
Kennedy had been shot is for many the only thing which unites America. An entire
cultural memory is based on the reception of media news. The landscape and
community of America (and many other parts of the world) was replaced by the
mediascape of television, which billed itself as a substitute form of community for the
(illusory, nostalgic) consensus which had been shattered by Kennedy's assassination. 77
Libra is alive to both the endless mediation of the assassination after the event,
and the saturation of images and representations in the environment in which the action
takes place. "Viyella" and "X-Acto" are the realistic details of a culture whose reality
is the world of commercials. Brand names form part of the interior monologue of
characters whose inner lives are saturated with the external world of television, films
and books. Oswald carries out the shooting at the same time as imagining the event on
TV, and he tries to live his life through thrillers and movies. Representation becomes
the guarantor of a reality that is but a ghost of itself: "Lee walked home . . . past
hundreds of tourists and conventioneers who thronged in the light rain like people in a
newsreel" (40); and "He watches John Wayne talk and laugh. It's remarkable to see the
screen laugh repeated in life. The man is doubly real" (93). Things are only felt to be
real, if they resemble their representations: the crowd at Love Field airport in Dallas are
thrilled to find that Kennedy "looked like himself, like photographs" (392).78 It perhaps
is not surprising that the assassination comes to be plotted as a thriller since, in
DeLillo's version, its two principal characters, Kennedy and Oswald, both read James
Bond novels.
The Kennedy assassination might therefore be convincingly written into a story
of postmodernity, as the first global event which is thoroughly subsumed into the logic
of the image. 79 JFK strives to mask the difference between the fabricated documentary

76 See Nick Trujillo, "Interpreting November 22: A Critical Ethnography of an Assassination Site,"
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79 (1993),447-66.
77The term "mediascape" comes from Arthur Kroker and David Cook, "Television and the Triumph of
Culture," in The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, Arthur and Marilouise
Kroker, eds (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp.267-79.
78 Along with various other members of the Engli~h fa:ulty at Duke Univ:rsi~y, Frank Lentricchia. has
roduced a thorough-going analysis of the Baudnllardlan aspects of DeLIllo s world. See espeCIally
Lentricchia "Libra as postmodern Critique," in Introducing Don DeLillo, pp.193-215. Although I agree
with many ~f the readings contained in this essay, I would argue that Lentricchia's account of Libra's
mediascape is more deterministic than DeLillo's novel warrants.
79 Fredric Jameson, for example, puts forward this view in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
- 48-
and the "real" footage, a task it performs so well that it only exacerbates the blurring of
the distinction between the two, thereby undermining its attempt to get at What Is
Really Going On. Conversely, Libra draws attention to this process, in its presentation
of the assassination as an "aberration in the heartland of the real" (15). In interview,
DeLillo emphasised the importance of the assassination as a moment of rupture: "I
think we've all come to feel that what's been missing over these past twenty-five years
is a sense of manageable reality. Much of that feeling can be traced to that one moment
in Dallas."80 For DeLillo, the assassination marks the origin of a crisis of faith not just
in the "official version" of events told by the government report, but in the legitimating
narratives of reality itself. The assassination is, in short, one of the key events that
postmodernised America.
Yet this narrative of postmodernisation returns us to the "manageable" codes of
realist causality. It becomes just one more story of the loss of innocence into which the
Kennedy years have been repeatedly plotted. This tale of lost innocence manifests
itself, for example, in the 1993 thriller, In the Line of Fire, in which-for the first time
in his career-Hollywood hard-man Clint Eastwood cries on screen. Eastwood plays
Frank Horrigan, an ageing Secret Service agent, whose duty in the Kennedy motorcade
30 years ago In Dallas should have been to throw himself in front of the President and
to "take the bullet." Horrigan's tears are occasioned not only by his eternal regret that
he hesitated at the fatal moment, but also by his sense of nostalgia, a feeling that the
current President is just not worth taking the bullet for. The obvious moral of the film
is that despite the current incumbent's self-conscious promotion of the Kennedy
parallels, Clint would never cry for Clinton.
Agent Horrigan is not the only one to inscribe the assassination into a personal
account of lost innocence. For example, Robert J. Groden, the "technical consultant" to
JFK, turned eighteen on the day of the assassination and has been trying to come to
terms with the event ever since. In his writings he explicitly links his own personal
coming of age to the process of public enlightenment about the workings of power in
America. 81 In a similar vein, DeLillo believes that the assassination played a key role in
his formation as a writer:
DECURTIS: The Kennedy assassination seems perfectly in line with the
concerns of your fiction. Do you feel you could have invented it if it
hadn't happened?

DELILLO: Maybe it invented me .... As I was working on Libra, it

occurred to me that a lot of tendencies in my first eight novels seemed to
me to be collecting around the dark center of the assassination. So it's
possible I wouldn't have become the kind of writer I am if it weren't for

Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp.354-55.

80 DeCurtis, '''An Outsider in This Society, '" p.4S.
81 Robert J. Groden, "The Killing of a President," Arena, Autumn 1993, pp.120-35.
- 49-
 the assassination. 82

There is, however, something puzzling about the causal influence the event exerts over
DeLillo's life. In an obvious sense the assassination functions as an initial impetus for
his life as a writer, something which galvanises him into chronicling the emergence of
postmodern America. Yet the Kennedy assassination, as it appears in Libra, is also the
logical culmination of his career as a writer of paranoid thrillers. While DeLillo claims
the shooting invented him as a writer, it was also something waiting to be invented by
him as the teleological conclusion of the concerns building throughout his reuvre. This
hesitation brings us back to the double logic of the Oedipal story. On the one hand, the
Kennedy assassination acted as a hidden motive whose true import remained obscure.
On the other hand, it was only during the writing of Libra that the assassination
belatedly emerged as a thematically necessary moment, around which DeLillo's career
as a writer coalesced. In other words, it was only in the paranoid atmosphere which the
Kennedy assassination helped to induce in America that DeLillo's writing could take
shape. As much as the assassination becomes a moment of origin for a new mode of
cultural and political existence in America, it is also only intelligible in the light of
subsequent assassinations and revelations. It is therefore significant that Libra, in
addition to its portrayal of conspirators, double agents, spies and assassins, documents a
self-conscious sub-culture of experts in paranoia, consisting of conspiracy-readers,
historians and decoders. In a similar fashion, the study of presidential assassins by
Swanson et al. discovered paranoia as the motivation not only for Oswald's act, but also
for the entire history of political assassinations in America. The Kennedy case,
therefore, produces a culture of paranoia in the light of which previous events come to
be rewritten as products of paranoia. Paranoia becomes both the symptom and the
cause of the political crisis of legitimation DeLillo explores. In summary, then, if the
Kennedy shooting is a cause of the breakdown in American reality, it is also an effect of
the very effects it brings about.
The retrospective translation of the Kennedy assassination into the language of
postmodern paranoia manifests itself most clearly in DeLillo's preliminary survey of
presidential assassinations for Rolling Stone. DeLillo looks in detail at the shooting of
President Reagan by John Hinckley, a "self-created media event." Hinckley claims he
was motivated by his obsessive watching of the film Taxi Driver, which was based on
the case of Arthur Bremer, who, having watched Clockwork Orange, stalks first
Richard Nixon then George Wallace. Caught up in a web of representations, Hinckley
shoots President Reagan, an event which, as DeLillo describes it, "was pure TV, a
minicam improvisation. "83 It is only in the light of this subsequent, de-realised version

82 DeCurtis, "'An Outsider in This Society,'" pp.47-48.

83 DeLillo, "American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK," Rolling Stone, 8
December 1983, p.24.
- 50-
that DeLillo is able to re-read the signs of a life saturated with mediated images which
he discovers in Oswald's case. Similarly, in Jean Baudrillard' s account of the
translation of political power into its simulation, the Kennedy assassination only comes
to take on the contours of "originality" with the discovery of its fake copies:

Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence

and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are
murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others-
Johnson, Nixon, Ford-only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated
murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an artificial menace
in order to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of
power.84

There is perhaps even a measure of nostalgia in DeLillo and Baudrillard's construction

of the Kennedy assassination as the limit case of modernist authenticity before politics
finally gave way to postmodern simulation. Yet this political nostalgia only comes
about through a disruption of causal narratives of progress, be they of the assassination
itself, or of the development of theories about the assassination. We might agree, then,
with Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's paradoxical conclusion that "a work can become modem
only if it is first postmodern. "85 The Kennedy assassination only takes on an aura of
modernist solidity in the light of the postmodernist crisis of narrative authority and
official versions which it helped bring about.

It has become a standard criticism of theories of postmodernism that the

proclamation of the end of metanarratives is itself just one more metanarrative. 86 This
logical contradiction is felt to be a serious flaw. But the contradictory plottings we
have found to be implicated in the Kennedy case should lead us to suppose that any
narrative of the rational, coherent, teleological origins of postmodernity must be
shadowed by a counter-narrative which snakes its way backwards through time and into
the realm of the psychic and the symbolic. The assassination of President Kennedy can
be read neither simply as a moment of causal origin, nor entirely as a totally mediated
episode of history which drifts free from its moorings in factual evidence. In
conclusion, then, I want to suggest that it functions as the primal scene of
postmodernism.
In his case histories, most notably that of the Wolfman, Freud sought
explanations for the current troubles of his patient in an event of early childhood which
would later be transformed into a trauma. 87 In the Wolfman case Freud began to

84 Jean Baudrillard, from Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman,
in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Mark Poster, ed. (Oxford: Polity, 1988), p.177.
85 Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard "Answering the Question: What is Postmodemism?," re~r. as. the appendix to
The Postmodem Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester UmversIty Press, 1984),
p.79.
86 See, for example, Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodemism (London: Routledge, 1992).
87 Sigmund Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The "Wolf Man")," [1918], in Pengui1l
- 51 -
speculate that the original moment which caused the ensuing neurosis was the infant
witnessing his parents having sex. This primal scene was a moment of horror whose
significance derived from its role in the Oedipal drama of jealousy of the father's
possession of the mother. Its effects, Freud argued, might not necessarily be felt at the
time, but it becomes a hidden source of motivation in subsequent psychic events. In
later revisions of the Wolfman case, however, he began to suggest the possibility that
the primal scene might not have actually happened, but instead be part of the
transpersonal phylogenetic inheritance out of which fairy stories emerge. The initial
cause of subsequent meanings may instead be an illusory event, a product of the psyche
which "needs" this type of symbolically weighty explanation to make sense of its
present situation. In other words, whether the event was real or imagined, it had the
same effects.
Oliver Stone's film restages the Kennedy assassination as a primal scene, as part
of his struggle to work through an Oedipal relationship about the legacy of the sixties in
America. As we have seen, the film is caught between two narrative logics-one
motivated by rationality and coherence, and the other by fantasy and desire-neither of
which can totally subsume the other. The therapeutic dynamic of the film leads the
viewer towards the restaging of the primal scene in the courtroom ending. As with
Freud's case histories, the primal scene is less a real event than a necessary illusion: the
initial seven seconds of horror that are finally revealed at the end of JFK consist not of
the assassination itself, but of its representation in the Zapruder home movie. JFK re-
shoots the original crime, yet what is being recreated is less the assassination as it
"really" happened, than a simulation of the existing footage by which we know the case
already. In the final courtroom scene, the Garrison character screens the Zapruder
footage to a shocked jury (and often a shocked present-day cinema audience), showing
again and again the fatal moment when the bullet penetrates Kennedy's head. Garrison
intones the words "back and to the left" as we view the footage. The instant of
penetration is toggled back and forth, making the president jerk to and fro in a
macabrely sexual moment of repeated annihilation. For Stone this is not any ordinary
primal scene, we must remember, but one in which the embodiment of American
virility is penetrated by the dark forces of a homosexual conspiracy.
What JFK struggles to repress and Libra endeavours to explore are the mutual
interruptions between the dual narrative logics of coincidence and causality. In Libra
David Ferrie comments on these subterranean connections between the two plot lines:

"Think of two parallel lines," he said. "One is the life of Lee H. Oswald.
One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space
between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third
line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the
deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by c~use and effect l.ike the
other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causalIty, cuts across tIme. It

Freud Library. 15 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1985), IX. pp.227-366.

- 52-
 has no history that we can recognize or understand, but it forces a
connection." (339)

Whereas JFK strives to downplay this "third line," Libra taps into the connections
which dreams, visions and intuitions make between the "lone gunman" story and a
conspiracy theory, and between fact and fiction. For DeLillo, plotting the Kennedy
assassination involves investigating not only the facts of the case, but also its attendant
fantasies, desires and paranoia. In JFK Garrison holds out the promise of reaching a
factual resolution to the meaning of the case. Libra's Nicholas Branch represents the
opposite pole of total despair that any conclusion can ever be reached. Libra, however,
occupies a position that "cuts across causality, cuts across time," in its attention to both
the factual and the symbolic aspects of the case. And this is the mode of detective
investigation which Freud's analysis of the primal scene forced him to embrace.
Although beginning to suspect that an imaginary event could have as much force as an
actual one, Freud was still left with a residual desire to know what really happened. "I
should myself be glad to know," he informs the reader, "whether the primal scene in
my present patient's case was a fantasy or a real experience."88 Likewise, the desire to
know (in the subtitle of a recent book) The Ultimate Truth about the Kennedy
Assassination is not diminished even if one believes, as the narrator of D.M. Thomas's
postmodern assassination novel declares on its opening page, that "fiction is a kind of
dream, and history is a kind of dream, and this [novel] is both."89 Instead, following
Freud, we perhaps need to understand the event as if it were a fantasy in order to do
justice to its complex transactions between fictional and conspiratorial plotting.

88 Freud, "The 'Wolf Man,'" p.360.

89 D.M. Thomas, Flying in to Love, p.3.
- 53 -
 CHAPTER 2

NAMING THE PROBLEM:

FEMINISM AND THE FIGURATION OF CONSPIRACY

- 54-
In the previous chapter we saw how conspiracies theories about the Kennedy
assassination participate in and produce narratives of postmodemism. This chapter will
consider how the language of conspiracy has shaped, and has been reconfigured by,
American feminism since the 1960s. Furthermore, whereas the emphasis in the first
chapter was on the meanings and functions of plot in accounts of the case, the present
chapter will focus on the figuration of conspiracy in feminist writing. Metaphors of
conspiracy, I want to argue, have played an important role within a certain trajectory of
popular American feminist writing over the last thirty years in its struggle to come to
terms with-and come up with terms for-what Betty Friedan famously called the
"problem with no name." The engagement with notions of conspiracy in feminist
writings has, however, produced ambivalent effects. On the one hand, conspiracy
tropes have been crucial not only in organising questions of blame, responsibility and
agency, but also in linking the personal and the political in one transcoding metaphor
around which a women's movement might coalesce. On the other hand, images of
conspiracy establish a series of implicit divisions within American feminism. As much
as the idea of conspiracy has helped feminism forge its identity through the naming of
an enemy, it has also become the site of an unspoken intellectual elitism, producing a
situation in which "academic" feminism ignores, repudiates, and contains its "popular"
other, by which I mean that trajectory of American feminism typified by writers like
Betty Friedan and Naomi Wolf.l
Chapter 1 focused in particular on fictional accounts of the Kennedy
assassination which are positioned on the border between fantasy and history. In
contrast this chapter will proceed mainly through readings of non-fictional feminist
texts over the last thirty years. In doing so, I am concerned to read them as if they were
fictional works, concentrating on the sources, functions and effects of their rhetorical
manoeuvres. Some critical attention has recently been given to "mad housewife"
fiction of the sixties which describes women's experience of living in a prison, a trap,
or a conspiracy.2 These critics work with the assumption that the novels can only say
what it feels like, whereas the theoretical writing (either of the time or of the present)

1 I am using "popular" to designate not so much the degree of popularity (although the two books I
concentrate on, The Feminine Mystique and The Beauty Myth, were both bestsellers), but rather the way
in which a certain tradition of "middlebrow" American feminism is marked out as "popular" precisely
because of its modes of address and rhetorical structures, one of the most favoured of which, I am
arguing, is the trope of conspiracy. Since writing this chapter, I ha~e com~ ~cross an excelle~t ar?~le by
Jennifer Wicke in which she argues that "to the extent that academIC femInISm has an OppOSIte, It IS not
movement feminism per se, but the celebrity pronouncements made by and about women with high
visibility in the various media." Instead of immedi~tely vilifying "c~lebrity feminis~" ~ "a .realm of
ideological ruin," counsels Wicke, .".we mu~t .recogmze that the ~~ergI~s of t~e cel:,bnty I~agmary ~e
fuelling feminist discourse and polItIcal actIVlt.y a,~ never befor~. Jenmfer WIcke, Celebnty MaterIal:
Materialist Feminism and the Culture of Celebnty, South AtlantiC Quarterly, 93 (1994), p.753.
2 See for example Gayle Greene, "Mad Housewives and Closed Circles," in Changing the Subject:
Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991);
Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989); and Pat Macpherson, Reflections on "The Bell Jar" (London:
Routledge, 1991).
- 55 -
can name the problem for what it really is. For example, in Changing the Subject,
Gayle Greene declares that "Friedan is so accurate a chronicler of white middle-class
women's experience in these years that The Feminine Mystique provides historical
documentary for what the novels portray fictionally."3 Unlike Greene, however, I
believe that a struggle over figuration takes place in the "historical documentary" as
much as in the fiction, and is perhaps more significant precisely because it is less
noticeable and less noticed. What I am concerned to explore are the terms and
narratives-and the notion of conspiracy in particular-by which a certain tradition of
American feminism has constituted its project since the sixties. As Elizabeth Weed
writes in her introduction to the collection of essays, Coming to Terms: "the terms of
feminism are given to it by the social formations on which it is produced, and feminist
practice becomes an ongoing theoretical and political process of reinscribing or
dismantling those terms."4
In the first section of this chapter I examine Friedan' s appropriation of the
language of brainwashing and conspiracy in The Feminine Mystique. I then go on to
trace in the second and third sections the gradual literalisation of these figures of
conspiracy in feminist writing in the latter half of the 1960s and into the '70s. Drawing
images to describe the situation of housewives from a panoply of Cold War themes,
"proto-feminist" writers of the early sixties edged towards a claim that the personal is
like the political, but that was still a long way off from the position of radical feminists
in the late sixties, for whom, in a new understanding of both terms, the personal was
political. s And it is even further removed from the position reached by cultural
feminists in the 1970s and '80s, when the last hint of comparison drained out of the
metaphor as the two terms became co-extensive, making the personal quite literally the
political. 6 The fourth section then examines in detail how feminism's engagement with

3 Greene, Changing the Subject, p.58.

4Elizabeth Weed, "Introduction: Terms of Reference," in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics,
Elizabeth Weed, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p.xvi.
S Carol Hanisch coined the phrase in her article, "The Personal is Political" (1968), in Notes From the
Second Year, Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds (New York: New York Radical Women, 1970).
By "radical feminism" I mean the kind of feminism which arose in America from about 1967. Ellen
Willis defines the movement in the following way: "radical feminists coined the terms 'sexism' and
'sexual politics' to express the idea ... that sexuality, family life, and the relations between men and
women were not simply matters of individual choice, or even of social custom, but involved the exercise
of personal and institutional power and raised vital questions of public policy. Sexism, the movement
contended, was neither the natural expression of sexual differences nor a set of bad attitudes or out-
moded habits but a social system--embedded in law, tradition, economics, education, organized religion,
science, language, the mass media, .sexual morality, child re.aring, the domestic division" of labor,. a~d
everyday social interaction-whose mtent and effect ~as to gl~e. me~ power .over women. E~len WIl1~s,
"Foreword" to Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radlcal Femlnlsm in Amenca, 1967-75 (Mmneapohs:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.x.
6 "Cultural feminism" designates the kind of feminism which came to the fore in America in the 1970s
(although its roots can be traced back to the late :60s). ~yn~e Segal, fo~ ~xa~ple, define.s c~ltura!
feminism as a movement which "celebrates women s supenor VIrtue and spmtuahty and decnes male
violence and technology." Segal, Is the Future Female?: Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary
Feminism (London: Virago, 1987). p.231.
- 56-
the figuration of conspiracy reaches a crisis point in the nineties with Wolf's The
Beauty Myth, which can be read as a replotting of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.7
In the final section I consider how recent repudiations of the language of conspiracy by
feminists informed by psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and cultural studies are
themselves caught up in a network of paranoid exclusions within the broad project of
American feminism.

THE PROBLEM WITH No NAME

In the previous chapter we came across the figure of Mae Brussell. In a local
newspaper profile, Brussell described how she had been "just a housewife, interested in
tennis courts and dancing lessons and orthodonture for my children," until the shooting
of Lee Harvey Oswald live on television prompted her into investigating the
assassination. 8 From the little I have been able to glean about Brussell, it is possible to
see how her life tells an important (if somewhat unusual) story. Brussell' s transition
from housewife to full-time work via a divorce had become by the end of the sixties a
familiar narrative of women's lives. For Brussell, the changing circumstances of her
life were connected with her belief that America was in the grip of a vast conspiracy of
powerful men who would stop at nothing to further their ends. Although in Brussell' s
case conspiracy and proto-feminist concerns are linked in a fairly literal way, I want to
argue that the growth of feminism in this period is intimately bound up with
comparable notions of conspiracy. 9
As with the development of conspuacy theories about the Kennedy
assassination, the feminism of the early sixties was marked by a growing conviction
that what at first appeared isolated incidents of oppression were in fact connected into a
much larger systematic plot. Moreover, as various accounts of the Kennedy
assassination have retrospectively constructed 1963 as the year in which America lost
its innocence and woke up to the currency of conspiracy, so feminism has come to see

7Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1990; London:
Vintage, 1991), and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
8 Judith A. Eisner, "Mae Brussell: Fears 'Hidden Government' Plans Assassinations," The Pine Cone
(Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA), 21 September 1972, pp.43-44.
9 Though unusual, Brussell's life story holds strong parallels with a~other exempl~y narrativ~ of the
1960s, namely Thomas Pynchon' s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). I dISCUSS Pynchon s novella In m?re
detail in Chapter 3, but for the present it is sufficient to note that Lot 49 is the tale of a CalifornIan
housewife Oedipa Maas, who becomes initiated into the world of conspiracy theories when she is called
upon to s~rt out the legacy of a tycoon wh? seemed to .own the whol~ of America. She s~bstitutes the
labyrinth of paranoia for the c1austrophobI~ ?f suburbIa: as she begInS t~ make connectIOns b~twe~n
various groups of dispossessed and outcast CItIzens. In Vl1leland, Pynchon s 1990 update on CalIfornia,
we learn that Oedipa and her DJ husband had separated in 1967 after an amicable divorce.

- 57 -
 the same year as the moment of its (re )awakening. 10 Accounts of women's fiction and
the women's liberation movement return to that year as a significant moment of
emergence in the history of contemporary feminism, pointing out that 1963 saw the
publication of, for example, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Doris Lessing's The Golden
Notebook, and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan's book was an immediate success, staying on the New York Times best-
seller list for nearly two years. The popularity of The Feminine Mystique was no doubt
due in part to its lively style. In many places the book reads like a thriller, with Friedan
as the lone detective chasing up the clues to the mysterious mystique. 11 She describes
how she listened to middle class housewives talking about their dissatisfactions with
married life, until "gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no name was
shared by countless women in America. "12 At the end of her first foray into suburbia,
for example, she writes that:

I reported back to my guide and said that while all four seemed
"fulfilled" women, none were full-time housewives and one, after all,
was a member of his own profession [namely psychoanalysis]. "That's a
coincidence with those four," he said. But I wondered if it was a
coincidence. (205)

As the search continues, so the little voice of doubt-presumably the one which also
speaks to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe-becomes more insistent, as the pieces
of the puzzle fit together:

These were fine, intelligent American women, to be envied for their

homes, husbands, children, and for their personal gifts of mind and
spirit. Why were so many of them driven women? Later, when I saw
this same pattern repeated over and over again in similar suburbs, I knew
it could hardly be a coincidence. (207)

As with researchers into the Kennedy case, Friedan reads coincidences as signs of an
underlying conspiracy. She finds "many clues by talking to suburban doctors,
gynaecologists, obstetricians, child-guidance clinicians, pediatricians, high-school
guidance counsellors, college professors, marriage counsellors, psychiatrists, and
ministers" (28). What the clues reveal is a concerted effort by welfare, educational and
media institutions to manipulate women in the post-war period into returning to a life of

10 The retrospective positing of 1963 as a year of transition for women receives popular figuration in
films such as Love Field (1992), in which a Southern blue-collar housewife, obsessed with the glamorous
life of the Kennedys, is compelled to drive all the way to Washington to pay her repects to the dead
President on that fateful weekend. On this voyage of discovery, she learns to respect not only the black
man who ends up helping her, but also to respect herself as an independent woman.
11 Friedan has continued to use this idiom and narrative structure for each of her subsequent books. In
The Second Stage(l98 I ; London: Sphere, 1983), Friedan describes how she began to realise that women
in the seventies were being led astray not by the feminine mystique, but by the feminist mystique of
career-and-family. And in The Fountain of Age (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) Friedan's "historical
Geiger counter" detects "clues" about the "age mystique" (p.ix).
12Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p.17. Further page references cited in parentheses in the text,
abbreviated to FM where necessary.

- 58 -
domesticity, despite the gains which Friedan attributes to the "first wave" of late
Victorian and early twentieth-century feminism.
In trying to "fit together the puzzle of women's retreat to home" (181), Friedan
develops the notion of the feminine mystique. It amounts to a devastating ideology,
part of a cunning and ruthlessly efficient programme to persuade women to forgo self-
fulfilment through careers in favour of home-making and child-rearing. 13 Friedan
describes, for example, how "Freudian theories were used to brainwash two generations
of educated American women" (109). Even more disturbing, the "feminine mystique
has brainwashed American educators" (155), those very college professors who
themselves brainwashed their women students into expecting no more than a home and
a husband out of life.
In developing an account of a conspiracy to brainwash American women into
domesticity, Friedan draws on one of the key terms of Cold War politics. The word
(which is a translation of a Chinese phrase) came into popular usage in the USA in the
wake of the scandal that, among the Allied troops captured in Korea, only Americans
had apparently succumbed to the enemy programme of propaganda and indoctrination.
Although a U.S Army report on the incident concluded that it was mainly poor morale
that accounted for the disproportionate rate of collaboration in the American contingent,
it was popularly believed that brainwashing must be a deadly efficient technique of
psychological warfare. 14 The term conferred a scientific legitimacy on suspicions that
no American soldier in his right mind would wittingly choose the alien ideology of
Communism; the only thing that could account for the shocking sight of American
servicemen co-operating with the enemy was the belief that their minds had been taken
over by force. The concept of brainwashing became popularised in novels and films
such as The Manchurian Candidate (1959/1962), which portrayed the assassination of a
presidential candidate by a brainwashed US army officer. 15
In The Feminine Mystique the idea of brainwashing creates a picture of women
as innocent victims of a scientific process of mind-manipulation by external forces.
Friedan describes "American housewives around forty [who] have the same dull lifeless
look" (222); similarly, she writes about the "vacant sleepwalking quality in a thirteen
year-old girl in a Westchester suburb," a zombified child who acted "like a puppet with
someone else pulling the strings" (246). These descriptions were familiar from

13 Friedan always prefers the formulation "mystique" to the word "ideology." Her reluctance to name the
problem as ideological can in pru:t .be un?er~tood in the li.gh~ of Daniel Bell's announcement t:vo ye.ars
later of the exhaustion of such polItIcal thmking and rhetonc, m The End of Ideology (New York. Colher-
Macmillan, 1965).
14 For the history of the term "brainwashing," I am drawing on J.A.c. Brown, Techniques of Persuasion:
From Propaganda to Brainwashing (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), and David Bromley a~d
James Richardson, eds, The Brainwashing/Deprogramming Controversy (New York and Toronto: EdWin
Mellen, 1980).
15 Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (1959; Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1993); film dir. by

John Frankenheimer. 1962.

- 59-
accounts of the brainwashed soldiers in Korea. In the same way that accounts of
brainwashing in Korea played down un-American sympathies, so too does Friedan' s
book imply that any undesirable beliefs which would seem contrary to the best interests
of women (as defined by Friedan) must have been planted into their brains by the
feminine mystique. Although Friedan seems to open up the possibility that women
might have complicitous and "politically incorrect" desires, the notion of external
infiltration in fact serves only to confirm her faith in the fundamental innocence and
rationality of women. "It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban
housewife," Friedan writes. "But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains that are
made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal
choices" (28). The feminine mystique, on this view, is merely a set of false beliefs,
which can easily be set straight once the relevant facts are produced. Not only is
lengthier education conducive to more and better orgasms, Friedan claims, but it is the
only thing that will really break these mind-forged manacles. Although she may be
infiltrated by bad ideas, for which the media, the psychologists and the professors are to
blame, the American housewife is still fundamentally her own woman: such is the
hidden persuasion of The Feminine Mystique.
Yet at crucial moments in Friedan's text this conspiracy scenario-which relies
on a clear separation of inside and outside, self and other, victim and perpetrator-
becomes compromised. If a woman is brainwashed into the false ideals of the feminine
mystique by external influence, Friedan suggests, then she could also be conditioned
into accepting a "new identity." The concluding chapter of The Feminine Mystique
adopts the imagery of brainwashing in its proposals for the creation of the New
Woman: "drastic steps must now be taken to re-educate the women who were deluded
or cheated by the feminine mystique"; there is also talk of "a concentrated six-week
summer course, a sort of intellectual 'shock-therapy'" (323-24). If positive images of
femininity as much as negative ones need to be implanted from without, then there is
precious little left to constitute an essential core of authentic personality. 16
In a similar fashion, Friedan acknowledges that "a mystique does not compel its
own acceptance" (160), suggesting that there must have been some form of
collaboration:
For the feminine mystique to have "brainwashed" American women of
nonsexual human purposes for more than fifteen years, it must have
filled real needs in those who seized on it for others and those who
accepted it for themselves .... There were many needs, at this particular

16 In her persuasive re-reading of The Feminine Mystique, Rachel Bowlby makes a similar. point:
"Friedan is constantly caught in this contradiction, which can be smoothed over o~l~ by acceptmg the
arbitrary distinction between true and false dreams-.between those .that are from wlthm .and correspond
t the 'human' potential, and those that are from WIthout and are Imposed by the manIpulators of the
'~eminine mystique.'" Rachel Bowlby, '''The Problem With No Name': ~e.reading Friedan's T~e
Feminine Mystique," in Bowlby, Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Wrztmg and PsychoanalYSIS
(London: Routledge, 1992), p.87. Bowlby also draws attention to the conspiratorial aspects of Friedan' s
book, but does not elaborate this observation.
- 60-
 time in ~merica, which made us pushovers for the mystique: needs so
compellIng that we suspended critical thought. (160)

The scare quotes around "brainwashed" signal an awareness that the idea of mind-
manipulation is, after all, only a metaphor. The rigid conspiratorial division into Them
and Us cannot be maintained, and Friedan must instead look to an account of the
hegemonic orchestration of women's needs and desires. But these needs are "so
compelling" that "critical thought" is suspended, making the acceptance of the feminine
mystique a seduction scene in which a woman's desires are so intense that she is no
longer able to think straight: she becomes a "pushover," an easy conquest. In this way
Friedan's rhetoric works repeatedly to contain the dangerous possibility that women
might be co-operating with the enemy, by implicitly reasserting a picture of women as
victims of a male conspiracy.
Though at times in danger of undermining itself, Friedan' s appropriation of the
Cold War language of a brainwashing conspiracy does succeed in producing a
transcoding metaphor which conjoins the "personal" aspect of women's lives to the
"political" realm of national issues. This strain of imagery produces an account of
sexual politics which reinterprets all aspects of personal experience into a coherent
causal story of patriarchal institutions conspiring to keep women trapped in
domesticity. In many ways, then, Friedan' s appropriation of Cold War scenarios
formed a breakthrough for feminism in its recognition of the political dimension of
personal experience.
Yet while Friedan's choice of imagery enacted a reconfiguration of the political
landscape of the late fifties/early sixties, it was also very much in line with
contemporary fears about the containment and contamination of the national body. 17
Friedan claims that the feminine mystique is of national concern, but only when it
impinges on traditional male-defined politics. She argues that "there are frightening
implications for the future of our nation in the parasitical softening that is being passed
on to the new generation of children as a result of our stubborn embrace of the feminine
mystique" (244). For Friedan, the spread of homosexuality is not "unrelated to the
national embrace of the feminine mystique" (239). The "parasitical softening" caused
by the feminine mystique leads to an increase in the "overt manifestations" of
homosexuality, which is "spreading like a murky smog over the American scene"
(240); the feminine mystique is likewise figured as a toxic cloud from a fifties horror
movie, which "feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every
corner of the culture" (53). The "national" and "stubborn embrace" of the feminine
mystique is also the embrace of the smothering mother, for, as Friedan explains, "the
mother whose son becomes homosexual" is usually not the "emancipated woman ...
but the very paradigm of the feminine mystique ... who attaches her son to her with

17For an account of this rhetoric, see Andrew Ross, "Containing Culture in the Cold War," in Ross. No
Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), pp.42-64.
- 61 -
such dependence that he can never love a mature woman" (239).
Friedan's analysis participates in a debate which stretches back to books like
Philip Wylie's highly-influential 1942 treatise on the decline of the American male,
Generation of Vipers, in which he coined the term "momism" to capture his sense that a
cloying femininity was to blame for turning American sons into un-American "sissies."
Wylie was convinced that America was "a matriarchy in fact if not in declaration."18
These fears of invisible threats to the national body become encoded in numerous Cold
War novels and films.19 On the one hand, motherhood was the site of sanctity which
must be protected from alien invasion; on the other, mothers were represented as the
source of internal infiltration in the form of a domestic surveillance which threatened to
tame the individuality of American men, turning them into the faceless masses of
totalitarian society. This nexus of ideas can be seen, for example, in The Manchurian
Candidate. When Raymond Shaw is brainwashed into becoming a Communist-
controlled assassin, he undergoes an "invasion of his person": "they are inside your
mind now ... you are a host body and they are feeding on yoU."20 It turns out that his
own mother is the "Queen of Diamonds," the Communist agent who is controlling him
as an assassin. The final scene of revelation alternates between maternal tenderness and
sexual predation. "She took his hand and kissed it with burning devotion," and "she
held his face in her hands and stared into it tenderly." But then "her long fingers dug
into his shoulders and pulled him to her on the chaise, and as her left hand opened the
Chinese robe she remembered Poppa and the sound of high rain in the attic when she
had been a little girl, and she found again the ecstatic peace she had lost so long, long
before."21 Raymond's mother embodies a realm of lost innocence that is far removed
from national politics; yet she is also the very agent of its destruction, a figure in whom
maternal and Communist infiltration merge. Likewise for Friedan, although women are
the victims of a male-orchestrated conspiracy, they also constitute a serious and
subversive threat to the nation. In this way, Friedan's figuration of conspiracy opens up
a new avenue for feminist politics, while at the same time re-inscribing The Feminine
Mystique into an entrenched discourse of matriphobia.
We have seen so far how Friedan's engagement with the style and language of a
Hollywood version of Cold War politics is both enabling and restricting. What makes
her use of these culturally available narratives even more problematic, however, is that
at the same time as The Feminine Mystique borrows from mass culture, it also develops
an attack on the culture industry. Nowhere does Friedan revel more in the narrative

18 Philip Wylie, Generation a/Vipers (1942; London: Frederick Muller, 1955), p.53.
19 Michael Rogin provides an excellent su!ve7, of these c~1tural arte.facts in "Kiss Me Deadly:
Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War MovIes, RepresentatIOns, 6 (Spnng 1984), 1-36.
20 Condon, The Manchurian Candidate, p.225.
21 Condon, The Manchurian Candidate, p.286. At the end of the book, the manipulating mother becomes
the victim of her son's assassination attempt.
- 62-
technologies of the thriller than in the chapter in which she gains access to the secret
files of an ad-agency boss. This enables her to name clearly whom she holds
responsible for the brainwashing of women. Contrary to what we might expect (given
the vehemence of her attack on Freud), "the practice of psychoanalysis ... was not
primarily responsible for the feminine mystique." "It was," she declares, "the creation
of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation researchers, and behind
them the popularizers and translators of Freudian thought" (111).
In seeking to lay the blame for social ills on a deliberate conspiracy by the
practitioners and managers of the culture industry, Friedan participates in a line of
analysis developed by the Frankfurt school (in particular, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer), as well as anti-Stalinist intellectuals such as C. Wright Mills, Dwight
MacDonald and Clement Greenberg. 22 Common to all is the belief that elements of
mass culture, ranging from Hollywood films to advertisements, are capable of
manipulating the mind of the unsuspecting consumer. 23 So-called low culture is always
far from innocent, the argument goes, because of its ability to gradually wear down the
consumer-Adorno uses the image of a record groove-into a state of passive
receptivity and conformity that is just one stop short of totalitarianism. 24 By contrast
high art always requires an effort from the spectator, insuring that slhe will be on the
look out for its "hidden persuasions," thereby protecting art from contamination by both
bourgeois art and mass culture. Society is thus rigorously divided into those who
actively plot and scheme, and those who are the victims of such machinations; that is,
between those who can read between the lines, and those who are condemned to read
the same story everywhere.
In developing her case, Friedan draws in particular on Vance Packard's The
Hidden Persuaders. 25 Like Packard, she is horrified at the potential power advertisers
wield in shaping the hearts and minds of consumers. Where Packard emphasises the
clinical efficiency of the "ultra-modern techniques" of "Motivation Research" (which

22 For an overview of these debates I have drawn on the selections of essays in Bernard Rosenberg and
David H. White, eds, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press, 1964), as
well as discussions by Ross, No Respect, and Christopher Brookeman, American Culture and Society
since the 1930s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984).
23 In "Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Wagner," Andreas Huyssen attempts to read Adorno
against the grain, arguing that "contrary to what one often hears, [Adorno'S culture industry concept]
cannot be reduced simply to a notion of brainwashing or manipulation." Huyssen recognises, however,
that "the double danger of Adorno's theory is that the specificity of cultural products is wiped out and
that the consumer is imagined in a state of passive regression." Adorno's notion of the power of the
culture industry bosses to determine meanings-t~eir co~esion ~nd. e~ficacy as ~ conspiracy-is not
acceptable to Huyssen, if "one begins to analyz.e m detaIl the slgmfymg .strat~gIes ~f those cultural
commodities and the mesh of repression and WIsh fulfilment, of the gratIficatIOn, dIsplacement and
production of desire which are invariably involved i~ them a.nd in their rece~tion." Huyssen, After the
Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodermsm (Basmgstoke: MacmIllan, 1986), pp.20-24.
24 The record groove image is from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry. as
Mass Deception," in Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cummmg
(1944; London: Verso, 1986), pp.120-67
25 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (London: Longmans, 1957).

- 63 -
turn out to be no more than crass Freudian generalisations), Friedan, as we have seen,
lends a patina of scientific credibility to her argument by adopting the language of
brainwashing. And just as Packard seems to believe every single claim about the
efficacy of advertising made by the "admen" in their trade magazines, so too does
Friedan repeat as fact the comments that are made to her "in confidence" by an
anonymous source in the advertising industry: both are in effect duped by the industry's
own promotion of its influence.
Although very much in line with Packard's analysis, The Feminine Mystique
contributes a specifically feminist twist to the conspiracy theory of mass culture.
Friedan emphasises the gendered separation of agents and victims with her account, for
example, of the systematic collaboration between the advertising industry and the
editors of women's magazines. She is in no doubt as to the effectiveness of the
advertising agency/women's magazine conspiracy to brainwash women:

It all seems so ludicrous when you understand what they are up to.
Perhaps the housewife has no-one but herself to blame if she lets the
manipulators flatter or threaten her into buying things that neither fill her
family's needs nor her own. But if the ads and commercials are a clear
case of caveat emptor, the same sexual sell disguised in the editorial
content of a magazine or a television programme is both less ridiculous
and more insidious. Here the housewife is often an unaware victim.
(202)

Though tempted to blame women for (literally) buying into the feminine mystique,
Friedan is ultimately concerned to point out how the devious advertising campaigns are
targeted specifically against women. The crowning moment of realisation in The
Feminine Mystique comes with the discovery that during the post-war period of rapid
suburban expansion women spent three-quarters of the household budget. Friedan
therefore asks pointedly, "why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really
important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the
house?"(l81; emphasis in original). With her insistence that women are the main
victims of the conspiracy of mass culture, Friedan' s work initiates a line of feminist
analysis which draws attention to the sexual politics of capitalism. Several
commentators have described how, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the
first half of the twentieth, mass culture and commodification were repeatedly figured as
a feminising, castrating threat to the strength of a nation. 26 The Feminine Mystique
works against this alignment of mass culture with femininity, with its argument that
women are not so much in league with the culture industry, as the special targets of its
brainwashing. Later feminists have continued to concentrate on this "special
relationship" between women, commodities and advertising, often with the same
assumption that women are at the mercy of a ruthless conspiracy to brainwash them

26See for example, Ann Douglas, The Feminisation of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1977): and Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in After the Great Divide.
- 64-
into the stupified condition of shopping automata. As Rachel Bowlby points out, in the
same way that advertising has tended to concentrate its campaigns on women, so
feminism has targeted marketing as a special site of attack. 27
The price to be paid for this rethinking of the feminisation of mass culture,
however, is a replication and reinforcement of the gendered roles of agent and victim.
In The Feminine Mystique, the more women are seen as victims of the "sexual sell," the
more the male advertising bosses are credited with cunning efficiency for orchestrating
the campaign. Friedan' s conspiratorial analysis thus produces a paradoxical situation,
in which the more comprehensive the revelation of systematic manipulation, the less
likely it becomes that women can do anything about it, or will even be encouraged to
do so, if the odds are stacked so much against them. Moreover, it remains obscure why
some women-and Friedan herself provides the obvious example in the book-have
managed to escape the trap of the feminine mystique. On the one hand, then, the
inscription of the feminine mystique into a conspiracy scenario serves to put the
spotlight on those responsible for the worst excesses of consumer exploitation,
reversing the traditional pattern of blame associated with the feminisation of mass
culture. On the other hand, far from getting at "what is really going on," it only
succeeds in mystifying the relationship between consumer capitalism and women's
desires.
It must be noted, however, that Friedan's commitment to the logic of conspiracy
is far from straightforward. Halfway through the book, Friedan finally fits the last
piece of the puzzle together, realising that "somehow, somewhere, someone must have
figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused,
nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of-state of being housewives" (181). Just in case
we might begin to expect a place, date and face to be fitted to that anonymous "figuring
out," Friedan cautions us that "it was not an economic conspiracy directed against
women." Similarly, having spelled out the insidious uses to which pseudo-Freudian
theories were put in fifties America, Friedan disavows the possibility that they amount
to a conspiracy. "It would be ridiculous," she admonishes the reader, "to suggest that
the way the Freudian theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated
American women was part of a psychoanalytical conspiracy" (109). And, as we have
seen, Friedan also acknowledges the possibility that women must have needed or
desired the mystique in some fashion for it to have been so successful. It is therefore
significant that in this attenuation of the conspiratorial model of ideology, Friedan
places the word "brainwashed" in scare quotes for the first time, signalling her
ambivalence towards the literalness of the image.
But why is Friedan so adamant in rejecting the notion of a conspiracy? Her
vehemence must be read in part as a meta-linguistic attempt to regain control of the

27 Bowlby, "Soft Sell: Marketing Rhetoric in Feminist Criticism," in Still Crazy after All These Years,
p.96.
- 65 -
figurative language through which her argument has proceeded. She must insist that it
would be "ridiculous" to believe in a conspiracy theory, precisely because her text has
already opened up that possibility. It must also be remembered that for left-liberal
intellectuals in the post-McCarthy-but pre-Kennedy assassination-context in which
The Feminine Mystique was written, conspiracy theories were a mark of an
unacceptable political demonology. Perhaps also motivating Friedan's explicit
rejection of conspiracy is an awareness that her analysis of the political dimension of
women's personal experience was in danger of not being taken seriously as a work of
scholarship. Not only does Friedan excoriate popular culture, but she also seeks to
avoid contamination by mass cultural forms and figures in her own text. The book
opens up the possibility of a conspiracy theory of sexual politics, only to deny it. In
summary, then, we might say that The Feminine Mystique offers an account of what
would come to be known as patriarchy as if it were a conspiracy, without ever fully
cashing out the metaphor into literal fact.

THE LANGUAGE OF CONSPIRACY

In the decades following The Feminine Mystique, however, the vanous

figurations of conspiracy in feminist writing increasingly became statements of fact.
Whereas for Friedan the notion of brainwashing still carries a measure of scientific
specificity, tempting her to place the term in scare quotes, in subsequent feminist
writings it detaches itself from its moorings in Cold War ideology, becoming a dead
metaphor, absorbed into feminist orthodoxy, and no longer noticeable as figurative
language. For example, the New York Radical Women, protesting about the Miss
America competition of 1968, handed out leaflets which asked, "What is so ignored as
last year's Miss America?" Their answer to this rhetorical question was that the beauty
competition "only reflects the gospel of our society, according to Saint Male: women
must be young, juicy, malleable-hence age discrimination and the cult of youth." The
real problem, however, is that "we women are brainwashed into believing this
ourselves !"28 Or, for instance, Patricia Mainardi, writing in 1975 about the nitty-gritty
of who does the housework even in a so-called liberated household: "Then an
interesting thing happened [when she asked her partner to share the housework]. I can
only explain it by stating that we women have been brainwashed more than even we
can imagine."29 So now the notion of "brainwashing" can explain everything: not only
why women want to be young and beautiful, but also why they end up doing more

28 New York Radical Women, "No More Miss America! Ten Points of Protest," in Sisterhood Is
Powerful, Robin Morgan, ed. (New York: Random House. 1970), p.523.
29 Patricia Mainardi, "The Politics of Housework," in Sisterhood Is Powerful, p.433.
- 66-
housework even in a supposedly equal household. In a 1975 article entitled
"Brainwashing-The Facts," Alice Embree summarises all the different ways in which
men-mainly through the culture industry-manipulate women. 30 What is slightly
surprising, however, is that after the title, Embree doesn't use the term "brainwashing."
So common had the figure become by 1975, it would seem, that it was not in need of
explanation, justification, or, as with the Friedan example, inverted commas: it had
become a statement of fact.
In her recent survey of "proto-feminist" fiction of the sixties, Paulina Palmer
endeavours to account for the prevalence of conspiracy images in the writing of that
period. She does this by confirming-in a tone which combines historical authority and
confessional intimacy-the accuracy of those figurations of "what many women feel
living in a phallocratic culture." "There can be few women," she asserts, "who, at some
time or other in their lives, have not experienced the frightening sense of being trapped
in a conspiracy of male domination."3! But, in a similar fashion to Friedan, having
asserted that most women in early sixties suburbia had the experience of living in a
conspiracy, Palmer goes on to acknowledge that "in material terms this notion of a
'conspiracy' may be a simplification and exaggeration." Potentially simple-minded and
exaggerated, the notion of conspiracy in the early sixties was perhaps, in Palmer's
words, no more than "a projection of imaginative reality," a metaphor which merely
gestured towards women's experience. Yet, having set out such a characterisation of
the trope of conspiracy, she immediately performs a double-take, suggesting that "it
may not be, in fact, the exaggeration which it first appears."32 Palmer's tergiversations
between a literal and metaphorical understanding of conspiracy imagery map out in
miniature the convoluted development of feminist debates on figuration in the decades
following Friedan' s first book.
In the late sixties, some feminist writers were concerned not merely to express
their experience, but to present a co-ordinated account of What Was Really Going On:
the task was not so much to name the problem as to name the oppressor. Conspiracy
and its related tropes became a focus of debate between feminist groupings in the
question of who or what was basically to blame for "the oppression of women." The
three most cited candidates were, as the analysis of the time framed it, individual men,
women in complicity with male institutions, or "the system." Each of these positions is
given an airing in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, a ground-breaking and popular work
of literary criticism which attempted to sketch out an entire history and theory of
patriarchal domination. Millett makes clear that men have all the power, and they are in

30 Alice Embree, "Brainwashing: The Facts," in Redstockings, eds, Feminist Revolution, (New York:
Random House, 1979), pp.178-92.
31 Palmer, Contemporary Women's Fiction, p.69.
32 Pier then goes on to justify this claim by pointing to Levi-Strauss' s discussion of the exchange of
a m in kinship systems, of which men are the beneficiaries. The reader is left unsure as to where she
women W, , F" 69
finally stands on the matter of conspiracy. Palmer, Contemporary omen s IctlOn, p. .

- 67-
league with one another to keep the situation that way:

our s?ciet~, like all other historical civilizations, is a patriarchy. The

fact IS eVIdent at once if one recalls that the military, industry,
technology, universities, science, political office, and finance-in short,
every avenue of power within society, including the coercive force of the
police, is entirely in male hands. 33

Such categorical pronouncements leave the reader in no doubt of the existence of a vast
conspiracy of male domination. Even though this fact may be "evident," however, the
way in which men control women is, for Millett, not quite so directly coercive:

We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is

its system of socialization, so complete the general assent to its values,
so long and so universally has it prevailed in human society, that it
scarcely seems to require violent implementation. 34

The fact that there seems to be little evidence of direct machination by the conspiracy
only serves to confirm that it is more ruthless and more pervasive than had previously
been suspected. So effective is it, that it has managed to remain invisible and
undetected for the whole duration of history.
As well as an analysis of the institutions that make up the patriarchal
conspiracy, and a more social-psychological approach that talks of the "system of
socialization" which causes women to accede to their allotted "sex role," Millett also
launches explicit attacks on particular men, namely Norman Mailer, D.H. Lawrence,
Henry Miller and Sigmund Freud. Whereas Friedan averred that it would be
"ridiculous" to call the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis a conspiracy, for example,
Millett is not afraid to make such accusations about Freud. Millett's analysis hesitates
between holding these particular men individually responsible for the contemporary
configuration of sexual politics, and viewing them as symptoms of a much larger
process of social determination of which they are also in some measure victims.
The internal tensions and contradictions in Millett's Sexual Politics became
visible in the late sixties with the formation, fragmentation and repositioning of radical
feminist groups, which defined their differences through their manifestos. Groups such
as Cell 16 of Boston and The Feminists of New York favoured talk of conditioning and
internalised oppression, employing a vocabulary of brainwashing, self-surveillance,
infiltration, complicity and double agency to account for why women seemed to believe
in and conform to stereotypes of their inferiority and submissiveness. What became
known as the "pro-woman" line, on the other hand, explicitly rejected such conspiracy-
minded psychological talk in favour of "external" factors, thereby removing blame
from individual women. For example, the Redstockings, a break-away group from the
NYRW, declare in their 1968 manifesto that "women's submission is not the result of

33 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970; London: Virago, 1993), p.25.

34 Millett, Sexual Politics. p.43.
- 68-
 brainwashing, stupidity or mental illness but of continual, daily pressure from men."35
If women seem to collaborate with their oppression, "pro-woman" feminists like the
Redstockings maintained, it is only because they are reluctantly forced through
circumstance into making complicitous compromises in order to survive. In the
manifesto they go on to argue that:

At~emJ?ts ~ave been made to shift the burden of responsibility from men
to InstItutions or to women themselves. We condemn these arguments
as evasions. Institutions alone do not oppress; they are merely tools of
the oppressor.

In effect, then, the Redstockings aimed to replace the abstract and metaphorical
language of brainwashing with a particularised and literal naming of the enemy.
According to this logic, believing anything less plays into the oppressor's hands.
What made these debates about the figuration of patriarchy even more fraught,
however, was the increasing suspicion that women's groups had been infiltrated by real
double agents. So, for example, when in the autumn of 1968 the NYRW began to
disintegrate, some of the original members, feeling that their former tight-knit
camaraderie had in fact been deliberately undermined, began to talk about the presence
of agents provocateurs and double agents. Patricia Mainardi, a member of the inner
circle of NYRW who went on to form the Redstockings, looked back on those meetings
in an interview during the late 1980s:

As the movement grew, so did the number of women whose

commitment to the women's liberation movement was more tenuous.
Your feeling was that these were people who were there to stop anything
from happening. I would not be the slightest bit surprised [to discover]
that there were agents and reactionaries there. 36

Radical feminists thus had to confront the possibility that the very meetings in which
discussion of the conspiracy of patriarchy was on the agenda were themselves subject to
the all-too-literal conspiracies of the CIA and FBI. When the Redstockings reformed in
1973 (after an absence of several years), they devoted much of their energy to
denouncing what they now saw as a liberal plot to take-over the radical feminist
movement. The desire to construct what had gone wrong in the sixties in terms of a
literal, personalised conspiracy reached its apotheosis when the Redstockings began to
accuse Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine of being involved with the CIA.37 Talk of the

35 The Redstockings, "Manifesto," reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful, pp.533-36.

36 Interview with Mainardi, cited in Echols, Daring to Be Bad, p.99.
37 For an account of these events see Echols, Daring to Be Bad, pp.265-69, and Ellen Willis, "Radical
Feminism and Feminist Radicalism," in Sohnya Sayres et aI., eds, The 60s Without Apology
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp.91-118. See also Frank 1. Donner. The Age of
Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System (New York: Random
House, 1981), pp.150-55 and 268-75; and Carol ~a.nisch, ."Th~, Lib~ral ~akeover of Wo~en's
Liberation," in Feminist Revolution, pp.163-64. The orIginal artIcle, GlOrIa SteInem ~nd the C~A. was
. I ded in the 1975 version of the Redstockings' Feminist Revolution, but was edIted out tor legal
mc u under publisher influence when Random House produced an abn'd ged versIOn
reasons . In
. 1979 .

- 69-
literal surveillance carried out under COINTELPRO (the government's conspiratorial
counter-intelligence programme) thus co-existed uneasily with a more metaphorical
understanding of hegemony as a form of complicitous self-surveillance.
Many feminists at this time therefore found themselves caught between a desire
to create a new set of terms, and a need to continue to appropriate the language and
ideas of an older, more literal, and more male-identified form of political activism. The
problematic engagement with the language of conspiracy takes place within a wider
struggle during the sixties over an appropriate language for feminism. During the
decade the definition of feminism proceeded by a series of systematic analogies with
other oppressed groups. In the same way that the "first wave" of feminist action in
America was based on an analogy with the oppression of slavery, so too did the
"second wave" of feminism arise in the context of the civil rights organisations in the
early part of the decade. 38 Articles produced by the increasingly vociferous women's
caucuses in the New Left characterised the situation of women in terms of race, class,
and even caste. 39 These analogies would see their culmination-partly through a logic
of "more oppressed than thou" prevalent in the Movement-in "The Fourth World
Manifesto" of 1971. Towards the end of the sixties, however, the tendency to describe
the condition of women through analogy with other groups was lessening. This was in
part due to the fact that feminists had exhausted the available metaphors-they had
gone off the scale of comparisons. The waning of a reliance on borrowed language was
also the result of a new belief (originating in black militancy and separatism) towards
organising around one's own oppression-and in one's own terms.
The development of consciousness-raising sessions as a feminist strategy in the
late sixties and early seventies must therefore be understood in conjunction with this
movement away from a borrowed language. The aim of consciousness-raising was in
part to allow women to speak in their own voices, from personal experience rather than
the language of male "experts" on women's issues. 4o Thus the Radicalesbians, a
feminist group of the early 1970s, seeking to intensify the process of consciousness-
raising, insisted that women divest themselves of all that is not woman-centred. "What
is crucial is that women begin disengaging from male-identified response patterns,"
they argued. "In the privacy of our own psyches, we must cut those cords to the
core."41 But the project of finding a self beneath the acculturation often produced a

38 For accounts of the development of the second wave of American feminism I have drawn on Sara
Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New
Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), and Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement
in America Since 1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster: 1991).
39Echols tells this story in Daring to Be Bad; see also Stanley Aronowitz, "When the New Left Was
New," in The 60s Without Apology, pp.11-43.
40Kathie Sarachild outlines the rationale of consciousness-~aising in "C~nsci.ous~ess-Raising: A ~adic~1
Wea on," in Feminist Revolution; Alix Kates Shulman dIscusses the ImphcatIOns of the technIque In
"SexPand Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism," Signs, 5 (Summer 1980),590-604.
41 Radicalesbians, "The Woman-Identified Woman" [1970], in Radical Feminism, Anne Koedt et a\., eds
- 70-
distinctly paranoid discovery. As Elizabeth Weed writes, "the widespread practice of
consciousness-raising groups in the 1960s and early 1970s did much to generate one of
feminism's most important recognitions: that one's desires may not be one's own, that
what one calls one's self may be constructed elsewhere."42 Moreover, feminism was
beginning to find that its language was not its own.
Where some feminists reacted to this discovery by seeking to expunge all trace
of a male-identified political vocabulary, others enacted a satirical appropriation of that
language. In the late sixties groups like WITCH [Women's International Terrorist
Conspiracy from Hell] and the Lavender Menace injected a measure of humour and
anarchic confusion into this already tense situation. Robin Morgan and Florika of
NYRW formed WITCH in the summer of 1968 partly in response to the success of the
Yippies. One of WITCH's first actions, for example, was to put a "hex" on Wall Street,
recalling Abbie Hoffman's throwing money at the Stock Exchange the previous year.
WITCH's formation and choice of name was also an ironic-yet-serious allusion to The
Conspiracy, a.k.a the Chicago Seven, a group of activists who were at this time on trial
before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for allegedly inciting a riot at the
1968 Democratic Convention. The HUAC was brought back into the limelight for the
first time since the McCarthy years as part of the government's heavy-handed attempt
to break the power of the increasingly militant Movement. Referring to the fact that the
HU AC had not included any women in the subpoenas to appear before the
Committee-a list which included Abbie Hoffman and the founder of the Yippies, Jerry
Rubin-Ros Baxandall of WITCH asked, "How come we, the real subversives, the real
witches, aren't being indicted?"43 Her question is both a demand to be taken seriously
by the exclusive all-male club of "real subversives," and an insistence that the
"metaphorical" conspiracy of feminism would in the long run be more subversive than
the macho posturings of what Baxandall referred to as the "boys' movement." In this
way, the rhetoric and rationale of WITCH provided both a mocking debasement of the
conspiracy mania of the masculinist New Left, and an implicit recognition that
repressive government policies were once again being mobilised under the justification
of "counter-subversion" in cases like the trial of the Chicago Seven. Similarly, though
most of their street actions consisted of merry pranksterism, WITCH were also quick to
announce in a more serious vein that "WITCHes must name names, or rather we must
name trademarks and brand names."44 Joking talk of conspiracy thus co-existed
uneasily with a literal desire to name names.
The formation of Lavender Menace tells a similar story of the parodic

(New York: Quadrangle, 1973), pp.240-45.

42 Weed, Coming to Terms, p.xv.
43 These details about WITCH are drawn from Daring to Be Bad; Baxandall is cited on p.97.
44 Some of WITCH's flyers and "spell poems" are reprinted in Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful.
pp.545-50.
- 71 -
appropriation of the rhetoric of conspiracy at the tum of the decade. A group of lesbian
feminists staged a disruptive protest at the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, adopting
the tactic of embracing many of the accusations made against lesbianism by liberal
feminists and those outside the movement. They called themselves the Lavender
Menace in response to a comment made by Betty Friedan at this time about the
potential infiltration of lesbians-a "lavender menace"-within the women's
movement. 45 Satirically confirming the charges made against them, they declared in
their first resolution that "Women's Liberation is a lesbian plot."46 The formation of
Lavender Menace served to materialise the demonological fears of feminists like
Friedan, ensuring that, as one of their slogans put, "I am your worst fears / I am your
best fantasy." Within the feminist movement at the beginning of the seventies, then,
groups like WITCH and Lavender Menace turned the language of conspiracy back
against its originators (both macho revolutionaries and liberal feminists), disrupting the
distinction between the literal and the metaphorical.

THE CONSPIRACY OF LANGUAGE

If the break-up of radical feminism towards the end of the sixties was in part
marked by a parodic recycling and deflation of the language of conspiracy, the
emergence of cultural feminism in the seventies was caught up in an inflationary circuit
of literalness which saw the notion of patriarchy as a conspiracy solidified into factual
statement. And whereas some radical feminists had countenanced the possibility that
women could be conditioned ("brainwashed") into collaboration with patriarchal
institutions, cultural feminists maintained the position that all men are entirely guilty of
creating a conspiracy to control women, who are all innocent victims.
Probably the most influential proponent of this position is Mary Daly. In
Gyn/Ecology Daly makes it clear that America-and perhaps the whole world-is
organised by a male supremacist conspiracy. She insists that being logical "would
require that we admit to ourselves that males and males only are the originators,
planners, controllers, and legitimators of patriarchy. "47 For Daly, "the fact is that we
live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic 'civilization' in which men
collectively victimize women" (29). No detail of social arrangement is accidental; Daly
goes on to declare that, "within this society it is men who rape, who sap women's

45 Friedan was quoted by Susan Brownmiller, "Sisterhood is Powerful," New York Times Magazine, 15
March 1970, p.140.
46 Quoted in Daring to Be Bad, pp.214-15. The C~ngre~s is also discussed in Over the Rainbow: Lesbian
and Gay Politics in America Since Stonewall, DaVId Deltcher, ed. (London: Boxtree, 1995), pp.36-38.
47 Mary Daly, GyniEcology The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978; London: The Women's Press,
1984), p.29. References to GyniEcology are hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.

- 72-
energy, who deny economic and political power." Patriarchy "appears to be
'everywhere"': not only have "outer space and the future ... been colonized," but
patriarchal control "is also internalized, festering inside women's heads, even feminist
heads" (1). In GyniEcology, the conspiracy of male power is total.
Daly repeatedly insists on the brutal facts of patriarchal power. She explicitly
counsels against collapsing a literal understanding of the male-supremacists' plot back
into metaphorical talk of abstract forces:

women--even femin~sts-are intimidated into Self-deception, becoming

the only Self-descnbed oppressed who are unable to name their
oppressor, referring instead to vague "forces," "roles," "stereotypes,"
~'constraints," "~ttitudes," "influences." This list could go on. The point
IS that no agent IS named-only abstractions. (29)

Despite her insistence on literal facts instead of abstractions, GynlEcolo gy is often

densely metaphorical. Before going on to examine some of the features and functions
of Daly's experimentation with language, it will be worth pausing briefly to reflect on
the relative status of such literal and metaphorical descriptions of patriarchy. Daly
develops two important strains of imagery which serve as replacements for a
psychology of women's behaviour. One line talks of possession and exorcism, making
patriarchy a devilish force: "It is women ourselves who will have to expel the Father
from ourselves, becoming our own exorcists" (2). Another cluster of images plays off
notions of brainwashing, mind-manipulation and alien control to explain why women
sometimes are their own worst enemies. Daly writes about "fembots," defined as
"Daddy's little daughter-robots, who dutifully titter on command, when he pulls their
puppet-strings" (17). The scenarios of GynlEcology might therefore be placed
alongside the work of Ira Levin, a thriller writer who seems to specialise in plotting
female paranoia. Rosemary's Baby (1969; film version 1969), for example, tells the
story of a young New York housewife who becomes convinced that her neighbours are
spying on her and that people are trying to interfere with her unborn baby.48 The ironic
twist, however, comes with the revelation that her paranoia turned out to be justified:
her entire circle of friends, including her husband, are part of a Satanist cult who have
succeeded in impregnating her with the anti-Christ. Levin's next novel, The Stepford
Wives (1972; filmed in 1975), features a pleasant American suburb in which the women
are all model housewives, belated epitomes of the feminine mystique. 49 It eventually
turns out (more ambiguously in the novel, less so in the film) that the women look and
act like "fembots" precisely because they are female robots. The Men's Association
has been running a programme to trade in their real wives who had become too much of
a handful when-horror of horrors-they had even invited Betty Friedan to speak. In

48 Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby (New York: Random House, 1967). Sharon Marcus provides a
compelling analysis of the logic of female paranoia in this novel, in "Placing Rosemary's Bab)',"
differences, 5 (Fall 1993), 121-53.
49 Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (London: Michael Joseph, 1972).
- 73 -
replacement, the men manufacture mechanical dolls, who are Disneyland versions of
the diligent housewife, with larger breasts and smaller behinds, "too nicey-nice to be
real." Only, they are real in the world of the novel. Once again the protagonist's
paranoia is confirmed, and her metaphorical suspicions are materalised into literal fact.
A~though Daly and other feminists at this time began to insist on the literalness of their
descriptions, they must always be seen against the kind of actualisation enacted in
Levin's fiction. There is more than one way of construing the "fact" that patriarchy is a
conspiracy, and more than one way of placing the division between the literal and the
metaphorical.
It is significant, therefore, that GynlEcology reflects self-consciously on
language. The book forms a remarkable attempt to escape through linguistic creativity
from what Daly considers to be the "mind-poisoning" of patriarchy, which has even
infected the women's movement. "This book," states Daly, "can be heard as a Requiem
for that 'women's movement,' which is male-designed, male-orchestrated, male-
legitimated, male-assimilated" (xvi). Daly endeavours to create not just a new form of
woman-centred politics, but a new form of feminist language which is not designed,
orchestrated or legitimated by men. Whereas earlier feminists like Friedan were
concerned to identify the problem with no name, Daly comes to see naming itself as the
problem. For Daly, then, what is significant is that women are "unable to name their
oppressor" (29; emphasis added). The point is, Daly warns, "no agent is named"; and
recognising that patriarchy amounts to a conspiracy requires not only "the courage to be
logical," but also "the courage to name." Literally naming the agents of patriarchy
therefore becomes an important act in itself.
The emphasis on finding the right words and naming things for what they are is
crucial to Daly's project, for she portrays language itself as a patriarchal trap. In
addition to her use of the language of conspiracy, Daly turns her attention to what might
be termed the conspiracy of language. She writes about the "hidden agendas concealed
in the texture of language," going on to argue that "deception is embedded in the very
texture of the words we use, and here is where our exorcism can begin" (3). Daly uses
various strategies in her campaign to combat the conspiracy of patriarchal language.
One method is to revalorise the very terms which have been used against women. Daly
takes the figure of witches, for example, and turns the negative associations of the word
into a positive model for feminist activity. Daly aims to rewrite the "deception plotted
by the male-supremacist scriptwriters" by (re )creating a new mythology-a new plot-
for "Lesbians/Spinsters/Amazons/Survivors" (20). Unlike the playful feminists of
WITCH, however, Daly always takes her reappropriation of the term seriously.
A second tactic is the creation of woman-centred counterparts for male terms
and characteristics. In place of men's "own paranoid fears" (29), for example, Daly
offers the notion of "pronoia," or positive paranoia, which she defines as
"seeing/making new patterns of perception as preparation for the latter/deeper stages of

- 74-
Journeying" (401). "Pronoia" is just one of the countless new coinings Daly employs
in GynlEcology. Her prose is shot through with a series of neologisms, which aim to
bring about in miniature a disassembly and recombination of the patriarchal conspiracy
which is believed to inhere in the individual sign itself, rather than discourse as a
whole. 50 In addition to new words, Daly also concentrates on the etymology of key
terms. Her analysis, however, is often directed less to the deep cultural histories
embedded in certain words, than to the surface appearance and literal inclusion of
particular syllables. "Manipulation," for example, reveals within itself the word "man."
Daly's emphasis on particular signifiers indicates a shift towards a literal-minded view
of language in the 1970s, in which individual words can come to cause social effects.
This concern with the material and the literal effects of representation was
fundamental to the campaigns against rape and pornography which began to dominate
feminist activism from the late seventies. The feminist literature on these topics is too
large for me to discuss in detail here, but I want to outline a few important issues which
arise from these interlocking campaigns. The first is that the language of conspiracy
became indispensable to the analysis of rape, in books such as Susan Brownmiller's
Against Our Will. Brownmiller defined rape as the "conscious process of intimidation
by which all men keep all women in a state of fear," establishing a Manichean division
of society into men who are all guilty and women who are all victims. 51 In an
analogous fashion to the way belief in a lone gunman was superceded by analyses of
systematic conspiracy in American society, feminist analyses of rape began to describe
it as the "all-American crime," and as the principal fact of patriarchy which ensures
"the perpetuation of male domination over women by force."52 In addition, the Cold
War paranoid figuration of bodily invasion, infiltration and contamination returned as
literal descriptions, as the female body became not a displaced metaphor for the
political, but the very site of politics itself.53 Whereas the language of conspiracy in
feminist writings of the early sixties formed an appropriation and reconfiguration of
contemporary politics, its use by feminists in the eighties produced disturbing echoes of
long since discredited sexual and national politics.
The second point is that pornography became theorised not just as a
representation of an act of violent sex, but as a violent act in itself. In this way the
distinction between the literal and the metaphorical was strategically collapsed, thus

50 Meaghan Morris makes a similar argument in "A-Mazi~g Grace: Notes on Mary Daly's Poetics" in
Morris, The Pirate's Fiancee (London: Verso, 1988), especIally pp.40-43.
51 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1975), pp.14-15.
52 Susan Griffin, "Rape: The All-American Crime" (1970), in Griffin, Rape: The Power of Consciousness
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), pp.3-22. The second quotation is from Brownmiller, p.209.
53 Sharon Marcus discusses some of the metaphors of rape in her defence ~f.a poststructuralist an~lys!~ ?f
rape. Marcus, "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape PreventIOn, ~n
Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds (London: Routledge, 199~)'
pp.385-403.
- 75 -
producing an insistence that pornography is not just like rape, but is rape itself~ and that
rape is not just like violence, but is violence itself. Once again, naming becomes a
political act. As Andrea Dworkin comments in the introduction to her book on
pornography, a man "actively maintains the power of naming through force and he
justifies force through the power of naming."54 By the eighties, then, the issue of
naming the problem had been replaced by the problem of naming. 55
Lastly, the emphasis on the causal power of pornography to incite men to
violence-a view summed up by Robin Morgan's slogan, "pornography is the theory,
and rape is the practice"-in effect marked a return to a conspiracy theory of mass
culture, except that now it was men rather than women who were the duped and robotic
consumers of ideological messages. 56 Andrew Ross, in his study of intellectuals and
popular culture, explains that during the 1980s "the vestigial Cold War opposition
between the advanced minority of an 'adversary culture' and the monolithically
victimized mass was being played out by the new feminist intellectuals," leading to the
"moral panic and conspiracy mania that are shared features of the discourses of both
anticommunist and antiporn intellectuals."57 In the antirape and antiporn campaigns,
then, the language of conspiracy and a conspiracy theory of representation became
intertwined, producing an unexpected return to earlier formulations in the discourse of
paranoia. Whereas Friedan had chosen her metaphors from culturally available
narratives of Cold War politics, the replication by feminists in the eighties of this
language now carried with it a burden of anachronism and nostalgia. The uneasy
alliance in the eighties between the pro-family stance of the Moral Right and antirape
and antiporn feminists therefore begins to make some sense. Both reproduced the
conspiratorial language and ideas of the fifties in their portrayal of women as innocent
victims of male violation.

CRYING WOLF

So far we have seen how a certain trajectory of popular American feminism in

the 1960s formed a coherent sense of its own identity through the representation of a
coherent, conspiring enemy. In the seventies and eighties, the status of these
figurations of conspiracy became increasingly problematic, as the emphasis shifted

54 Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women's Press, 1981), p.18
55 In the late eighties there arose the issue of whether "date rape" was "real" rape or not. For a sample of
this debate, see Camille Paglia, "Rape and Modern Sex War" and "The Rape Debate, Continued," in
Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp.49-74.
56 Morgan's comment is made in "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape," in Take Back the Night:
Women on Pornography, Laura Lederer, ed. (New York: Morrow, 1980), pp.134-40.
57 Ross, "The Popularity of Pornography," in No Respect, pp.186-88.
-76 -
from the representation of a conspiracy theory of patriarchal institutions, to a
conspiracy theory of representation. In the late eighties and early nineties, I now want
to argue, the issue of what is literal and what is metaphorical becomes crucial to a larger
political and cultural debate within feminism itself.
I want to look in some detail at Naomi Wolfs The Beauty Myth (1990), a text
which is particularly relevant to this story since it forms an up-dating of Friedan's
original classic. 58 Wolf tells a parallel story to Friedan's account of an ideological
backlash against the previous gains of feminism. For Wolf, "the more legal and
material hindrances women have broken through" in "the two decades of radical action
that followed the rebirth of feminism in the early 1970s," "the more strictly and heavily
and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon US."59 And, like Friedan,
Wolf often begins to present this not as a congruence of diverse historical forces, but
the result of conscious planning, particularly by the advertisers and the very industries
which stand most to gain from such a return to domestic virtues. At times Wolf is
explicit about her rewriting of Friedan for a new generation, with, for example, a
recapitulation of the scenario of women being duped into the stupified condition of
Stepford Wives, automata who have been programmed to spend money no longer on
their homes but on their bodies. "To paraphrase Friedan," writes Wolf, "why is it never
said that the really crucial function that women serve as aspiring beauties is to buy more
things for the body?" (66; emphasis in original). At other times, however, Wolf is less
specific about her intellectual inheritances, with the result that The Beauty Myth reads
more as a palimpsest of the last thirty years of feminism, in which the faint outlines of
previous positions and figurations are still visible. The history of feminism's "coming
to terms" remains sedimented within the body of Wolfs text, but keeps resurfacing at
key moments.
The Beauty Myth is punctuated by moments of textual anxiety over what is to be
understood metaphorically, and what is to be taken literally. Wolf frequently insists
that many of the tropes she employs to describe women's oppression by the beauty
myth are no such thing: she means them literally. "Electric shock therapy is not just a
metaphor," she warns (250). Wolf presumably means that the manipulation of
women's minds is not just comparable to ECT, but is sometimes actually instantiated
by shock therapy. A similar hesitation between the literal and the metaphorical occurs
in a comparison between the physical mutilation of slaves and the "employment
demand for cosmetic surgery" (55). "The surgical economy is no slave economy, of
course," explains Wolf, but adds that, "in its demand for permanent, painful and risky

58It is thus interesting to note that the front cover of the 1993 Penguin paperback edition of The Feminine
M ti ue bills it as "the classic text of the modern women's movement which exploded the myth of The
ys q Mystique" (my emphasis). In this strangely tautologIcal
Feminine . ad '
vertIsement, th ' Ief0 Fne
e tIt . dan ' s
"classic" is translated into the approved buzzword of the nineties.
59 Wolf, The Beauty Myth, pp.9-10 (further page references cited in the text). Considering Wolfs debts
to Friedan, it is odd that she should date the "rebirth" of the feminist movement from the 1970s.
- 77-
alteration of the body, it constitutes-as have tattooing, branding, and scarification in
other times and places-a category that falls somewhere between a slave economy and
the free market." Wolf seems caught "somewhere between" a desire to produce
elaborate comparisons and figures, and an awareness of feminism's long history of
making itself a distinct project that cannot be collapsed into other terms.
As the book progresses, Wolf engages in an endless process of bolstering up her
rhetorical claims: when the comparisons seem to fall short and lose their force, Wolf
redoubles her insistence. Tellingly, the closer to her own personal experience she
comes, the more this strategy intensifies. In her heartfelt discussion of eating disorders
Wolf is less equivocal, more certain that women's oppression is not somewhere
between the metaphorical and the literal, but constitutes instead a literalisation of the
metaphorical:

Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social

order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we
are-less. We should identify it as Jews identify the death camps, as
homosexuals identify AIDS: as a disgrace that is not our own, but that of
an inhumane social order. Anorexia is a prison camp. One fifth of well-
educated American young women are inmates. Susie Orbach compared
anorexia to the hunger strikes of political prisoners, particularly the
suffragists. But the time for metaphors is behind us. To be anorexic or
bulimic is to be a political prisoner. (208; emphasis in the original)

Wolf first advocates regarding anorexia as political damage. The fact that this
observation must be claimed rather than merely stated suggests that such comparisons
are more for strategic reasons than a mere desire to describe the situation of anorexic
women in itself. Next she suggests making comparisons with other analogous groups;
the movement is towards a more complete identification, but the figure still remains a
simile ("as Jews," "as homosexuals"), if only in form alone. Finally, feeling herself to
be beyond metaphor in an extreme situation for which Orbach's comparisons are no
longer adequate ("the time for metaphors is behind us"), Wolf insists on a total
identification between eating disorders and political imprisonment. The element of
comparison in the original metaphor is cancelled out.
The implications of Wolf's rhetorical insistence on full identification in her
metaphors have received much criticism-as have Friedan's comparisons of being a
suburban housewife with living in the Nazi concentration camps.60 The reiteration of
the equivalence between the personal and the political leads to an erasing of any
differences that might inhere in the various cases she mentions. Can anorexia "be" a
prison camp in the same way that Auschwitz was a prison camp? Could a PLWA or a

60 See for example, Bowlby's comments in "Re-reading The Feminine Mystique,"p.78. Like figurations
of co~spiracy, holocaust metaphors have become a favoured .trope wi~hin ~eminism, and they ~ave
. ·larly attracted much debate. Sylvia Plath and Andrea Dworkin, have lIkeWise both become notonous
~Imlth ·r use of concentration camp comparisons. These metaphors implicitly refer back to one of the
lor el . h f J . h . h· h
founding conspiracy mythologies .of our t.ime, namely t~e NaZI myt 0 a eWls conspiracy W IC
helped legitimate a literal, systematic conspiracy to extermmate the Jews.
- 78 -
concentration camp internee escape their 'prison' through a recognition of the false
images of homosexuality or Jewishness, in which, by Wolfs logic, they are trapped?
The comparisons are surely ill-conceived, but the passage is nevertheless revealing in
its focus on the problem of figuration itself. The declaration that "the time for
metaphors is behind us" cuts both ways. It draws attention to Wolf's sense of
redoubled urgency in a time of backlash, in which rhetorical circumlocution is a lUxury
that feminism can no longer afford. History, as far as Wolf is concerned, has in effect
played a sick joke on women, turning their once figural language into literal fact. But
the assertion also manifests an anxiety about language itself, speaking of a thwarted
desire to match description with experience, to reach an unmediated realm beyond
representation. The implication is that language-metaphor in particular-has
repeatedly failed to do justice to feminism's project to make people see how things
really are. Figuration, it would seem, has become an enemy of feminism, conspiring
against women, and preventing them from being understood.
Wolf is weighed down by the last three decades of feminist writing, which have
become littered with dead or absorbed political metaphors, requiring an ongoing
forging and strengthening of new comparisons. For example, in the second chapter,
which forms an extended comparison between the Beauty Myth and the worst aspects
of religious cults, Wolf points out that "what has not been recognized is that the
comparison should be no metaphor" (88). She continues:
The rituals of the beauty backlash do not simply echo traditional
religions and cults but functionally supplant them. They are literally
reconstituting out of old faiths a new one, literally drawing on traditional
techniques of mystification and thought control, to alter women's minds
as sweepingly as any past evangelical wave. (88; emphasis in original)

In such passages the author of The Beauty Myth finds herself in the position of crying
wolf: this time, the frenetic italics seem to say, it's really real, no longer a false alarm,
no longer a metaphor. The movement towards a literalisation of the figurative has
pushed the language of her feminism to a crisis point, in which the more Wolf insists on
the non-figural nature of her assertion, the more it draws attention to its rhetorical
status. The more her words slip from control, the louder she must shout them.
It is therefore extremely significant that the one image which Wolf doesn't
insist on is the figure of conspiracy. The Beauty Myth begins with the following
epigraph from Ann Jones:
I notice that it is the fashion . . . to disclaim any notion of male
conspiracy in the oppression of women ... "For my part," I must say
with William Lloyd Garrison, "I ar:n no~ prep.ared to respect ~hat
philosophy. I believe in sin, .therefore m a smn~r; m theft, therefore .m a
thief; in slavery, therefore m a slaveholder; m wrong, therefore m a
wrongdoer. "61

61 The passage in fact comes from Ann Jones's Foreword to her Women Who Kill (New York: Ballantine,

- 79-
 If this passage is quoted approvingly-and Wolf's page of epigraphs would be a
strange place to introduce such irony if the excerpt is not meant to set the tone for the
coming analysis-then we might expect a book on "How Images of Beauty Are Used
Against Women" to contain much denunciation of "male conspiracy." Yet, like
Friedan, Wolf's work exhibits a self-conscious cautiousness in connection with the term
"conspiracy." Turning to the Introduction we find that Wolf is suddenly reluctant to
call the Beauty Myth a literal conspiracy. Having just listed examples of the "now
conscious market manipulation" of the "$33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-billion
cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7-billion
pornography industry," Wolf insists that "this is not a conspiracy theory." And, having
described how the backlash "ideology that makes women feel 'worth less' was urgently
needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more," she
then announces that this view "does not require a conspiracy" (17-18).62 In the
Introduction Wolf does use the phrase "cultural conspiracy," but places it in scare
quotes. She is prepared to embrace many other extravagant characterisations of the
beauty myth, but feels obliged to signal her distance from conspiracy theories.
Although conspiracy theories are expressly rejected in The Beauty Myth, the
narrative structure of personification on which conspiracy theories rely makes a
return--even in the very passages in which the repudiations are made. Conspiracy
theories allow the possibility of apportioning blame for what might otherwise appear a
series of unconnected and overdetermined events, attitudes and practices. They betray
an attraction to the notion of reading history personally, of seeking a hidden cause
behind every event, and behind every cause an evil conspirator who deliberately plots
those events; in short, of giving a name to the faceless "problem." Wolf begins by
pointing out that it is the idea of repressive beauty, rather than any particular item in the
list of guilty industries, that is doing the damage. What to call this "idea," however,
emerges as a problem in her prose. Following Henrik Ibsen she sometimes calls it a
"vital lie" told by society to itself. Using the work of psychologist Daniel Goleman,
she talks about "necessary fictions" and "social fictions that masqueraded as natural
components." The title of the book, in a modulation of Betty Friedan' s famous title,
calls it the beauty myth. And, in the least precise formulation of all, when she claims

1981), pp. vii-xviii. Noting that "among academic historians and literary historians" it "seems to be
incumbent upon the author to say that readers who gain the impression fr.om the.book ~~t men as a group
have done something unpleasant as a group to women as a group are entIrely mIstaken, Jones concludes
that, "if this book leaves the impression that men have conspired to keep women down, that is exactly the
impression I mean to convey; for I believe that men could not have succeeded as well as they have
without concerted effort" (p.xvii).
62 In a remarkably similar passage in the Introduction to Backlash, the book that consolidated the analysis
of contemporary anti-feminism started in The Beauty Myth, Susan Faludi performs the same kind of
rhetorical manreuvre. Having just given a brief overview of the many elements of the "backlash" that her
book is to deal with, she then warns the read~r t~at "these ~henomen,~ are all relat~d, but that d~esn 't
they are somehow co-ordinated," Faludl drIves the POInt home: the backlash IS not a conspIracy,
:~~na council dispatching agents from a central room." Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War
Against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991), p.xxii.

- 80-
 that the beauty backlash does not require a conspiracy, she qualifies it by adding,
"merely an atmosphere" (18).
But having removed all trace of malicious conspiratorial agents in these careful
circumlocutions of what-if this were not a book directed towards the American
popular market-might be termed ideology, patriarchy or hegemony , Wolf then
describes how "the resulting hallucination materializes." At the very moment of
insistence on materiality, then, literal conspirators give way to figurative ones, as the
text becomes crowded with prosopopeia. "No longer just an idea," Wolf continues, "it
[Le. the beauty myth] becomes three-dimensional, incorporating within itself how
women live and how they do not live." The verb forms once again are active, conjuring
up the spectre of a meta-conspiracy, an ideology with a human face, as we hear how "it
[the contemporary backlash] has grown stronger to take over the work of social
coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer
can manage. "63 In the tone of Senator McCarthy sounding the alarm about a
personified version of the Communist peril infiltrating America, Wolf goes on to tell
how "it is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things
that feminism did for women materially and overtly." But just at the end of the
Introduction this rhetorical return of the disavowed trope of prosopopeia is itself
inverted, in a move invoking what can now only be described as a meta-meta-
conspiracy. In a reversion to a sinisterly anonymous passive verb form, Wolf explains
how, "after the success of the women's movement's second wave, the beauty myth was
perfected to checkmate power at every level in individual women's lives." But by
whom was it perfected? Just when we had a grip on the Beauty Myth (to capitalise it in
the same way that Wolf capitalises Friedan's phrase, the "Feminine Mystique") as a
Frankenstein's monster, a fabricated mish-mash of cultural attitudes and images at once
grotesque and desirable, so now we need to be on the look out for the shadowy scientist
himself, malevolently fulfilling his conspiratorial projects through the cunning
manipulation of the poor dumb monster of the Beauty Myth. In this way, each
repudiation of a conspiratorial mode of analysis returns us to an even more paranoid
formulation, as each abstraction of agency is refigured into an act of deliberate
contrivance by shadowy agents.

63 Compare, for example, Faludi's portrayal of the Backlash: "In the last decade, the backlash has moved
through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of ~attery and fear. Along.the w.ay
it has adopted disguises ... It manipulates a system of rewards and pumshments ... Cornered. It demes
. own eXI'stence , points an accusatory finger
Its " at feminism,
. . and burrows
. deeper underground ... The
backlash line blames the women's movement (Faludl, Backlash. p.XXII).

- 81 -
THE CONSPIRACY OF THEORY

In the concluding section of this chapter, I want to consider why The Beauty
Myth should manifest such anxiety about figuration in general, and the figure of
conspiracy in particular. It is doubtless due in part to Wolf s self-conscious rewriting of
The Feminine Mystique, which, as we have seen, likewise exhibits a wariness about
identifying its argument as a conspiracy theory. And, given the three decades of
feminist struggle with the problem of naming which intervenes between the two books,
it is not surprising that Wolf should betray a redoubled cautiousness in acceding to an
image which by the nineties has a long and troubled history. With the collapse of
Eastern European communism at the end of the eighties, Wolf's reluctance to
characterise her strategy as a conspiracy theory must surely also be understood in the
context of post-Cold War scepticism about this apparently out-dated political rhetoric,
in the same way that Friedan's downplaying of conspiracy takes place in the post-
McCarthy intellectual backlash against political demonology. Moreover, there are
surely strong parallels between the Eisenhower era which Friedan describes (her initial
moment of revelation comes "one April morning in 1959"), and the Reagan/Bush years
in which Wolf s analysis takes shape, not least in the way that the individual presidents
gave institutional legitimation to a paranoid rhetoric of national security at a time when
detente was supposedly the official policy.
Yet these explanations do not fully make sense of Wolf's vehement claim that,
despite appearances, her argument is not a conspiracy theory. What must also be taken
into account, I believe, is Wolf's implicit recognition that conspiracy theories are a
mark of the unscholarly. When in her second book, Fire with Fire, Wolf declares that
"it's time to say fuck you, I'm gonna have footnotes, I'm gonna have breasts," her
anxiety seems as much about not being taken seriously by "academic" feminism as it is
a challenge to the anti-feminist backlash. 64 Although her message is obviously that in
the nineties there should be nothing remarkable about being a woman with ideas, she
seems as keen to emphasise the presence of her footnotes as the fact that she is a
feminist. It is therefore important to note that the language of conspiracy is frequently
associated with crackpot theorists like holocaust revisionists and assassination buffs;
researchers like Mae Brussell, for example, are always careful to point out that they are
investigative researchers, and not conspiracy theorists. In a certain sense, the concept
of a conspiracy theory functions more as an accusation of unprofessional research,
compounded by the fact that the main cultural outlet for conspiracy theories is in
popular thrillers and detective fiction. And here we must recall that Wolf, like Friedan,
directs her most impassioned attacks on the culture industry; indeed, they both

64 Wolf Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Ce1l1ury (London:
&
Chatto Windus, 1993), p.20 1. As with Friedan' s .secon~ ~ook, Wolf transfers..~e ~harge ?f. con,~piracy
from patriarchal institutions of the backlash to certain feminIsts whom she calls victim feminists.

- 82-
construct what amounts to conspiracy theories of advertising and the media. At times,
then, Wolf's anxious denial of conspiracy theories is motivated by what seems to be a
paranoid fear of being contaminated by this popular, unscholarly logic.
What makes this situation more complicated is that "academic" feminists have
positioned themselves precisely in opposition to the conspiracy theorising of "popular"
feminists like Wolf. For example, one of the "three insights" which conclude Lynne
Segal's analysis of feminist strategies for the future is, quite simply, "the recognition
that women's subordination is not a result of a conscious conspiracy by men. "65 If we
can clear up this embarrassing tendency, Segal seems to imply, we will be well on our
way to ridding feminism of its persistent attraction to such annoying patterns of
analysis. "We" in this case refers to those who, like Segal, feel that the project of
"radical feminism" begun in the sixties has been hijacked by what has passed under the
sign of "cultural feminism," a distinction which can be mapped onto the high
theory/grass roots activism divide. Segal's forthright repudiation of conspiracy
theories-combined with a hint of attraction to such explanations-is, I want to
suggest, typical of the fraught relationship between academic and popular feminism.
There are several reasons for the repudiation of conspiracy theories by academic
feminists. In Mica Nava's recent reassessment of theories about advertising, she notes
how "current theories of culture and subjectivity take much more seriously notions of
personal agency, discrimination and resistance, as well as (drawing on psychoanalysis)
the contradictory and fragmented nature of fantasy and desire." This "new, more
nuanced understanding of subjectivity," Nava goes on to explain, is crucial to "recent
critical refutations of the notion that the media and advertising have the power to
manipulate in a coherent and unfractured fashion and represent a move away from the
notion of mass man and woman as duped and passive recipients of conspiratorial
messages designed to inhibit true consciousness."66 Feminists like Nava who are
sympathetic to cultural studies have begun to employ the language of desire, fantasy
and identification in place of conspiracy theories of, say, mass culture or Freudian
psychoanalysis. Instead of a paranoid fear of infiltration, contamination, and
indoctrination by external forces, emphasis is placed on the way that people use culture
to create meanings, as much as having meanings imposed on them from above by the
culture industry. These "refutations" of conspiracy theories, I would suggest, have
been integral in shaping the kind of feminist cultural studies performed by critics such
as Nava.
Furthermore, feminisms informed by psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity
and poststructuralist theories of language position themselves precisely in opposition to
the notions of psychology, agency and causality on which conspiracy theories rely. For

65 Segal, Is the Future Female?, p.23 1.

66 Mica Nava, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism (London: Sage. 1992), p.165.

- 83 -
example, in her reassessment of Sexual Politics, Cora Kaplan draws attention to the
way that Millet's analysis amounts to a conspiracy theory of Freudian analysis. Kaplan
argues that "Millett ... had to reject the unconscious, the pivotal concept in Freud, and
something common to both sexes, because she is committed to a view that patriarchal
ideology is a conscious conspiratorial set of attitudes operated by men against all
empirical evidence of women's equal status in order to support patriarchal power in
office."67 Kaplan's accusations are doubly significant because, in her view, what
popular feminist conspiracy theories of patriarchy fail to provide is any account of the
workings of the unconscious and desire in social formations. Conspiratorial versions in
effect cash out the unconscious into the rational and the deliberate, producing a
deterministic and thoroughly efficacious portrait of social agency. "What distinguishes
psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gender," writes Jacqueline Rose, "is that
whereas for the latter, the internalisation of norms is assumed roughly to work, the
basic premise and indeed starting-point of psychoanalysis is that it does not."68 What
Rose's position suggests is that there should no longer be an unproblematic adherence
to conspiracy theories of patriarchal history, for the concept of the unconscious will
always act to undermine the conscious, coherent and entirely efficacious picture of a
conspiracy. In this way, the accusation of using a conspiracy theory has joined that list
of untenable feminist positions which includes essentialism and functionalism, marking
a boundary between sophistication and vulgarity-indeed, the very mention of the word
"conspiracy" is often enough to end discussion.
Viewed from the other side of the divide, however, it is academic feminism
which is the problem. Some feminists have even characterised poststructuralism itself
as a cunning conspiracy by male theorists and their female dupes. Just when women as
subjects were beginning to receive attention from historians, the argument goes, along
came poststructuralism which "conveniently" announced that the subject was a fiction
anyway.69 The accusation of a conspiracy of theory speaks of the divide between
feminists who concentrate on the literal and material dimensions of male oppression in
cases such as pornography and rape, and those theorists whose emphasis is on the
figurative and the representational. In the introduction to Bodies that Matter, Judith
Butler talks about "the exasperated debate which many of us have tired of hearing."
Butler is referring to stock criticisms of poststructuralism-such as "'If everything is
discourse, what about the body?"'-in which an insistence on the literal prevents any

67 Cora Kaplan, "Radical Feminism and Literature: Rethinking MilIeu's Sexual Politics," in Cora
Kaplan, Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), p.2l.
68 Jacqueline Rose, "Femininity and its Discontents," in Sexuality and the Field of Vision (London:
Verso, 1986), p.90.
69 For accounts of this argument see Pamela Moore and ,Dev~~ey Looser, ','Theoretical Feminism:
'ectivity Struggle, and the 'Conspiracy' ofPoststructurahsms, Style. 27 (Wmter 1993).530-58. and
b
S u~ •
Patricia Waugh, "Modernism. Postmodernism. Feminism: Gender an d Autonomy Teory, h ' " m W aug. h
Practising PostmodernismiReading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold. 1992).

- 84-
discussion of how the very construction of the category of the material is caught up in a
series of powerful political exclusions. 70 For Butler, what is to count as the material is
never guaranteed in advance.
What really exasperates Butler, however, is "when construction is figuratively
reduced to a verbal action which appears to presuppose a subject," leading "critics
working within such presumptions ... to say, 'If gender is constructed, then who is
doing the constructing?'" In other words, "where there is activity, there lurks behind it
an initiating and willful subject," and, Butler continues, on such a view "discourse or
language or the social becomes personified."71 In effect, Butler is taking issue with the
tendency of feminists like Wolf to find deliberate conspirators lurking behind any social
processes. Butler's focus on the trope of prosopopeia is, as we have seen, born out in
the case of The Beauty Myth. Yet what Butler fails to take into account in her argument
against the personification of agency is any sense of the narrative pleasures which it
affords. The prose of Friedan, Wolf and Faludi offers some of the dramatic popular
pleasures associated with the plots, characters and scenarios of thrillers. Their
popularity as feminists is in part due to their use of popular generic conventions.
A bizarre situation arises, then, in which academic feminism leads the way in
displaying a sympathetic and perceptive approach to popular culture, yet reserves an
often unacknowledged antipathy towards popular feminism for its attraction to the
popular charms of conspiracy theory. Conversely, popular feminists such as Wolf and
Faludi repudiate the term "conspiracy" in their desire to be taken seriously, even as they
succumb to the attractions of personification and usher in a barely disguised version of
the conspiracy theory of mass culture. In this way, conspiracy becomes not so much
the indication of an already-existent natural division between the popular and the
scholarly, but the site and the very structure of a series of shifting exclusions, silences
and moments of rhetorical crisis through which a division between a vulgar and a
sophisticated feminism is effected.
The language of conspiracy has produced divisions and exclusions not just
between academic and popular feminism, but also within popular feminist writings.
Quite simply, it seems that it is always other women who are brainwashed. This sense
of superiority-of having transcended the historical and intellectual forces in which
others are still immured-manifests itself in the contradictory positionings effected by
the pronoun "we." The use of a collective "we" in feminist writing answers an
understandable desire to assert a solidarity, to forge a sisterhood to oppose patriarchy.
Yet, conversely, the use of the first person plural produces an implicit self-legitimating
polarisation between those who are subjected to the conspiracy to brainwash women,
and those who are strong and wise subjects, able to recognise, criticise, and even to

70 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge, 1993), p.6.
71 Butler, Bodies that Matter, pp.6-9.
- 85 -
 transcend it. As we have seen, Friedan mainly discusses the brainwashing of American
women in the third person plural, giving the impression that-as she openly admits-
once she was brainwashed by the feminine mystique, but now she has escaped the
conditioning. Occasionally, however, she does use the first person plural, as for
example when she says: "there were many needs, at this particular time in America, that
made us pushovers for the mystique: needs so compelling that we suspended critical
thought" (FM, 160; emphasis added). Friedan's momentary alignment with the duped
majority sits uneasily with her self-promotion as the heroic lone detective who has
managed to uncover the secret conspiracy. In a similar fashion, Kate Millett's
occasional use of the collective pronoun jars with her objective analysis of what has
happened to other women. Millett writes about how "traditional beliefs still invade our
consciousness and affect our thinking to an extent few of us would be willing to admit,"
yet there is little suggestion that Millett's own consciousness has been invaded.72 By
contrast, in the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto Valerie Solanas
irreverently lambasts feminist gestures towards solidarity which belatedly accompany
the revelation of cultural brainwashing. "SCUM," her manifesto announces, "is too
impatient to hope and wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes."73
By the time of The Beauty Myth, the problem of the collective pronoun has
become pervasive. Sentence after sentence of Wolf's prose enacts a basic but
contradictory division between those who are duped and those who are in the know.
Usually in the first half of the sentence she quotes a fact or figure about the oppression
of women, phrasing it in the objective third person plural, only in the second half to
effect an identification with that oppression through her use of the collective pronoun.
Sometimes this has a disconcerting poignancy, particularly in the chapter on anorexia
when Wolf reveals that she had suffered from eating disorders as a teenager: "they"
could indeed include "me." But in many other places the shift of pronominal stance
mid-way through a sentence positions Wolf uneasily both on the inside and the outside
of the brainwashing conspiracy: "If those women who long to escape can believe that
they have been subjected to a religious indoctrination that uses the proven techniques of
brainwashing, we can begin to feel compassion for ourselves rather than self-loathing;
we can begin to see where and how our minds were changed" (BM, 128; my emphasis).
As Tania Modleski points out, however, the desire to position oneself clearly "outside"
ideology is misleading. "Today," writes Modleski, "we are in danger of forgetting the
crucial fact that like the rest of the world even the cultural analyst may sometimes be a
'cultural dupe'-which is, after all, only an ugly way of saying that we exist inside
ideology, that we are all victims, down to the very depths of our psyches, of political

72 Millett, Sexual Politics. p.46; emphasis added.

73 Valerie Solanas became famous for her assassination attempt on Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas, Scum
Manifesto (1968; London: Phoenix Press, 1991), p.25.

- 86-
and cultural domination (even though we are never only victims)."74 The tension in
Wolf's syntax thus gestures towards her contradictory positioning as both duped and
knowing, with the trope of conspiracy producing complex negotiations between and
within each of the terms.
In the same way that The Beauty Myth almost inevitably constructs its own
category of the culturally duped, so too it is very hard not to regard feminists like Wolf
as dupes of their Zeitgeist, unthinkingly spouting the language of the day, victims of
modes of thought which "we" have now seen through. Not only can it become easy to
dismiss "popular" feminism of the present as the work of those immersed in various
ideologies to which "we" are immune, but there is an equally common conviction of
having gone beyond the primitive ideas of feminism's past. Jane Gallop, in her re-
reading of some of the now more ignominious collections of feminist theoretical essays
from the seventies, draws attention to the tendency to dismiss the writings of the past as
embarrassing mistakes, the products of women who inevitably become characterised as
"cultural dupes." She describes moments in her classes when discussion was foreclosed
with the exchange of knowing grimaces, when her "audience assumed that [she] was
describing an error of earlier days, a foolish . . . stance, that we were comfortably
beyond, thanks to the poststructuralist critique." What Gallop discovers in such
moments is "a notion of our history as a simple progress from primitive criticism to
ever better and more sophisticated."75 How to read the works of early sixties feminists
like Friedan becomes a real problem. One possibility, as in Wolf, is to recycle the
former analysis of the sixties, struggling to make its terms and figures fit into a new
context in the nineties. Another possibility is simply to view them as mistaken analyses
which have now been superseded. What I have attempted to do in this chapter,
however, is to understand how popular feminists from Friedan to Wolf have engaged
with the figuration of conspiracy, and how its logic continues to function in feminist
writing today, not least in the construction of the very category of the popular.

74 Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a .. Postfeminist" Age (London
and New York: Routledge, 1991), p.57.
75 J G II Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.136,
ane a op, . . .".,. h bl' d f
79 Bowlby. in "Rereading Friedan's The Femmme Mystique, lIkeWise pomts out t e m nesses 0 a
. .' 't" m whl'ch can on the one hand attack masculinist myths of progress, yet, on the other,
femInist cn ICIS . ., .' .. th
unwittingly reinscribe such narratives into an ImplICitly teleological history of femInist eory.

- 87 -
 CHAPTER 3

THOMAS PYNCHON:
THE CULTURE OF CONSPIRACY
AND THE CONSPIRACY OF CULTURE

- 88-
 In the first two chapters we saw how conspiracy theories about the "official versions"
of events (namely the Kennedy assassination and sexual politics) have contributed to
the development of postmodernist and feminist challenges to orthodoxy since the
1960s. These two movements have participated in a widespread popular appropriation
of the language and narrative form of conspiracy theory over the last three decades.
This chapter will trace the emergence of this self-conscious countercultural engagement
with the "paranoid style in American politics" through the career of Thomas Pynchon,
whose novels have played a significant role in the development of a popular culture of
conspIracy.
The first part of this chapter outlines some of the influential characterisations of
the sixties as an age of paranoia, with Pynchon as one of its principal exponents.
Instead of diagnosing Pynchon' s first three novels as symptoms of the sickness of the
age, I locate each of them within their particular historical moment in the developing
diagnosis of conspiracy culture. Pynchon' s novels, I suggest, are not just one more
contribution to a vast culture of conspiracy ranging from popular thrillers to national
politics. Instead they form part of an emerging self-reflexive debate on conspiracy
theory as a recognisable form of historical explanation.
The second half of the chapter examines in detail what has happened in the
nineties to the sixties concern with conspiracy, through a reading of Pynchon' s fourth
novel, Vineland (1990). Pynchon's first novel for nearly two decades tells a story of
various counterculture characters of the sixties and their troubled survival through to
the Reagan era. Most reviewers found the language and style of paranoia-previously
Pynchon's most distinctive trait-to be missing from this novel. This absence made
Vineland a success for some critics, a failure for others; significantly, it was Pynchon' s
first real bestseller. I want to argue that the apparent absence of conspiracy is
particularly significant, because in the nineties Pynchon's intricate and highly self-
conscious reworkings of conspiracy theories are in many ways no longer viable. In this
novel hidden depth is replaced by visibility and obviousness, making obsolete the mode
of literary detection which has sustained an industry of Pynchon criticism over the last
two decades. In brief, I read Vineland as both a diagnosis and a symptom of a world in
which the paranoid "depth" of secrecy has been flattened out by the proliferation of the
signs of mass culture. The substitution of the self-conscious semiological paranoia of
the earlier novels for the saturation of commodity culture might have made Vineland a
popular success, but, I want to argue, in a final twist of irony Vineland reproduces what
amounts to a conspiracy theory of popular culture.

- 89-
THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF PARANOIA

Many commentators have agreed in identifying paranoia as one of Pynchon' s

most distinctive traits. Articles by Scott Sanders, Louis Mackey, Antonio Marquez and
Leo Bersani focus, respectively, on "Pynchon's Paranoid History," "Paranoia in
Gravity's Rainbow," "Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition," and "Pynchon, Paranoia,
and Literature."} Likewise, Morris Dickstein's sympathetic commentary on the cultural
experiments of the sixties, Gates of Eden, argues that "Pynchon' s sensibility, like that
of some earlier Beat figures ... strikingly foreshadowed the mood of young people in
the late sixties." For them, according to Dickstein, "paranoia, like radicalism, drug-
taking, and communal life, was both a rejection of the official culture and a form of
group solidarity, promising a more fully authentic life-possibility."2
Pynchon has been identified as one of a handful of novelists who captured-if
not inspired-the mood of a generation. He is frequently inserted into a developing
canon of paranoid novelists. Marquez imagines "future literary historians looking back
and categorizing this period as 'The Golden Age of Paranoid Literature, '" and in many
ways this has already happened, not least with City of Words, Tony Tanner's highly
influential survey of American fiction between 1950 and 1970. 3 Tanner confidently
identifies the mood of the times. In a remarkably close parallel with Paulina Palmer's
comment on women's paranoid relation to patriarchy (which I discuss in Chapter 2
above), he asserts that "there is no doubt that during the last two decades a large
number of Americans have come to regard society as some kind of vast conspiracy."4
As we saw in the Introduction, Tanner finds a version of the dialectic of paranoia-fear
of social and linguistic constraints coupled with a dread of formlessness-at work in
most of the fiction of this period. "Most of the American heroes," Tanner explains,
"share one dread-of being 'taken over' by some external force, of being assimilated to
an alien pattern not of their choosing, of being 'fixed' in someone else's 'reality-

} Scott Sanders, "Pynchon's Paranoid History," Twentieth-Century Lit., 21 (1975), 177-92; Louis
Mackey, "Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition," Sub-Stance, 30 (1981), 16-30; Antonio Marquez,
"'Everything Is Connected': Paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow," Perspectives on Contemp. Lit., 9 (1983),
92-104; Leo Bersani, "Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature," Representations, 25 (1989),99-118. See also
Mark Siegel, Creative Paranoia in "Gravity's Rainbow" (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1978),
and Steven Best, "Creative Paranoia: A Postmodern Aesthetic of Cognitive Mapping in Gravity's
Rainbow," Centennial Review, 36 (1992),59-87.
2 Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977),
p.125.
3 Marquez, "'Everything Is Connected," p.92.
4 Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p.427. See
also Raymond Olderman, Beyond the Wasteland: A Study of the American Novel in the 1960s (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1972): "When a man of the six~es feels he has lost control of his own life,
e thinks no single individual can influence large pubbc events, when he feels he can no longer
w hen h . b' fi d 'd . h f
cope with the irrationality of public and private affaIrs ... he egms ~o m acci ents m t e ~att~m 0
fortune-mysteries in the indifference of fact. Or, perhaps, he does discover ... a fearful belIef m the
absolute malicious force of Conspiracy" (p.119).
- 90-
picture."'5 Although Tanner is perhaps unique in claiming something akin to paranoia
as the dominant mode in postwar fiction, other commentators have concurred in his
creation of a canon of paranoid writers. Raymond Olderman, John Kuehl, Tony
Hilfer, Pat O'Donnell and Brian McHale all place Pynchon at the core of their list of
what Hilfer, taking the term from the pop group in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49,
calls "the Paranoids."6 In Fredric Jameson's panoptic survey of contemporary cultural
forms, "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capital," he names William
Burroughs, Ishmael Reed and Pynchon as prime examples of postmodern literature.
Jameson draws attention to what he disparagingly calls "the omnipresence of the theme
of paranoia as it expresses itself in a seemingly inexhaustible production of conspiracy
plots of the most elaborate kind in the postmodem age."7 Although the link is not
explicitly made, we are presumably meant to infer that Pynchon et al. are key
postmodernists because they contribute to the omnipresence of paranoia as a key
component of postmodem culture.
Jameson is not the only critic to develop an account of what might be termed the
cultural logic of paranoia. As with Jameson's article, there is some confusion in other
accounts of the era of paranoia as to the exact historical framework of this cultural
development. 8 "Other centuries have only dabbled in conspiracy like amateurs," claim
Carl Graumann and Serge Moscovici, the editors of a volume by social psychologists
and historians entitled Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. "It is our century," they
continue, "which has established conspiracy as a system of thought and a method of
action."9 Some theorists have characterised the whole of the modem period as "the age
of paranoia," in which, following suggestions by Lacan, paranoia is constitutive of

5 Tanner, City of Words, p.109.

6 alderman, Beyond the Wasteland; John Kuehl, Alternate Worlds: A Study of Postmodern Antirealistic
American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1989); Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since
1940 (London: Longman, 1992); Pat O'Donnell, "Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative,"
Boundary 2, 19 (1992), 181-204; Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge,
1993). A canon of conspiracy films has also been constructed; see, for example, James W. Palmer and
Michael M. Riley, "America's Conspiracy Syndrome: From Capra to Pakula," Studies in the Humanities,
8 (1981), 21-27, and Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World
System (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, and London: BFI, 1992).
7 Jameson, "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, 6 (1984),
p.80.
8 Jameson conspicuously chooses his examples of postmo~ern literature (naI?ely Pyn~hon, Burroughs,
and Ishmael Reed) from the 1960s, but draws on the ~chitecture ~n~ expenmental VIdeo work of the
1980s in other parts of his discussion of the cultural lOgIC of late capitahsm.
9 Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici, eds, Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1987), p.153. Two philosophers of p~YC?oIOgfYthhave ~glued .al~ngysimh ildar ~~e~ tha~
. is now indistinguishable from the normal functIOnIng 0 eoretIca actIVIty; e u a ne an
f~~:~~I~gassi, Paranoia: A Study in Di.agnosis.(D?rdr~cht, Holland: R~id:!, 1976? Li~ewise Edw~d
I?
t paranoia is the domInant pnnciple In modern fictIOn, In The DIalectIc of ParanOId
J ayne arg ues tha d "P·d P .
Form," Genre, 11 (1978), 131-57; for an analogous argument see Leo Brau y, rOVI ence, aranOIa,
and the Novel," ELH, 48 (1981), 619-37.
- 91 -
normal subjectivity in capitalist society.1O Others focus explicitly on the sixties as the
time on which this cultural sensibility becomes especially significant. For example,
several contributors to the Social Text collection, The 60s without Apology, discuss the
conspiratorial dimension of that decade. The authors of the ironic "Lexicon of Folk-
Etymology" explain that, "in the practice of overt politics, the term 'paranoia' was
applied when fear and anxiety analogous to that encountered in drug use were
manifested intrapsychically. "11 Herb Blau, another contributor to the collection,
concludes that, "it was conspiracy theory which dominated perception in the 60s, for
good reason or wrong, almost more on the left than on the right."12 From a very
different political perspective, John Carroll, a sociologist writing in the late seventies,
identifies the sixties youth movements as the prime site of emergence of "the paranoid
personality." "This decade appears as peculiarly paranoid," he argues, "when one
considers the accumulated diversity, intensity and persistence of the revolt against
inherited authority. "13
It has become a common manreuvre in Pynchon criticism to cite one of the
many articles on paranoia as "the metaphysic of the age," and then to slot Pynchon into
that "metaphysic" as one more example of the overproduction of paranoid thrillers,
albeit distinctly highbrow ones. 14 What I would argue instead is that Pynchon' s novels
are indeed a complicitous contribution to the culture of conspiracy, but, more
importantly, they are part of a wave of critical reflections on that culture. Though there
is much truth to the claim that the sixties were marked out by paranoia, what is perhaps
more significant is the emergence at this time of self-reflexive definitions of the culture
of conspiracy, which identify it, name it, and criticise it. Conspiracies and conspiracy
theories might have well have played a part in many periods of social crisis throughout
history; what happens in the fifties and sixties is that the very notion of a conspiracy
theory as a form of historical explanation and an indicator of a political sensibility
becomes theorised, discussed, parodied, and finally incorporated as part of common
currency. So instead of characterising Pynchon as merely one more exponent of
paranoia, I think we should view his novels as participating in a larger process of
cultural diagnosis.
Three articles in particular are cited in characterisations of Pynchon and other
novelists as exponents of the paranoid style in literature, namely Richard Hofstadter's

10 See, for example, Teresa Brennan, "The Age of Paranoia," Paragraph, 14 (1991), 20-45, and Carl
Freedman, "Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick," Science-Fiction
Studies, 11 (1984), 15-24.
11 Ralph Larkin and Daniel Foss, "Lexicon of Folk-Etymology," in The 60s without Apology, Sohnya
Sayres et aI., eds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.375.
12 Herb Blau, "From '(Re)Sublimating the 60s,'" in The 60s without Apology, p.318.
13 John Carroll, Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modern Culture (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1977), p.80.
14 The phrase comes from Marquez, '''Everything Is Connected,'" p.92.

- 92-
groundbreaking essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1963), an article by
an unnamed author in Esquire entitled, "Wake up America!" (1966), and an essay on
"Paranoia" in Harper's Magazine (1974). In what follows, I want to read Pynchon's
first three novels alongside these articles. Rather than regarding these three diagnoses
of the cultural logic of paranoia as providing interchangeable explanations of Pynchon' s
novels, my concern is to locate each novel and its counterpart article within a more
precise historical moment, thereby identifying three stages in the development of a self-
aware debate on the paranoid style. In brief, Pynchon's novels display a movement
from a satire on "Their" paranoia during Cold War, to an appropriation of the language
of paranoia by the "We" of the counterculture in the latter half of the sixties.

(i) V.

Pynchon's first novel, V. (1963), has much in common with an influential article
of the same year, written by the American historian Richard Hofstadter. First delivered
as a lecture in Oxford during the fateful month of November 1963, "The Paranoid Style
in American Politics" has become a favourite of Pynchon criticism, with its neat
summary that "the distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents
see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a 'vast' or
gigantic conspiracy as the motive force in historical events."15 Sanders, Marquez and
Kuehl, for example, all quote this definition in order to characterise if not Pynchon
himself, then certainly the world-view of his characters and of the novels themselves.
Attention needs to be focused, however, on the conditions of emergence of Hofstadter's
analysis: why were historians producing psychologised diagnoses of political styles at
this time (that is, in the period after the highpoint of McCarthyism, but before the
increasing reliance on conspiracy theories in the wake of the Kennedy assassination)?
Hofstadter proceeds by taking isolated examples from American history since
the revolution, in order to trace in those significant moments the formation of a
paranoid style which, in Hofstadter's view, produces a damaging, populist challenge to
the stability of the pluralist consensus of American political life. Like Hofstadter's
article, V. is also constructed out of a series of seemingly isolated historical episodes.
The only thing these diverse events have in common is that Herbert Stencil, the son of a
diplomat and the embodiment of the paranoid style in public officials, believes they
provide evidence of "The Big One, the century's master cabal ... the ultimate Plot
Which Has No Name."16 The title character V. in all her various manifestations is,

15 Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in The Paranoid Style in American
Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967), p.29.
16 Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963; London: Picador, 1975), .p.226. Page references to this editi~n wi~1 be
cited hereafter in parentheses in the text, where necessary 10 the form of (V., 22~) .. In t.he quotatIOns from
Pynchon's texts I have added square brackets to my ellipses in order to dlst10gUlsh them from the

- 93 -
 somewhat improbably, implicated in each of the following historical snapshots: "she"
appears as Victoria Wren in Egypt Gust before the Fashoda Incident), and in Florence
(during violent urban unrest in the years at the tum of the century); as Vera Meroving in
Southwest Africa (in 1922); as the Bad Priest (during the siege of Malta in the Second
World War); as the woman known simply as V. (in Paris the year before the First
World War broke out); and as Veronica the beatified sewer rat (in the present of the
novel, namely late fifties New York). V. starts off as no more than "the recurrence of
an initial and a few dead objects" (445) and by the end she becomes "a remarkably
scattered concept" (389). Each of these seemingly strategic moments of social and
economic crisis also represents a significant moment in the buried history of the
paranoid style, occurrences marked out for example by "those grand conspiracies or
foretastes of Armageddon which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities
in the years preceding the Great War" (155). V. becomes both a test-case of the
possibilities of reading between the lines of history, and an examination of the historical
emergence of that mode of paranoid reading.
The novel also develops a continuous, complicitous dialogue with Modernist
literature and art. John Dugdale, in his exhaustive discussion of Pynchon's allusions to
writers such as Conrad, James, Rilke, Eliot, Frazer and Joyce, explains that "this
reading of Modernism is informed by the observation of the resemblance between its
practices and those of the conspiracy theorist who sees shapes beneath 'the surface
accidents of history,' and makes grand patterns out of 'any cluster of phenomena,' and
detects alliances and agreements where the myth-maker sees connections."17 Stencil's
desire to find a unifying thread to history is pulled apart not only by the diversity of
historical moments, but also by the sheer profusion of narrative tones, styles, literary
parodies and points of view. This happens most notably in Chapter 3 ("In which
Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations"), which fragments Pynchon' s
earlier short story, "Under the Rose," into loosely interlocking narratives focalised
through seven characters, most of whom are local by-standers and accidental witnesses
to the "main action"-unaware that there even is a plot to assassinate the British
Consul. The effect of these narrative "quick-changes" is to disperse the linear
concentration of John Buchan-style British spy stories into a myriad of non-Western
impressions and lives, defying the reader to sort out the "relevant" clues from the
wealth of incidental details. In the final section of the chapter the task is taken to its
extreme conclusion, when the narration assumes an impersonal and inhuman "vantage
point," which turns out to be the exact place where Porpentine's shot body comes to
rest (94). The difference between figure and ground is eliminated, when the fatal shot
becomes merely "a flame ... in the area of the other's right hand," and the Jamesian
figures in the patterned carpet are turned to a "monochrome orange" in the light of the

frequent ellipses in the original.

17 John Dugdale, Thomas PYllcholl: Allusive Parables of Power (London: Longman. 1990), p.ll-l.
- 94-
setting sun. In this way the paranoid style of a "stencilized" reading is at one and the
same time necessary for piecing the narrative of a culture together, and singularly
pointless. In the beat scene of fifties New York Stencil's antiquated conspiracy theories
hold as much weight as the apocryphal stories of crocodiles in the sewers, which is
indeed where Stencil ends up pursuing his quest for V.
Pynchon's first novel thus takes seriously the idea of the paranoid style as a
method of historical interpretation and literary composition which has actively
contributed to the destructive events of the twentieth century. Yet it also ridicules
Stencil's quest as the work of a bizarre outsider whose sights are turned towards the
past and to European forms of political intrigue. Hofstadter's analysis displays a
similar tension. On the one hand, he is keen to show that the paranoid style is far from
an individual mental aberration, since it has been taken seriously in a variety of
historical situations, and across the political spectrum. On the other, the majority of
Hofstadter's examples are taken from minority, "fringe" politics. The presentation of
the paranoid style as a dangerous historical development is thus coupled with a
recognition that most of its proponents were not in the mainstream of political power.
As I outlined in the Introduction, Hofstadter is one of several American historians and
political scientists in the late fifties and early sixties whose emphasis turned to the
irrational basis of politics instead of the conscious, material interests of its participants.
Countersubversion came to be understood more in terms of displaced, unconscious
fears that crystallised into a conspiracy theory, than as a fully intentional scheme which
conveniently used scare stories to promote political goals. In short, psychological
categories seemed to offer better purchase on the waywardness of recent politics than
purely economic ones. V. participates in this movement towards a definition and a
diagnosis of the paranoid style in history. Significantly, it is Eigenvalue, Stencil's
dentist and substitute psychoanalyst, who gives the clearest-and clearly satirical-
diagnosis of Stencil's condition:

Cavities in the teeth occur for good reason ... But even if there are
several per tooth, there's no conscious organization there against the life
of the pulp, no conspiracy. Yet we have men like Stencil, who must go
about grouping the world's random caries into cabals. (153)

Hofstadter is careful to point out that he is less concerned to take issue with the
specific content of each conspiracy theory, than to identify a recurrent "way of seeing
the world and expressing oneself." But, as he admits, "the term 'the paranoid style' is
pejorative, and it is meant to be."18 Both Hofstadter's article and Pynchon's novel
make more sense if we remember that the previous year, 1962, had seen the world
pushed to the brink of nuclear war with the Cuban missile crisis. On top of this, the
memory of McCarthyism was still fresh, even if it was now regarded as an aberration in
the normal workings of American politics. Both Pynchon and Hofstadter-albeit from

18 Hofstadter, ''The Paranoid Style," p.5.

- 95 -
 different perspectives-participate in a wider attack by sixties intellectuals on the
institutionalised culture of paranoia that dominated Cold War politics, in which the
conspiratorial imagination had first to be classified in order to license subsequent
denunciations. 19
Both V. and Hofstadter's paper were written before the Kennedy assassination,
which upped the stakes in any discussion of the paranoid style. As we saw in Chapter
1, within a decade of the event those Americans who didn't believe in a conspiracy
were in a minority. From being a mark of extreme but influential politics promoted by
those on the fringes of power, the paranoid style became a popular and perhaps
indispensable cultural sensibility. In brief, the sixties witnessed a shift from conspiracy
theories being told by the authorities about the people in the name of
countersubversion, to conspiracy theories being proposed by the people about abuses of
power by those in authority. V. is part of this history. 20

(ii) The Crying of Lot 49

Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), marks the mid-point of
this transition, and, as we have already seen in Chapter 2, its plot bears structural
similarities to some features of the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination: an
American housewife chases up clues in connection with the death of a man whose
legacy seemed to include the whole of America. It is significant that, unlike Herbert
Stencil who is an outsider on the fringes of political authority, Oedipa Maas is an
American housewife, married to a used car salesman turned DJ. Conspiracy becomes

19 It comes as no surprise, then, to find that Karl Popper's collection of essays, Conjectures and
Refutations, also published in 1963, contains several "refutations" of what he terms the "conspiracy
theory of society," which is "the view that whatever happens in society-including things which as a rule
people dislike, such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages-are the results of direct design by some
powerful individuals or group." Popper rejects this picture of historical causation, arguing that "the
conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all events, even those
which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the people who are
interested in these results." Likewise in V. the possibility of a historical conspiracy organised through
virtu, the Machiavellian principle of personal will, is matched against the emergence of the sheer
complexity of events, impressions, retellings and unconscious fears which go to make up a historical
Situation (as Old Stencil capitalises it). Karl Popper, "Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences,"
in Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; first published in Library of the
10th International Congress of Philosophy, 1, Amsterdam, 1948),336-46.
20 Ingrid Walker Fields tells a version of this narrative in her unpublished thesis, ""Paranoia, Politics, and
the Popular Imagination: Conspiracy in Contemporary American Literature" (unpublished PhD diss.,
University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993; abstract in DAI, 53 (June 1993), 4325A). She argues that the
second half of this century has witnessed a transformation from governmental conspiracy theories about
internal enemies, to popular conspiracy narratives about a government conspiring against its own people.
What Walker Fields omits from this story is the crucial factor of the self-reflexive theorising of
conspiracy theories as a cultural phenomenon d.u~ing t~is per,i,od." Furthermore~ ~he g~ves too ~,uch
credence to the notion that in a postmodern polItIcal clImate we have been dISInherIted from our
cultural memory." I would argue instead that in addition to mounting a broad challenge to the orthodoxy
of a shared "cultural memory," conspiracy theories have also produced complex alignments and
antagonisms both between and within the various constituencies of the counterculture.

- 96-
part of suburbia, and in the years between V. and Lot 49 the focus of attention shifts
from Europe and New York to the West Coast. Lot 49 reads as a journalistic survey of
the LA scene in the summer of '64, and portions of the novel were in fact published in
Esquire magazine in 1965. The book is a sharply humorous sampling of the rapidly
changing Zeitgeist, and one of the new fashions Pynchon identifies is the emergence of
paranoia as a popular, but zany, cultural language. The novel is full of self-conscious
references to paranoia, not least with a would-be Beatles-style pop group called The
Paranoids. At the same time, there are still some quick satires on the kind of minority
political fanatics studied by Hofstadter and his colleagues; for example, Mike
Fallopian, a member of The Peter Pinguid Society, even more right-wing than their
(real-life) rivals the Birch Society, engages in a ridiculous exchange of paranoid one-
upmanship with Oedipa Maas and the lawyer Metzger, the co-executors of Pierce
Inverarity's will:

"You one of these right-wing nut outfits?" inquired the diplomatic

Metzger.
Fallopian twinkled. "They accuse us of being paranoids."
"They?" inquired Metzger, twinkling also.
"Us?" asked Oedipa. 21
The accusation of paranoia flies back and forth in the novel, with everyone in on this
self-conscious cultural joke. The narrator at one point discusses Oedipa's education in
the fifties, "at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow
students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them, this having
been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places," felt by "those dear daft
numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's so intemperate youth" (71)-and here the
narrator goes on to mention, by their first names, Secretaries of State Forrestal and
Dulles, and Senator McCarthy. What are these "pathologies in high places" that, like
the Tristero conspiracy which dominates the novel, don't even have to be spoken out
aloud? Surely a strong contender is paranoia, and the diagnosis of the paranoid style
has by now become so familiar as to be almost affectionate.
As the diagnosis of paranoia shifts from Them to Us, Oedipa finds herself in the
position of spelling out the four possibilities concerning the Tristero conspiracy: there is
an underground conspiracy, or she has hallucinated it; there is a plot to make her think
there is a conspiracy, or she is "fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut,
Oedipa, out of your skull" (118). Well-acquainted with the vocabulary of popular
Freudianism through her analyst, Dr Hilarius (himself possibly in the advanced stages
of LSD-induced paranoia), Oedipa knows what the diagnosis will be. "Change your
name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and/or Leonard [that is, The Paranoids], baby," she advises
her reflection in the vanity mirror; "either way, they'll call it paranoia" (117). Paranoia

21Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 ~1966; Lond~n: Picador, 1~7?), p.32. Further page references to this
edition will be cited in parentheses In the text, With the abbreViatIOn Lot 49 where necessary.

- 97-
becomes caught up in self-reflexive loops of epistemology and power, so that They can
use a diagnosis of paranoia to further Their devious ends. Ironically, Oedipa's paranoia
prevents her from seeing that self-knowledge of her own paranoia might be the very
thing which ~ould short-circuit the diagnostic labyrinth in which she feels trapped.
Knowing that her thoughts are delusional might paradoxically provide Oedipa with a
critical leverage against the threat of engulfing paranoia. By the mid-sixties, then, the
popular awareness of paranoia as a cultural phenomenon had to be factored into any
account of conspiracy culture. By the middle of the decade the historians of the
paranoid style were in danger of themselves being diagnosed by the popular political
forces which they had earlier anatomised.
With its wry commentary on the translation of paranoia as a fifties political style
into the affected anxieties of a sixties Californian housewife, Lot 49 at times speaks in
the same idiom as an article from Esquire magazine of the same year, entitled, "Wake
up America! It Can Happen Here! A Post-McCarthy Guide to Twenty-three
Conspiracies by Assorted Enemies Within." The article has been used to "explain"
Pynchon, but, once again, the article is itself in need of explanation. Wedged between
the tail end of a discussion on "the calculus of sex" and adverts for the Relax-A-Cizor
waistline reduction device, the guide adopts the dryly humorous tone of What Every
Bachelor Needs To Know. It scarcely needs to provide any commentary in its outlines
since, in a "post-McCarthy" age, the assorted conspiracy theories speak for
themselves-the article ends snappily with the throw-away, "And that's what's
happening, baby."22 In her use of the hip address, "baby," Oedipa tries hard to match
the nonchalance that we find in Esquire's treatment of paranoia. Included in the list
and garish cartoon illustration of the twenty-three "enemies within" there are several
familiar to the world of Lot 49: there is of course the Kennedy assassination (always
present but never mentioned in Lot 49); the Zip-Code Plot, in which the lewish-
controlled "Post office or the Commissar ... will know exactly where you are, what
you are doing and who is with you because you have been branded on ... the right
hand" (note in Lot 49 the old sailor with a tattooed sign of WASTE, the alternative
postal system (87»; the Flag-Stamp Intrigue, which finds extremely suspicious a 1963
U.S. stamp that omits the words "U.S. Postage" (think of the discovery by Oedipa and
Genghis Cohen the philatelist of anomalous U.S. stamps(66-68»; the threat of Hypno-
Subversive music from groups like the Beatles (compare Pynchon's British Invasion-
style combo, The Paranoids); and the Mental-Health Conspiracy, which aims to dupe
Americans into believing that only European doctors are "competent in the field of
insanity" (consider Dr Hilarius's murky past as a concentration camp doctor(95».
Pynchon's novel, however, cannot be explained away by comparing it to Esquire's
"Guide," not the least because Lot 49 satirises the popularised language of paranoia

22 "Wake up America! It Can Happen Here! A Post-McCarthy Guide to Twenty-three Conspiracies by

Assorted Enemies Within," Esquire, May 1966, p.165.

- 98-
advanced by such articles. It is both a product of and a reflection on the moment in
which paranoia becomes identifiable and available as a form of popular historiography.
Unlike the "Guide" in Esquire, The Crying of Lot 49 is not content merely to
anatomise the turn to conspiracy; it also seeks to assess the political value of this new
cultural language. In part Pynchon's second novel continues the troubling critique of
the paranoid hermeneutic which he had begun in V. In chasing up tiny clues to the
Tristero conspiracy which Oedipa discovers in the legacy of tycoon Pierce Inverarity,
she draws on her fifties college training in the detective reading skills of New Criticism,
pursuing arcane references in obscure works of literature. With another gesture towards
an anonymous They, the narrator explains that, "they had managed to turn the young
Oedipa into a rare creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit ins, but just a whiz
at pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts" (71-72). Lot 49 points towards the
inadequacies of those reading habits Pynchon himself was schooled in with his English
B.A. at Cornell during the late fifties, and the novel indeed becomes caught up in the
marginalia and footnotes of history as Oedipa herself gets involved with Genghis
Cohen (the philatelist) and Emory Bortz (the literature professor). After Oedipa's brief
escape from the claustrophobia of suburbia when she goes out "on the road" in San
Francisco, the return to these academic modes of inquiry seems merely to serve the
purpose, as Christopher Lasch argues in his harsh critique of Pynchon, of "hiding the
obvious behind a veil of obscurity."23 Lasch's arguments against the turn to paranoia in
American culture are forceful, but Lot 49 does begin to consider, however
complicitously, the possibility that Oedipa's quest for some transcendent but arcane
revelation is an enormous red herring, such that she fails to notice the obvious social ills
around her which need no conspiracy theories to explain them. The Bomb is one
obvious but unspoken presence in a Southern California dominated in the sixties by the
aerospace (that is, rocket) industry. The seedy story of Department of Defense weapons
contracts for household-name firms is told in the glee sung at the Yoyodyne
shareholders meeting. "Bendix guides the warheads in, / Avco builds them nice" (57),
and so the list of the West Coast's open secret continues, a story Pynchon knew only
too well from his time as a technical writer at Boeing Aerospace in Seattle in the years
1960-1962. In his introduction to Slow Learner Pynchon comments on the "simple,
standard fear" of the Bomb, stating that "there was never anything subliminal about it,
then or now."24 Yet in Lot 49 there is at times a "ritual reluctance" to name this
commonly shared fear, which becomes displaced into the Tristero conspiracy, and
especially "The Courier's Tragedy," with its atmosphere of apocalyptic imminence:
"[n]otice how often the figure of death hovers in the background"(l07) of the illustrated

23 Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984; London: Picador.
1985), p.159.
24 Pynchon, Slow Learner (London: Picador, 1984), p.20-21. Dugdale discusses the Bomb as a latent
symbol in pynchon's work (Allusive Parables, pp.157-64).
- 99-
 edition of the play, Bortz advises. Oedipa, the narrator informs us, "was to have all
manner of revelations," not about Pierce or herself, but "about what remained yet had,
somehow, before this, stayed away" (12), and, "if only she'd looked," she "might have
found the Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly
concealed entranceways" (124).
Lot 49 simultaneously broaches and ignores the possibility that the
"disinherited" of America are not the once-aristocratic Tristero (now transformed into
the malcontent meritocracy of Yoyodyne's pointless postal system), but the blacks,
Mexicans, Chinese, gay men, deaf-mutes, and other disadvantaged groups whom
Oedipa glimpses on her night's wandering. In the same year that Lot 49 was published,
Pynchon wrote an article in the New York Times about Watts, the site of race riots in
Los Angeles the previous year. In "A Journey into the Mind of Watts" he argues that
"what is known around the nation as the L.A. scene exists chiefly as images in a screen
or a TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that
survive only a matter of weeks. It is," Pynchon continues, "basically a white Scene and
illusion is everywhere in it."25 The world of Lot 49 is made up of these "illusions,"
which draw its inhabitants away from the obvious: in the article Pynchon suggests that
the black ghetto of Watts was a revolution waiting to happen, a fact, like Watts itself,
ignored by most white residents of L.A.
In addition to its various satires on conspiracy theories, Lot 49 touches on the
possibility that paranoia might provide a model for connecting or plotting together as an
alternative counter-conspiracy all those left out of mainstream American society. The
people Oedipa comes across-the non-white night inhabitants of San Francisco, kids in
freight cars, squatters in lean-tos and junkyards, drifters, walkers along the road at
night, random voices on the phone, the old sailor, the young wino W.A.S.T.E. carrier, a
facially-deformed welder, and so on-all coalesce into a ghostly scarcely visible mirror
image of the ubiquitous Inverarity conspiracy. Before her night on the streets of San
Francisco, "she might have wondered what undergrounds apart from the couple she
knew of communicated by WASTE system. By sunrise she could legitimately ask what
undergrounds didn't" (86). As much as Oedipa's paranoia sidetracks her from the
obvious, it also leads her to discover the existence--even if still imaginary-of a
counter-conspiracy, as a "calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its
machinery" (86).

(iii) Gravity's Rainbow

Whereas Lot 49 only briefly introduces the potential of a counter-conspiracy

into its post-McCarthy satires on Cold War paranoia, Gravity's Rainbow produces a

25 Pynchon, "A Journey into the Mind of Watts," New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966, p.78.
- 100-
 full-blown exploration of this possibility. Lot 49 describes the summer of 1964, and
marks the beginnings of the counterculture, with demonstrations in Berkeley's Sproul
Plaza and experimentation with LSD. At the end of the novel Oedipa moots the
suggestion that "perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself'
(Lot 49, 125). By the time Gravity's Rainbow was published in 1973 the adventure of
the counterculture was nearly over. In the final section of the novel, "The
Counterforce," Pirate Prentice outlines what holds this Counterforce together. "Creative
paranoia," Prentice explains, "means developing at least as thorough a We-system as a
They-system. "26 Although the novel is set in "the Zone," the chaotic terrain of
Germany at the close of the Second World War, the merry pranks of the Counterforce
speak to the time and place in which the whole narration is embedded: a movie house in
L.A., managed by the Nixon figure, Richard M. Zhluub. The Counterforce becomes a
loose affiliation of the various victims of "the Firm," like Roger Mexico, Seaman
Bodine and Tyrone Slothrop, who unite in scenes of mayhem, such as the anarchic
episode in which they disrupt a boardroom meeting by pissing over the assembled
dignitaries and businessmen (636-37).
As Dickstein observed, paranoia becomes as integral to the counterculture as the
use of drugs, and Gravity's Rainbow fully recognises that the two are intimately
connected. The central plot of the Zone section involves Slothrop's mission impossible
to recover a consignment of hash from the Potsdam enclosure, and many of Slothrop , s
moments of paranoia coincide with his use of drugs (voluntary or otherwise), as the
narration becomes lost in layers of narcotic fantasies. When, for example, Slothrop is
searching for the dealer Saure Bummer ("Acid Bummer," i.e. bad trip), the debris of
Berlin begins momentarily to assume scary configurations, "whose smooth masks ...
speak their entire meaning, all of it right out on the surface" (436). Slothrop's shadow
on the arches of the ruined tenement block become paranoid projections, as he begins to
see a vast and threatening horror-movie throat. He also spies the words "DIE,
SLOTHROP" written in red neon, with the Herero's rocket mandala in the sky above.
These fleeting paranoid hallucinations crystallise into minatory forms, but then melt
away. The "ominous" heaps of reinforced concrete ready to tumble one moment
become merely "black spaghetti" curls of iron in the next (434). Reefer
"papyromancy" (442), along with "dreams, psychic flashes, omens cryptographies,
drug-epistemologies" (582) becomes part of the Counterforce's armoury of creative
paranOIa:
We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we
were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were
encouraged to avoid ... we have to find me~ers wh~se scales are
unknown in the world, draw our own schematIcs, gettIng feedback,
making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function.

26Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (l97~; London: Pi~ador, 1975), ?~38. All page refer~nces to this edition
will be cited hereafter in parentheses In the text, WIth the abbreVIatIOn GR where necessary.

- 101 -
 · . zeroing in on what incalculable plot? (521)

The alternative epistemologies which cluster around drug-use hold out the promise of
zeroing in on the plots of power that are normally left unexamined. But the "mindless
pleasures" of drugs also serve to undermine the temptations of paranoia. 27 Lot 49
briefly raises the possibility in the shape of Mucho Maas that large quantities of LSD
might function as a resistance to the solipsism of paranoia, precisely by dispersing or
"dissipat[ing]" (100) the personality that would be at the centre of any persecution. 28
Gravity's Rainbow carries this suggestion to the extreme with the final
fragmentation of Slothrop, who "is being broken down ... and scattered" (738).29 The
narrative enacts this dispersal, with its profusion of styles and rapid changes between
genres. Randomness of narrative plotting comes to work as a resistance to the over-
determination of conspiracy plotting. For example, when Slothrop leaves his slm
hideout with Greta on his mission to find Saure Bummer, his own trajectory through the
Zone (and, by extension, the progress of the plot) is described as "wandering,"
"ambling," and "mosey[ing]" (433-36). A rigid hierarchy of plots is hard to establish,
as even a simplified plot summary demonstrates: Slothrop's excursion to connect with
his dealer at first appears as an interlude in his cinematic encounter with Greta, but it
begins to take on a life of its own; back-tracking a little, we remember that Slothrop is
only with the ageing film actress because he woke up there after Tchitcherine had
captured and drugged him during the Potsdam hash rescue mission; but Slothrop only
went on the dope deal because he happened to meet Bummer whilst looking for
information about the Rocket. Slothrop's Rocketman adventures, although starting off
with a seemingly random combination of a costume and a chance meeting, soon takes
on a logic of its own, in the same way that so many of the metaphors and extended
figures of this novel take on a life of their own. In the Zone the reader, like Slothrop,
begins to lose sight of the "master plot" of the Rocket amidst all the Chinese box
hallucinations:
A few hours later Slothrop wakes up, and wonders where he is going.
Well, to find that Saure Bummer, soon as this rain lets up, give
the man his hashish. But what then? Slothrop and the S-Gerat have
grown to be strangers. He hasn't really thought about them for a while.
Hmm, when was that? (434)
For Slothrop it was the day before yesterday; for the reader it is several hundred pages.
The plots drift into each other, creating a "moire, a new world of flowing shadows,

27 "Mindless Pleasures" was the title Pynchon originally proposed for Gravity'S Rainbow. Tanner
discusses this fact in his Thomas Pynchon (London: Methuen, 1982), p.78.
28 When Dr Hilarius is doing his convincing impersonation of Dr Strangelove's Col. Jack D. Ripper, he
explains to Oedipa that, '''There is me, ~here are others. You know, with LSD, we're finding: t~e
· t' t' begins to vanish. Egos lose theIr sharp edges. But I never took the drug, I chose to remaIn 10
d IS mc IOn th '" (Lo 49 94)
relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the 0 ers are t, .
29 Leo Bersani explores the dispersal of personality as a resistance to paranoia at length in "Pynchon.
Paranoia, and Literature."
- 102-
interferences," which is, the narrator informs us, the result when "a paranoid meets a
paranoid" (395).
If the discourse of paranoia is occasionally surrounded by a "ritual reluctance"
in Lot 49, in Gravity's Rainbow it becomes omnipresent, transformed, for example, into
a brash Broadway tune: "Pa-ra-nooooiiiia, Pa-ra-noia! / Ain't it grand ta see, that
good-time face, again! / Pa-ra-noi-ya, boy oh boy, yer / Just a bit of you-know-what /
From way back when!" (657). Paranoia is endlessly and outrageously discussed,
theorised, and utilised, from the five "Proverbs for Paranoids," to the many narratorial
definitions of this hermeneutic. "Paranoia," we are told, "is nothing less than the
onset, the leading edge of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in
Creation, a secondary illumination" (703); it is, in other words, "a Puritan reflex of
seeking other orders behind the visible" (188); and, "if there is something comforting-
religious, if you want-about paranoia, there is also anti-paranoia, where nothing is
connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long" (434). These
analyses of the Puritan heritage of the paranoid style sit alongside revelations that, in
the world of the novel at least, much of the paranoia is justified. Just about every
character is paranoid in one way or another, which is hardly surprising since the novel
is overflowing with the intricate conspiratorial details of the inter-war cartels involved
in rocket development. 30 Tyrone Slothrop, for example, becomes convinced that "the
Firm" are controlling his fantasies, which is not so unreasonable since the baby Tyrone
was indeed the object of experimentation by the I.G. Farben cartel (or, in another
variation, he is the victim of a conspiracy to make him think that he has been thus
controlled (738)). In this wayan investigation of the psychological mechanisms of
Their paranoia is coupled with the appropriation by the Counterforce of that language.
Whereas Hofstadter is concerned to expose and implicitly criticise the paranoid
style in American politics, and the authors of the Esquire guide to twenty-three
conspiracies humorously take that critique for granted, an article from Harper's
magazine of 1974 documents the emergence of paranoia as a countercultural sensibility.
Hendrik Hertzberg's and David McClelland's article, entitled "Paranoia: An Idee Fixe
Whose Time Has Come," acknowledges that paranoia is both a "recent cultural
disorder," and a "natural response to the confusion of modern life," in other words, both
the official policy of the Cold War, and a popular response to that political framework. 31
Like Gravity'S Rainbow, this article understands paranoia as an important language
which is spoken across the political spectrum. The authors characterise the Nixon
presidency as "a Golden Age of political paranoia," in which "the paranoid strategies of
projection, denial, and the use of code language with private meanings ... have been

30 Dale Carter pieces together this story in The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall a/the American Rocket
State (London: Verso, 1988).
31 Hendrik Hertzberg and David c.K. McClelland, "Paranoia: An Idee Fixe Whose Time Has Come,"

Harper's June 1974, p.52.

- 103 -
played out on a national scale."32 They also discuss the appropriation and proliferation
of the language by those who would be the targets of Nixon's countersubversion.
"Hippies," they claim, "could no more communicate their thoughts without 'paranoia'
and 'paranoid' than they could eschew 'like,' 'y'know,' and 'I mean. "'33 Significantly,
Hertzberg and McClelland tum to Pynchon' s novels for further elucidation of this "idee
fixe," producing a feedback loop of self-reflexive cultural diagnosis between Pynchon
and popular magazines. This loop becomes even more circular in, for example,
Marquez's essay on Pynchon, which maps out the contours of the latter's paranoid style
by citing Hertzberg and McClelland, which itself relies on Pynchon for its formulation
of "this recent cultural disorder." Pynchon's fiction provides evidence for a diagnosis
of the culture, but then that diagnosis is used to classify and clarify Pynchon' s works.
Gravity's Rainbow increases the stakes in the contest over who is to perform
cultural analysis. The narrator warns that (in Michael Rogin's terminology which I
outlined in the Introduction) a symbolic rather than a realist understanding of history
might well play into Their hands:

By way of the Bland institute and the Bland Foundation, the man has
had his meathooks well into the American day-to-day since 1919. Who
do you think sat on top of that lOO-miles-per-gallon carburetor, eh? sure
you've heard that story-maybe even snickered along with paid
anthropologists who called it the Automotive Age Myth or some shit-
well, turns out the item was real, all right, and it was Lyle Bland who
sprang for those academic hookers doing the snickering and the
credentialed lying. (581)

By the early seventies, then, the psychoanalytically-informed diagnosis of the paranoid

style, which had proved an important intellectual tool in coming to terms with the
irrational prejudice fuelling domestic policies of countersubversion and foreign policies
of mutual suspicion, sat uneasily alongside accusations that this very form of analysis
only served to further Their interests. In the decade between Pynchon' s first novel and
his third, conspiracy theories had mutated from a political style in need of explanation,
to a self-conscious and necessary working assumption for the counterculture.

VINElAND: PARANOIA REVISITED

We have seen, then, how Pynchon' s first three novels contribute to an emerging
debate on the Cold War culture of conspiracy, mapping out the dangers and possibilities
of the paranoid style. In the second half of this chapter I want to explore what happens
to the self-reflexive cultural logic of paranoia in Pynchon's fourth novel, Vineland,

32 Hertzberg and McClelland, "Paranoia," p.53.

33 Hertzberg and McClelland, "Paranoia," p.52.
- 104-
published as the Cold War was coming to a close. 34

(i) Mindless Pleasures

Towards the end of 1989 rumours began to circulate in academic and literary
circles that Pynchon' s long-awaited new novel was about to be published. In the 17
years since his last novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon had come to be regarded by
many critics as one of the most important novelists in post-war America-and, as we
have seen, one whose name was synonymous with paranoid conspiracies. Whatever
this new novel was ostensibly about, it would inevitably amount to a symbolic story
about the fate of the sixties, and about the fate of the paranoid style, even if by default.
As it turned out, the novel was explicitly a story about the fate of various ex-hippies
struggling to survive in the dark years of the Reagan era. Vineland became one more
contribution-albeit an extremely ambiguous one-to the by now familiar
thirtysomething genre, one more plotting of the lives of sixties radicals who in various
ways sold out or were betrayed. Yet it was also a novel in which Pynchon's trademark
focus on paranoia was apparently missing.
The critical reception of Pynchon's fourth novel was divided, and the key issue
seemed to be Vineland's substitution of joking references to mass culture in place of the
notoriously erudite conspiratorial allusions in the earlier novels. On the one hand,
Vineland was favourably reviewed by the majority of newspaper critics, and the novel
became Pynchon's first real commercial success, staying on the New York Times
bestseller list for nearly four months in 1990. Its popularity with readers and some
newspaper critics was probably due to its straightforwardness in comparison with
Pynchon's earlier highly intricate and allusive conspiracy fictions. Terrence Rafferty in
the New Yorker found it "the clearest novel Thomas Pynchon has written to date," and
Christopher Walker in a letter to the London Review of Books characterised it as
"Pynchon's most user-friendly novel."35 Designating it a Main Selection, the American
Book-of-the-Month Club emphasised that Vineland was "eminently scrutable, richly
accessible, enormously readable," in an attempt to reassure readers for whom Pynchon
had become a by-word for convoluted obscurity-a specialist in what one reviewer
labelled the "highbrow conspiracy thriller."36
But for others the novel was an anti-climax after 17 years of waiting and false
rumours. Wendy Steiner, writing in the Independent, thought Vineland a "parody of

34 Pynchon, Vineland (1990; London: Minerva, 1991). All page references to this edition will be cited in
parentheses in the text.
35 Terence Rafferty, "Long Lost," New Yorker, 19 February 1990, pp.108-112; Christopher Walker,
"Thomas Pynchon's Vineland," London Review of Books, 8 March 1990, pp.4-5.
36 J. Anthony Lukas, "Vineland by Thomas Pynchon," BOMe News, April 1990, p.3; Donna Rifkind,
"The Farsighted Virtuoso," Wall Street Journal, 2 January 1990, p.A9.

- 105 -
 Pynchon's genius," with "inventiveness reduced to gimickry, high comedy become
wisecracking, emotional power shrunk to sentimentality." The book, she concluded, "is
a great disappointment."37 Christopher Lehman-Haupt in the New York Times
commented that "it's a little as if Upton Sinclair had been captured by ninja warriors
and lived to tell the tale to an R. Crumb high on acid."38 Disappointment with the novel
seemed to go hand-in-hand with the perception, as Lehman-Haupt put it, that "Mr.
Pynchon's paranoia seems to have eased." Although some critics still found Pynchon
to be promoting paranoid plots (for example, Salman Rushdie, and Paul Gray in Time
magazine),39 most were struck by the comparative absence of "that nexus of ideas with
which he is most frequently associated-namely the linkage of plot, quest, knowledge
and apocalypse."40
Frank Kermode' s article in the London Review of Books commented at length
on Pynchon's trademark theme of paranoia, a feature which Kermode himself had
analysed years previously in an article which was influential in establishing Pynchon in
the canon and making The Crying of Lot 49 one of the most frequently taught books on
English degree courses in the States. 41 In his review Kermode reminds us that Pynchon
"explores, more intensively maybe than anyone else has ever done, the relation between
fictional plot and paranoid fantasy." Vineland, however, came as a disappointment to
Kermode, not so much because it dropped these concerns altogether, but because it
merely repeated them "in a manner even more bitter but also less guarded by irony, less
cogent." Yet what disappointed Kermode more than anything about Vineland was its
endless references to popular culture and the detritus of everyday life. He wished the
novel had contained a glossary, since he found it frustrating that so many of the
references were lost on him; what made it worse, he complained, there is no reference
volume in which he could look up the brand names, the slang and the TV trivia. This is
a significant comment, because Pynchon' s previous novels have generated an entire
academic industry devoted to explicating the arcane and improbably learned allusions
(there are companion volumes to both Gravity's Rainbow and Lot 49).42 "It will be
remembered," Kermode warns, "that the paranoia of the earlier books always sought
sign-systems, not only interesting in their extraordinary complexity and extent but also

37 Wendy Steiner, "Pynchon's Progress: Dopeheads Revisited," Independent, 3 February 1990, p. 30.
38 Christopher Lehman-Haupt, "Vineland, Pynchon's First Novel in 17 Years," New York Times, 26
December 1989, p.C21.
39 Salman Rushdie, "Still Crazy After All These Years," New York Times Book Review, 14 January 1990,
pp.l, 36-37; Paul Gray, "The Spores of Paranoia," Time, 15 January 1990, pp.69-70.
40 Walker, "Pynchon's Vineland," p.5.
41Frank Kermode, "That Was Another Planet," London Review of Books. 8 February 1990, pp.3-4;
Kermode, "Decoding the Tristero," in Edward Mendelson, ed., Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), pp. 162-66.
42 J K Grant A Companion to "The Crying of Lot 49" (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,
. erry , U· . f G .
1994); Steven Weisenburger, A "Gravity's Rainbow" Companion (Athens, GA: mverslty 0 eorgla
Press, 1988).
- 106-
 menacing." For Kermode, Vineland proved a disappointment precisely because it
replaced (in his view) the complex and wide-ranging focus in the earlier novels on
semiological paranoia with the mindless pleasures of mass culture. In the critical
reception of Vineland, both sides agreed, then, that paranoia had given way to pop
culture. What I want to argue, however, is that the apparent absence of conspiracy from
Vineland is part of a meaningful continuation of Pynchon's dialogue with paranoia.
More importantly, the "easing of Mr. Pynchon's paranoia" is directly connected with
the story Vineland tells about the increasing saturation of mass culture.
In order to show the significance of the connection between the end of paranoia
and the triumph of mass culture, the following section will elaborate a running
comparison between The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland. The differences between
these two novels are instructive, since both form Baedekers of the cultural landscape of
California twenty years apart, with the later novel catching up on the life histories of
some of the characters in the earlier one (the first is set in the summer of 1964, and the
second in the summer of 1984).

(i) Beyond Paranoia

Unlike Pynchon's previous novels, the plot of Vineland is not itself a conspiracy
plot. V. sets on collision its two main stories, namely the development of the "the plot
that has no name" and the beat scene of fifties New York. The Crying of Lot 49 has
the shape of a detective story which uncovers clues towards the Tristero conspiracy.
Gravity's Rainbow, though it disperses its narratives amid a welter of discourses and
derailings of the plot, pieces together the story of The Firm's conspiratorial control of
pre-war industries in general and Tyrone Slothrop in particular. By contrast, Vineland
consists of a series of interrelated stories that reach back from the present into the past
but refuse to coalesce into a single conspiracy theory.
The present action of the novel, which takes place in the summer of 1984, sees
sixties survivors Zoyd, Frenesi, and their daughter Prairie, being chased by their long-
time enemies, drug enforcement agents Brock Yond and Hector Zuniga. As this story
proceeds, we gradually learn about events at the People's Republic of Rock and Roll at
the tail end of the sixties, tales of DL Chastain's ninja training in post-war Japan,
stories of Frenesi' s parents' in McCarthyite Hollywood, and her grandparents' time in
the labour unions of the thirties. The novel does feature a few "Pynchonesque"
moments, like the mysterious giant footprint which wipes out the labs of "shadowy
world conglomerate Chipco" (142), or the sinister mid-flight raid by unnamed forces on
Zoyd's night crossing to Hawaii-though these episodes are closer to Godzilla and sci-
fi movies than the John Buchan or Raymond Chandler scenarios of the first three
novels. But the narrative events are never totally overshadowed by the pervasive
presence of conspiracy which would link together all characters and events of the novel

- 107 -
into a coherent plot. Whereas Pynchon' s first three novels were shaped-however
satirically-by the codes of the detective fiction and thriller genres, the latest novel
turns for its structure to romance. Where Oedipa Maas' s detective mission promises to
expand outwards to involve the legacy of the whole of America, Prairie Wheeler's
quest is for her mother. Oedipa leaves the domestic scene in search of the political; by
contrast, Prairie must uncover the political story of Frenesi's activities at the end of the
sixties in order to recover the domestic. The treatment of the romance genre in
Vineland is, like that of the thriller in the earlier novels, a mixture of borrowings and
reworkings, producing an acknowledgement of both the attraction and the constrictions
of this popular form. The classic denouement of the romance-the revelation of the
protagonist's true parentage-is in Vineland played out as farce. In what should be the
final, cataclysmic tableau, Brock Yond descends from the sky in his new guise as
"Death from Slightly Above" and reveals his true identity to his "daughter" in the
clearing, only for him to be yanked back up into the helicopter. The revelation leaves
Prairie nonplussed, as she coolly retorts that '''you can't be my father, Mr. Yond, my
blood is type A. Yours is Preparation H'" (376). The only secret revealed at the end of
the novel is that there are no secrets left.
Unlike a conspiracy theory in which the aim is to show that "everything is
connected," the narrative of Vineland operates in line with DL and Takeshi's principle
of Karmic Adjustment, which aims to avoid the "danger of collapsing [everything] into
a single issue" (365). Pynchon's new aesthetic principle is a process of entanglement.
The novel shows DL, Zoyd and Prairie as they each, at different times, "clumsily
piec[e] the story together" (282)-and this is what the reader also has to do. There are
many pieces to this jumbled jigsaw, not least the countless mini-narratives about what
happened to each of the characters after the sixties were over. To tell the story of one
character's life the narrator has to tell the story of them all. In place of a series of clues
which promise to lead towards a grand revelation, Vine land relies on a series of
"endless tangled scenarios" (284). We learn of how Frenesi and her new husband Flash
become "tangled in an infinite series of increasingly squalid minor sting operations"
(72); in the computer files at the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives headquarters digital
versions of Frenesi and DL exist, "woven together in an intricacy of backs covered,
promises made and renegotiated," and so on (115); DL's old teacher Inoshiro Sensei
prepares her "to inherit his own entanglement in the world" (180); the story of the
finances of Vato and Blood, the tow merchants, is connected with "Specter's tangled
financial saga" (182); at the Thanatoid Roast '84, "Thanatoid wives bravely did their
part to complicate further already tangled marriage histories" (219); in Hollywood
Frenesi's mother, Sasha, became "entangled in the fine details of the politics in the
town at the time" (289); and when DL and Takeshi finally get it together in a penthouse
high over Amarillo the moment is framed by "a fractal halo of complications that might
go on forever" (381).

- 108 -
 Entanglement has always been a distinctive characteristic of Pynchon's work; in
Lot 49 Metzger explains that "our beauty lies in this extended capacity for convolution"
(21), and the first page of Gravity's Rainbow announces that "this is not a
disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into" (3). But whereas the narrative
threads in the first three novels were-however improbably and satirically-all knotted
into the workings of a "master cabal," in Vineland there is only an increasing
complication. Likewise Pynchon has consistently manifested a talent for complexity in
his sentence construction. We might compare, however, the much-quoted ending of
Lot 49 with the closing scenes of Vineland. In the former the sentences, like the
choices they outline, arrange themselves into a semblance of binary clarity: "Either
Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero" (126). By contrast
in Vineland the rambling, convoluted syntax remains till the end:

A tour bus, perhaps only lost in the night, swept in with a wake of diesel
exhaust and waited idling for its passengers, some of whom would
discover that they were already Thanatoids without knowing it, and
decide not to reboard after all. There were free though small-sized eats
for everyone, such as mini-enchiladas and shrimp teriyaki, and well
drinks at happy-hour prices. And the band, Holocaust Pixels, found a
groove, or attractor, that would've been good for the entire trans-night
crossing and beyond, even if Billy Barf and the Vomitones hadn't shown
up later to sit in, bringing with them Alexei, who turned out to be a
Russian Johnny B. Goode, able even unamplified to outwail both bands
at once. (384)
In Vineland sub-clauses proliferate, intervening in the flow of the sentence; brand
names and pop references pile up like so much prosaic lumber to be fitted in; phrasal
verbs are separated from their prepositions, producing only a sense of anticlimax when
they are finally reached; in short, the yearning towards a revelation of the previous
novels is replaced by a cluttering up in this one.
Entanglement becomes the structuring principle of Vineland, I would argue,
because it has become impossible to maintain the kind of Manichean oppositions
between Them and Us which structure conspiracy fictions. The possibility that the We
of the counterculture might end up working for Them had already been raised towards
43
the end of Gravity's Rainbow, but in Vineland betrayal becomes a key theme. The
paranoid divisions between Them and Us blur and re-emerge and become confused
once more through three generations of political compromise and betrayal. As well as
the main stories of Frenesi's and others' co-option into the snitch system which mark
the demise of the paranoid certainties of the counterculture versus the government,

43 In Gravity's Rainbow there is, for example, the scene in which Pirate Prentice confronts the fact that he
might unwittingly have been a double agent for the other side (542); the~~ is al,so ,t,~e startling )ump~cut
forward to an unspecified time when a "spokesman for the Counterfo~ce admits In a recent I~,~ervlew
with the Wall Street Journal" that "'We were never that concerned With Slothrop qua Slothrop (738);
Roger Mexico likewise daydreams of "t?e failed Counte~orce, the,~Iar:norous ex-rebels, , , doo~ed pet
ks " with the suspicion that "They wIll use us, We wIll help legitImize Them, though they don t need
f rea , " , I" (71 ~)
it really, it's another dividend for Them, nice but not cntIca - ,
- 109-
Vineland also establishes a series of narrative parallels and echoes which reinforce this
point, without connecting the stories into a single conspiratorial plot. So, for example,
many of the men in the novel-Zoyd, Hector, Brock, Takeshi, Weed Atman, Hub
Gates-are separated from their wives/lovers, whichever side they are on. The
domestic makes symbolic links beneath the political, with marriages, friendships, and
even long-standing antagonisms establishing complex networks of indebtedness and
complicity. In a similar vein, as much as Brock Vond is the embodiment of Their
collapsing surveillance system, he himself is under surveillance by his superiors. It is
ironically Vond's participation in the economy of paranoia that contributes to the
devaluation of its political currency. The political landscape of Vineland produces
many unlikely alliances and temporary rapprochements which work against the grain of
the clear loyalties of the paranoid generation of the sixties. To a certain extent paranoia
has become a redundant language in a world whose sides have become inextricably
fused.
The time for paranoid illumination is also past, in a novel that is marked out by
its sense of belatedness. Lot 49, for example, closes in suspense in the auction room, as
Oedipa-and perhaps the sixties more generally-wait for a grand revelation that will
transform the mundanity of suburban America. By the time of Vineland, the final years
of the sixties and whatever "transcendent meaning" (Lot 49, 125) they brought with
them are long since passed; whatever Oedipa was waiting for has already happened.
Vineland's opening word is "later," and its starting point is "later" in all senses: after
the auctioneer's crying of lot 49, after the nuclear apocalypse hovering over the final
scene of Gravity's Rainbow, and, in a novel published some five years after its
"present," beyond even the apocalyptic year of 1984.
To gain a sense of how the promise of paranoia has become out-dated and
routinised we might compare the opening paragraphs of Lot 49 and Vineland. The
former novel begins in the following way:
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a
Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the
fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she
supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California
real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spar~ time
but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the Job of
sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living-room,
stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of
God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. (Lot 49, 5)
The news that Oedipa is to sort out Pierce Inverarity's legacy arrives as a mysterious
and anonymous intrusion into the mundanity of her life as a Californian housewife~
significantly, it remains unclear whether she finds out from a telephone call, a normal
letter, or via some more secretive mode of communication. The enigmatic arrival of the
announcement is perhaps an example of what Jesus Arrabal the anarchist calls a
"miracle," which are "intrusions into this world from another" (Lot 49, 86). Chasing up

- 110 -
the clues in Pierce's will affords Oedipa glimpses of worlds and words unknown to her
in the hermetically sealed world of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines. Her life of
Tupperware parties up till this point is marked by an absence of paranoid significance,
an "absence of an intensity" (12); as yet there are nothing like the "flinders of
luminscent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage" (87) which she will
strain to see with the old sailor once she has become "sensitised." Oedipa turns to the
three possible comforts in her life-the TV, religion, and alcohol-but each remains
mute. Paranoia will come to offer Oedipa some form of consolation, however
compromised, for the loss of the "direct, epileptic Word" (81), in the shape of the
Tristero conspiracy's "promise of hierophany"(20).
Vineland likewise begins with the arrival of a communication on a Californian
summer's day, some twenty years later:

Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted
awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a
squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these
had been carrier pigeons from some place far across the ocean, landing
and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but
none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in
time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen,
almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his
latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did
something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he
would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed. (3)

Hippie no-hoper Zoyd Wheeler struggles towards some kind of revelation in his dream
about the message-bearing carrier pigeons, perhaps suffering from the same inability as
his tripping companion Van Meter, who "had been searching all his life for
transcendent chances exactly like this one the kids [whose dreams are like Garcia
Marquez tales] took so for granted, but whenever he got close it was like, can't shit,
can't get a hardon, the more he worried the less likely it was to happen" (223). The
"light pulsing" in the message-bearers' wings might refer us back to the "pulsing
stelliferous Meaning" (Lot 49, 56) that Oedipa feels on the threshold of unveiling, but
for Zoyd the paranoid's moment of illumination has always remained just out of focus.
He describes how he "keep[s] tryin' to find out" through psychokinesis where Frenesi
is, through "try[ing] to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that'll give a clue, but-
well the signs are there on street corners and store windows-but [he] can't read" (40).
For Oedipa the announcement of Pierce's death opens up the promise of discovering a
"secret richness and concealed density of dream" (Lot 49, 117), even if that quest turns
out to be a red herring. By contrast, for Zoyd the "deep nudge from forces unseen"
comes to him in a dream, which he automatically takes to be prophetic in a vague way.
But it turns out to be nothing more mysterious than the arrival of his disability check,
which acts as the annual guarantee of compliance with Drug Enforcement Agent Brock
Vond's contract to keep him away from his former wife, Frenesi.
Whereas the announcement at the start of Lot 49 signals Oedipa's induction into

- III -
the world of paranoia and surveillance, for Zoyd this is only "another nudge" in what
has become a routinised and mundane surveillance operation over the last dozen or so
years. He merely groans his way out of bed to start one more day. When the Tubal
Detox doctor asks whether Zoyd has had the paranoid feeling of being persecuted for
some time, Zoyd replies that "in Hector's case fifteen or twenty years" (43). From its
promise of sudden illumination in Lot 49, paranoia in Vineland has become like
background radiation, a permanent but inactive presence in Zoyd's daily life. The
"Nixonian Reaction" ensured that "betrayal became routine," with "money from the
CIA, FBI, and others circulating everywhere, leaving the merciless spores of paranoia
wherever it flowed" (239). Likewise surveillance has become automated and
anonymous; as Flash, informer and Frenesi's new husband, complains: "we're in
th'Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you're tellin' the Man more
than you meant to" (74). Even worse, paranoia seems to have become an irrelevance in
a land whose TV shows turn "agents of government repression into sympathetic
heroes," made worse by the fact that "nobody thought it was peculiar anymore, no more
than the routine violations of constitutional rights these characters performed week after
week, now absorbed into the vernacular of American expectations" (345). The forces
of evil have not disappeared, but the discovery of their existence no longer comes as a
moment of sudden insight. On the penultimate page, in the midst of the final build up
towards the seemingly happy ending with the return of lovable mut Desmond, the
narrator presents a picture of the implacable forces of evil fixed into a classical tableau:
"the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after the partners into Time's wind, impassive
in pursuit, usually gaining, the faceless predators who'd once boarded Takeshi's
airplane in the sky, the one's who'd had the Chipco lab stomped on, who despite every
Karmic Adjustment brought to bear so far had simply persisted, stone-humorless,
beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain or accommodate," and so on
(383). Instead of becoming the focus of attention, these "unrelenting forces" form a
stone frieze, a carved backdrop against which the "endless tangled scenarios" of
Vineland are told.
Because the "faceless predators" have become routine, the novelty and critical
edge of paranoia as a countercultural language have been lost. Vineland affords
glimpses of a time when paranoia was as much a sign of fashion as "miniskirts, wire-
rim glasses, and love beads" (198). For example, on a Hawaii-bound flight in the early
seventies Zoyd is non-plussed when a sinister craft docks alongside in mid-Pacific,
helmeted officials board the plane and someone with a "blond hippie haircut" takes
refuge in Zoyd's in-flight band, welcoming him "smoothly" with '''Man's after you,
eh'" (65). In Lot 49 The Paranoids are a novice band hoping for a recording contract:
in Vineland we learn incidentally that at the highpoint of the "Nixonian Reaction" they
were playing the Fillmore Stadium (308)! As the novel frequently stresses, fashions
and musical tastes are expendable, and by 1984 The Paranoids have been replaced by

- 112 -
the "sonic apocalypse" (55) of Fascist Toejam and the novel's resident band, Billy Barf
and the Vomitones. For Zoyd's teenage daughter, Prairie, paranoia is just one more
antiquated accessory of her "hippie-freak parents" (16) and their friends, another item
which signifies the sixties, "an America of the olden days she'd mostly never seen,
except in fast clips on the Tube meant to suggest the era, or distantly implied in reruns
like 'Bewitched' or 'The Brady Bunch'" (198). She is "leery as always of anything that
might mean unfinished business from the old hippie times" (56), and when her father
expresses excessive concern for her safety on that summer day in 1984, she asks him,
"'Sure this ain't pothead paranoia?''' (46).
Paranoia has become passe, however, not merely because it is part of a now out-
dated drug scene, but because everything turns out to be true. 44 In a version of Oedipa's
long night of paranoia in San Francisco when signs of the Tristero appear wherever she
goes, Zoyd has the feeling that on every one of his errands in Vineland that summer's
day everyone else is out to get him. He insists that "it wasn't pothead paranoia-but
neither was Zoyd about to step inside this bank" where "colleagues at desks could be
seen making long arms for the telephone" (46). In Lot 49 there is hesitation and
suspense surrounding Oedipa's moments of paranoia-is there really a conspiracy, or is
she suffering from mental delusions? By contrast in Vineland the moment of doubt has
passed, and fears of conspiracy are shown to have been always already justified. Thus
whereas Vineland is staged under the sign of the factual, Lot 49 continuously teeters on
the edge of metaphors which never quite solidify into literal statements. Clauses
beginning "as if' multiply endlessly, leaving Oedipa and the novel on the cusp of
revelation:
So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero. Or
rather, her attendance at some unique performance, prolonged as if it
were the last of the night, something a little extra for whoever'd stayed
this late. As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jewelled garters and G-
strings of historical figuration that would fall away were layered dense
as Oedipa's own street-clothes in that game with Metzger in front of the
Baby Igor movie; as if a plunge towards da~n indefinite black hou~s
long would indeed be necessary before the Tnstero could be revealed 10
its terrible nakedness. (Lot 49, 36)
In Lot 49 the moment of waiting is indefinitely prolonged, as if, in the language of
calculus which the novel itself explores, the "vanishingly small" increment between the
literal and the metaphorical were endlessly subdivided without ever fully bridging the
gap (Lot 49, 89).
In Vineland, on the other hand, the fictive has been collapsed into the factual;

44 Phon himself has commented on the significance of the change from a sub-culture associated with
ynbc· speed and LSD to the rave scene based on Ecstasy: "[with MDMA] the circuits of the brain
canna Is , · · · · 1 d' t d Y
which mediate alarm, fear, flight, lust, and tern~ona~ p~anola are temporan y Isconnec e. .ou see
with total clarity, undistorted by ammalIstlc urges. You have reached a state which the
every th 109
O

. .,,' . hk ff C 'b '. L;F. . h T h

ancients have called nirvana, all seelOg blIss. Cited 10 Douglas Rus 0 , ) erra. IJe III t e renc es
of Hyperspace (London: FlamingolHarperCollins, 1994), p.ll O.
- 113 -
Lot 49's striptease of history has given way to an endless visibility. Zoyd, Flash,
Frenesi, DL and the other members of the former 24 fps film collective all live their
lives after the moment of revelation in the sixties, in a world in which everything has
endlessly been exposed. 1984 sees a revival of their paranoia, but this time round all
their suspicions are immediately shown to be factual in the context of the novel: Zoyd,
Frenesi and Flash have been cut off from the witness protection payments; the film
archives are publicly burnt; Brock is putting the heat not only on Prairie, but also on the
Vineland cannabis growers in a personal offshoot of Reagan's War on Drugs, testing
the "personal paranoia thresholds" (221) of the Holy tail planters. 45 Lot 49's "as if'
collapses straight away into the dull actuality of "there is."
The logic and context of this transition can be seen more clearly in a passage
from Flicker, a novel published in 1992 by Theodore Roszak, another survivor of the
sixties counterculture. Roszak was the author of the extremely influential study, The
Making of a Counter Culture (1970), which anatomised the political logic of the youth
movements of the late sixties as a rebellion against technocracy.46 Flicker is narrated
by a film studies academic imprisoned on a desert island. He was placed there after he
discovered too much about the Orphans, an ancient theocratic conspiracy which plans
not only to spread their Manichean doctrine by using the subliminal flicker of film-
frames, but also to lead the world, through the development of technology, to what they
consider to be its correct conclusion, namely mass destruction. In the following scene
the narrator discusses his recent discoveries with Angelotti, an Orphan pretending to be
a friend, who eventually betrays the narrator:

"The next war will be the last war ...

"We agree, don't we, this is no fantasy? This is the news of the
day. The movie we are watching is one mad rush toward annihilation.
Yet think of the genius that has gone into this production! The
machines, the medicines, the instruments that explore the great world
and the small. Think how much has been perverted, twisted, poisoned.
How are we to account for this, for the amazing coherence of this
terrifying scenario? Can it be purely fortuitous? Or is there not
obviously a design here before us, the design of a story? If a person
knew nothing whatever of the orphans, might he not in a moment of
frightening insight say to himself, 'It is as if someone ha~ p~anned it'?
But you and I know better, don't we? We can say, It IS because
someone has planned it. "47

Like Flicker, Vineland is written at a time when everyone "knows better," and paranoid

45 Frenesi jokes with a neighbour that it must be just a computer error, "but then, paranoid, dec.ided n.ot to
repeat what she'd heard from Flash" (86); in a return to the old days of the 24 fps film coll~ctIve, DItZah
. t ZI·pi that "we all have to be extra paranoid" (262) when they find out that varIOUS members
teII s her SIS er .. . kl I .
of their old group have gone missing; and under DL's guidance, Prame must qUlC yearn paranOIa as a
necessary defensive weapon.
46 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Societ), and Its
Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1970).
47 Roszak, Flicker (London: Bantam, 1992), p.564.
- 114 -
speculation has been replaced by epistemological resignation. The paranoid suspicions
held by the counterculture have all been confirmed, and conspiracies theories about the
government conspiring against its citizens are taken for granted. Carl Oglesby, a New
Left student in the sixties who subsequently became a radical historian, sums up the
situation with his dictum that "conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics
by normal means."48 The two decades since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow
conspiracy have witnessed the following: the revelations about Watergate; the
discovery of anomalies in the official versions which has led to a proliferation of
conspiracy theories about the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X; the emergence of details about COINTELPRO, the government's counter-
intelligence programme; the October Surprise arms-for-hostages scandal and the Iran-
Contra hearings-and so on. Thus in Vineland we find that Watergate has lost its aura
of revelation, with its translation into The G. Gordon Liddy Story (339), just another
late-night made-for-TV movie (starring Sean Connery), about the life of the CIA
operative involved not only in the Watergate break-in but also in the Bay of Pigs (and
possibly the Kennedy assassination), and who is now a Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio
host. Likewise the government's conspiracy against its own citizens has become so
visible that the Bureau is obliged to place a Wide Load sign on the back of the lorry
when they move Weed Atman's COINTELPRO file around. Special Agent Ribble of
the Witness Protection Programme asks Flash if he's '''notice[d] how cheap coke has
been since 1981 '" (353), insinuating a conspiracy theory which even as well-versed a
paranoid as Flash is still naive enough to find incredible: "'Roy! Is you're sayin' the
President himself is duked into some deal? Quit foolin'! Next you'll be tellin' me
George Bush'" (353). The joke, of course, is that by the time of the publication of the
novel the story about the connections between Reagan, Bush, the CIA, drugs, arms, the
Contras and Iraq had all been endlessly displayed on TV with the Oliver North
hearings. There is no longer any excuse for believing that the government doesn't
operate secret policies. "In those days," the narrator of Vine land comments
sardonically about the sixties, "it was still unthinkable that any North American agency
would kill its own citizens and then lie about it" (248). The irony is that where
conspiracy theories might have been a critical mode of narrative for an emergent
counterculture in the sixties, by the time of Vineland so much has been exposed that
they are no longer necessary.
What makes it worse in Vineland is that power no longer feels the need to hide
itself, or work through secret agencies. The film archive of 24fps, for example, is
burned publicly in a suburban neighbourhood. Reagan's War on Drugs becomes
heavy-handed, with Brock's troops "terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up
and down dirt lanes in formation chanting 'War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!' strip-

48 Carl Oglesby. The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate (Kansas City:
Sheed Andrews and McMeel. 1976). p.IS.
- 115 -
searching folks in public [... ] acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they
had invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San
Francisco" (357). The action takes on cartoon proportions with the Campaign Against
Marijuana Production (CAMP), led by the neo-Nazi Count Kommandant Bopp, who
requisitions the whole of Vineland airport in an increasingly visible operation. It begins
to look like a national-emergency operation (co-ordinated with the invasion of
Nicaragua) is being prepared, but even these plans are not kept hidden: "copies of these
contingency plans had been circulating all summer, it wasn't much of a secret" (340).
As we have seen, many critics balked at the obviousness of the politics in
Vineland, but I would argue that obviousness has become an aesthetic response to a
situation in which the hidden agendas of politics are "not much of a secret." In essays
on Gravity's Rainbow and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, Brian McHale
develops an argument about what he terms "meta-paranoia. "49 Modernist texts invite
paranoid readings, he argues, because they encourage readers to discover secret
analogies between events, hidden significances, concealed allusions, and so on. After
"the New Critical institutionalization of Modernism," he continues, "paranoid reading
comes to be taken for granted, assumed to be the appropriate norm of reading." What is
the reader then to make of "postmodernist texts," McHale wonders, "which assume and
anticipate paranoid reading-habits on the part of their readers," with their representation
and thematisation of paranoid reading in the form of conspiracy theories? McHale
advocates the idea of meta-paranoia, which would involve "some form of paranoiacally
skeptical reading of those paranoid structures" which make up a book like Gravity's
Rainbow.
I would argue, however, that McHale's schematic analysis of postmodern
paranoia cannot address the logic of texts like Vineland, in which the very strategy of
"paranoid reading" is no longer available because what has previously been hidden has
now been made manifest. In Vineland there is an emptying out of paranoid allusions,
since its signs of pop culture only point to other signs and images, locked in their own
claustrophobic world of TV listings. This semiological dead-end produces a flattening
out-perhaps even a reversal-of surface and depth. In many ways there is not much
left for a critic like Frank Kermode to do, since the "interpretations" are all there on the
surface; in Vineland, mass-produced objects speak for themselves. In order to read for
the "unconscious" of Vineland, it now becomes necessary, I would suggest, to focus on
precisely the notions of obviousness, surface, and visibility. 50

49Brian McHale, "Modernist Reading, Postmodernist Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow," '''You
Used to Know What These Words Mean': Misreading Gravity's Rainbow," and "Ways of World-
Making: on Foucault's Pendulum," in Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.61-
86,87-114, and 165-187.
50 Some critics have discussed DeLillo in t?ese te~ms .. P~,t O'I?onnell, fo~ example, ~~plores the
disappearance of paranoia into obviousness In DeLillo, In Ob.vIOu~ ParJahnOlMa: TLhe pOhtlC~ o[.~~n
DeLillo's Running Dog," Centennial Revie·w, 34 (1990), 56-72. LikeWise, 0 n cure traces e I .0 s
rewriting of the romance genre in an age devoid of secret spaces, in "Postmodern Romance: Don DeLIllo
- 116 -
 So whereas The Crying of Lot 49 holds out the possibility of "another mode of
meaning behind the obvious," a form of secret, revelatory understanding which
promises, however mistakenly, to yield up the final truth about America, in Vineland
there is only the obvious. Lot 49 considers the possibility of a "transcendent meaning"
that will be found "behind the hieroglyphic streets" (125), a concern that manifests
itself in the repeated figurations of uncovering, revelation, and, as we saw in the extract
above, striptease. Even if the hope of a countercultural hidden "underground" of
outsiders connected by a secret tradition proves illusory, the novel itself nevertheless
manages to introduce a "ritual reluctance" into the mundane language of suburban
California; in "The Courier's Tragedy" when "things get really peculiar," a "gentle
chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words" (48). Lot 49 opens out the
glossy present of 1964 through its intertextual references to literature, art, science,
history, and science, into the endlessly-expanding labyrinth of the Borgesian library.51
Even if, as Oedipa worries, there is after all "only the earth" and not "another set of
possibilities" (125), the Californian landscape has been transformed and illuminated in
the course of the novel. But in Vineland it begins to seem that after all there might be
"only the earth." When Ralph Wayvone Sr., the San Franciscan mafia boss, stands
daydreaming in his coastal-view garden one foggy morning, "the fog now began to lift
to reveal not the borderlands of the eternal after all, but only quotidian California again,
looking no different than it had when he left" (94).
At times Vineland seems to hold out the hope of some hidden enclave in
Vineland County-"about the last refuge for pot growers in North California" (220)-
which would escape the legal and financial constraints of the outside world. The
hinterlands consist of "regions unmapped" (173), a fact which temporarily hinders the
otherwise inexorable clamp-down led by Kommandant Bopp's army. For the Yuroks,
the indigenous people of this land, Shade Creek had always signified "the realm behind
the immediate" (186). But this echo of the aspirations towards otherworldliness in Lot
49 is long since gone, as are the native Indians; the "invisible boundary" which
concealed "another intention" (317) has been dug up and paved over by cable TV
developers. There are-or soon will be-no spaces left for secrets, mysteries, or any
other form of resistance to the technorationalisation of "the spilled, the broken world"
(267) of the Californian landscape. Throughout Vineland there runs a sub-plot about
the disenchantment of California (and, as the title of the novel suggests, of the "legacy"
of America), an on-going tale of development, encroachment, yuppification and
commodification. So, for example, the former hard-core union enclave has vanished:
we learn about the transformation of a logger's bar into a New Age haven where

and the Age of Conspiracy," South Atlantic Quarterly, 89 (1990), 337-53.

51 Dugdale's Allusive Parables of Power provides probably the best account of Lot 49's intertexts.
Pynchon's first three novels of course contain many engagements with mass culture, but in Vineland
there are scarcely any references to anything else.
- 117 -
"dangerous men with coarsened attitudes [... J were perched around lightly on designer
barstools, sipping kiwi mimosas" (5).52 Even spiritual secrets have been turned into
commodities: the Buddhist mandalas of Gravity's Rainbow become translated into the
"pizza mandala" at the Bhodi Dharma Pizza Temple in downtown Vineland (45); the
life-long training in oriental techniques undergone by DL Chastain has been made
redundant by the fact that "today, of course, you can pick up a dedicated hand-held
Ninja Death Touch calculator in any drugstore" (141); and the Sister Attentive of the
Kunoichi retreat is more concerned with "cash flow" than spiritual matters (153). Not
only do sixties fashions like the miniskirt make a return, but the "big Nostalgia Wave"
(51) sweeps up the sixties themselves, turning the political ambitions of the decade into
nothing more than a fashion, "as revolution went blending into commerce" (308). In
the same way that spirituality and politics are doomed to transparency as commodities,
so too are the hidden recesses of Vineland's topography finally marked out for
development. We learn, for instance, about "valleys still in those days unknown except
to a few real-estate visionaries, little crossroads places where one day houses'd sprawl"
(37); we hear "an industrious roar that could as well have been another patch of
developer condos going up" (191), and the sound of birds battles against the "distant
wash of freeway sound, the concrete surf' (194). When Zoyd and Prairie first arrive in
"Vineland the Good" they find a world "not much different from what early visitors in
Spanish and Russian ships had seen," but "someday this would all be part of a Eureka-
Crescent City-Vineland metropolis" (317), because "developers in and out of state had
also discovered this shoreline" (319).
The hidden depths and concealed realms which might permit countercultural
fantasies of conspiracy and paranoia have thus all but disappeared in the world of
Vineland. Everything has become exposed, and it is in this light that we can make
sense of the re-surfacing of those characters like Frenesi and Flash who had gone
underground at the end of the sixties. When Frenesi hears of names being deleted from
the computer list of informers she hypothesises first that they have either died or been
made to disappear, but then she speculates that "'maybe they went the other way,
surfaced, went up in the world again'" (88). More frightening than the possibility that
various of their friends have vanished down into the repressive depths of the state
machine is the know ledge that they might have had the perversely comforting cloak of
surveillance removed, returning them to the total visibility of the "upper world" (90).
On this reading, then, the final failure of the sixties underground culture comes about
not through any of the conspiratorial fantasies of apocalypse which the counterculture
espoused, but because there is nowhere left to hide.

52 The filming of The Return of the Jedi in Vineland County was what changed the loggers bar, but
·es themselves have been overtaken by the process of yuppification found in the Noir Center movie-
~~~e shopping mall, which "runs to some pitch so desperate that Prairie at least had to hope the whole
process was reaching the end of its cycle" (326).
- 118 -
(iii) "Conspiracy Theory is Demode"

We have seen, then, how in Vine land paranoia becomes routinised and made
redundant, and how secrecy is turned inside out into obviousness. I'd now like to
explore what has happened more generally to the discourse of conspiracy-and the self-
aware debate on that discourse. Once again my aim is not to diagnose how or why
"Mr. Pynchon's paranoia has eased," but to locate Pynchon within a wider rethinking of
the political and aesthetic possibilities of paranoia as a cultural language.
We might begin by looking at one account of how "the pagan innocence and
idealism that was the sixties remains and continues to exert its fascination on today's
kids."53 Cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000, whose "scouts are out there sniffing the
breeze," argues that the true inheritors of the counterculture today are the "whole new
generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights" who are the pioneers of the cybernet.
The magazine could therefore report at the end of the eighties that "eco-fundamentalism
is out, conspiracy theory is demode, drugs are obsolete." Though a little heady on the
"new whiff of apocalypticism across the land," the editors nevertheless stake out the
new frontiers of countercultural politics for the nineties as a cyberterritory which will
not be plotted by conspiracy theories. Less prophetic, but probably more in tune with
the uneven development of cultural sensibilities, the Covert Culture Sourcebook
includes a section on conspiracy theory, listing books on topics as incommensurate as
the Lockerbie bombing and "The Secret History of the New World Order."54 Within
the catalogue as a whole, conspiracy is sandwiched between entries on The Body and
Death, each becoming merely one more style in this cornucopia of fringe culture. The
collection perhaps gestures towards the formation of a rainbow coalition of radical
America, in the belief (as its blurb puts it) that "everything interesting is out at the
edges. Sparks kick up when opposing edges meet. Sometimes hot edges fuse, creating
something wild and new ... That's covert culture." Yet, in its random sampling of "the
edges," it seems to substitute the content of each critical position for an aura of
alternativeness. The same process of homogenisation is at work in numerous
alternative bookstores in the States. In the Amok bookstore in Los Angeles, for
instance, The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History
finds its home on the shelves next to, say, magazines on body piercing, and scholarly
works on black politics.
In many ways, then, conspiracy has become not so much out-moded as out-
numbered. It now takes its place in a supermarket of New Age beliefs and practices,
ranging from artificial life to zine culture, each no less-but also no more-significant

53 Queen Mu and R.U. Sirius, editorial, Mondo 2000, 7 (Fall 1989), cited in Andrew Ross, Strange
Weather (London: Verso, 1991), p.163.
54 Richard Kadrey, Covert Culture Sourcebook 2.0: Further, Deeper, Stranger Explorations of Fringe
Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).
- 119 -
than its rival products. Thus in a periodical published from Santa Rosa in the eighties
called Critique: A Journal of Conspiracy and Metaphysics, the list of contents for issue
number 25 included: "Holistic medicine and the Islamic Worldview; Drugs and Profit
in the Third World; Eating Culture; Food as Junk Commodity; Sufi Healing in a
Mystical Community; Medicine and Metaphysics; Notes on the Dervishes; Some
Journalistic Hoaxes; Michael Ledeen and the Iran-Contra Scandal; Money Subversion
is No Accident; Nuclear Fallout and Cancer; The Coming Ice Age; Secret Societies in
the Life of Karl Marx; A Metaphysical Approach to Understanding Relationships;
Ramtha; Channeling and Deception; and Dealing with the Mystics." The only thing
these articles have in common is that, in some fashion or other, they question consensus
reality-in the words of the journal's motto, taken from Noam Chomsky. The
possibility of critique, however, seems to diminish in proportion to the proliferation of
nonconformist cultures. Paranoia as a form of cultural resistance has condemned itself
into obsolescence by the very profusion of conspiracy theories. In an ironic twist on
Mondo 2000's proclamation of the replacement of the culture of paranoia by the
exploration of cyberspace, perhaps the true home of conspiracy theories is now the
Internet, with half a dozen newsgroups and e-zines dedicated to conspiratorial
matters-not to mention the hacking activities which "freed" some of the information
from security service computers in the first place. Alongside established genres like the
Kennedy assassination and the Illuminati, unmoderated newsgroups like alt.conspiracy
receive several hundred postings a day, with contributions ranging from the latest
speculation about the "double blast" in the Oklahoma bombing, to indiscriminate rants
about a world take-over by the Trilateral Commission. The sheer volume and
incommensurability of the articles resembles the process of commodification running
through Vineland, such that every aspect of history and society will sooner or later be
turned into a conspiracy theory. This countercultural language looses its force at the
moment when it becomes Ubiquitous.
Pynchon's Vineland can thus be seen to participate in a wider discussion by the
Left of the paradox that conspiracy theory failed precisely because it became too
successful. In his essay, "Cognitive Mapping," which functions partly as a postscript to
the 1984 article on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson roundly condemns conspiracy
theory and its fictional enactments. "Conspiracy," writes Jameson, "is the poor
person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total
logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is
marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content."55 Two important arguments are
contained in Jameson's seemingly off-the-cuff remarks. The first is that in calling
conspiracy fictions the "poor person's cognitive mapping," he points towards the
popular appeal of an aesthetic form which seemed to hold out radical promise. Yet the

55 Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson
and Lawrence Grossberg, eds (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p.355.
- 120-
phrase demonstrates the kind of elitist distrust of popular theorising present in feminist
writings, such that conspiracy theory becomes the mark of difference between the
popular and the academic. Pynchon's first three novels, I have suggested, yield a
similarly complicitous critique of popular thrillers and detective fiction as both enticing
in their promise to get at What Is Really Going On, and distracting in their ability to
mask the obvious behind a veil of seemingly important details.
The second component of Jameson's comment is that conspiracy theories are
"degraded" forms of analysis not so much because they ignore the political and
economic story, but because they obsessively focus on it, saturating the "theme and
content" of contemporary culture with the paranoid style. Furthermore, as Pat
O'Donnell argues in an article on the "culture of paranoia" in Norman Mailer, Joseph
McElroy, Diane Johnson, Don DeLillo and Lot 49, Pynchon's novel "can be said to
foster paranoia, as well as to fabulate it." As much as paranoia functions as a resistance
to the dominant culture, it also ends up "comply[ing] with its advancement."56 The
effect of this self-replicating overload of paranoia in both fiction and theory, Jameson
suggests, is to convince readers of their powerlessness:

What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly
total system or logic-the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious
example-the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the
theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and
terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical
capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation
and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are
increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in face of the model itself. 57

Jameson's complaint is thus not so much about the actual content of paranoid
depictions of panoptical society, as their tendency to undermine the desire for action.
His argument takes place within a movement over the last decade which has sought (as
the title of a book by Baudrillard puts it) to "forget Foucault," or at least the way
58
Foucault had been read as a theoretician of panoptic surveillance systems. Andrew
Ross (like Jameson, a member of the Social Text collective) spells out clearly the
argument that an excessively conspiratorial mapping of the postmodern surveillance
state ends up leaving people resigned to their fate:

56 O'Donnell, "Engendering Paranoia," pp.192-93. I agree on the whole with O'~onnell's c~nclusi?n,
but would argue instead that pynchon takes the idea of paranoia furthering TheIr ends as hiS starting
point.
57 Jameson, "Postmodernism," p.86.
58 See for example Frank Lentricchia's analysis of Foucault in Ariel and the Police (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1988), and "In Place of an Afterword: Someone Reading," in Critical Terms for
't Study Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds (Chicago and London: Chicago
L I erary , h· . d··d 1° b
. slOty press 1990) pp.321-38: "for Foucault undisciplined and anarc IC In IVI ua Ity may e
U mver , , ° dO °d r bO f °ts
precisely the unintended effect of a system. wh~ch w~ul~ p~oduc; In IVI l~a Idt y ab~ an ? J~ct 0 tlh
knowledge and power, but which instead, and lromcally, inSIde ItS sale, norma Ize s~ Ject, instigates °e
move to the underground where a deviant selfhood may nurture sullen schemes of resistance to a world In
which paranoia is reason, not madnesso"
- 121 -
 What I have been describing are some of the features of that critical left
position-. sometimes referred to as the "paranoid" position-on
Infor~at1.on .technology which imagines or constructs a totalizing,
monolIthI.C pIcture of syst~matic domination. Whilst this story is often
charactefl~ed a~ a .conspIracy theory, its targets-technorationality,
bur~aucrat1c capItalIsm-are usually too abstract to fit the picture of a
socIal order planned and shaped by a small, conspiring group of
centralized power elites. 59

Ross is dubious about conspiracy always being the best story to tell, for it recreates
precisely the mentality and conditions that it is warning us against. He too advocates
what amounts to a strategic non-deployment of conspiracy metaphors in order to write
oneself out of the victim's slot. "The critical habit of finding unrelieved domination
everywhere," Ross continues, "has certain consequences, one of which is to create a
siege mentality, reinforcing the inertia, helplessness and despair that such critiques set
out to oppose in the first place." On this view, then, the effect of paranoia is to promote
the very social conditions which make people paranoid in the first place.
The argument turns paradoxical-and here we return to the territory of
Vineland-in those characterisations of postmodernity which confirm that everything
really was connected after all. Ross, for instance, talks about the vast connections of
vested interests in what he terms the "media-military-industrial complex." The irony is
that although these links exist, none of it was planned by a conspiracy, and there is no
one in control. Terry Eagleton, for example, observes that postmodernism is just a sick
joke at the expense of modernism. "Reification," he argues "once it has extended its
empire across the whole of social reality, effaces the very criteria by which it can be
recognized for what it is and so triumphantly abolishes itself, returning everything to
normality."60 In effect, "postmodernism persuades us to relinquish our epistemological
paranoia," because it becomes unnecessary when the distinction between figure and
ground, original and copy, or secrecy and visibility has been erased. 61 In a similar
vein, Jameson theorises "late or multinational or consumer capitalism" as "the purest
form of capitalism yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto
uncommodified areas." This "purer capitalism of our own time," he continues, "thus
eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated."62
Jameson goes on to argue that the final saturation of the commodity logic has
penetrated the last sites of modernist resistance located in Nature, the Unconscious, and
the Third World. As we saw with Vineland, paranoia paradoxically becomes redundant
when everything finally is connected, tied up into the global capitalist market, when
everything-even secrecy, be it of information or landscape-becomes available and

59 Ross, Strange Weather, p.96.

60 Terry Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism," in Against the Grain (London: Verso,
1986), p.132.
61 Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism," p.144.
62 Jameson, "Postmodernism," p.76.
- 122-
 visible as a commodity.
If Hofstadter and the articles in Esquire and Harper's constitute the discursive
terrain which Pynchon's first three novels map out and are themselves located within,
then it might be claimed that, along with the alternative culture proliferation of
conspiracy theories considered above, the work of Jean Baudrillard provides a
theoretical and rhetorical analogue to Vine land. Baudrillard' s account of the
hyperreality of, say, presidential assassinations (which I discussed in Chapter 1)
suggests that the paranoid logic of conspiracy theories has become redundant. He
claims that the total saturation of the commodity-as-sign empties it of any depth of
meaning; the result is that "we no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in
the ecstasy of communication." This ecstasy, Baudrillard argues, is:

no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that
of the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-than-visible; it is the
obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely
soluble in information and communication. 63

Baudrillard traces this historical shift from secrecy to visibility through pathological
metaphors. He declares that hysteria and paranoia have been replaced by
schizophrenia, a characterisation of postmodernity which Jameson and Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari have also expounded in their own ways.64 "Projective paranoia" as
"the pathology of organisation" has turned into schizophrenia as "an immanent
promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication
networks." Pynchon's latest novel shares similarities with Baudrillard's account of the
transformation of paranoia into the ultra-visibility of schizophrenic culture, but it gives
far more context and detail than the apocalyptic abstraction of the latter's analysis.
Vineland also plots a more uneven tale of development, in which the language of
paranoia coincides and impinges upon the newer condition of schizophrenia.

63 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard & Caroline Schutze (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1988), p.22.
64 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. R, Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984). Jameson writes that "I have
found Lacan' s account of schizophrenia useful ... as description rather than diagnosis ... I am obviously
very far from thinking that any of the most significant ~ostmodernist artists ... are s~hizophre~ics in a~y
clinical sense" ("Postmodernism," p. 71). His exploratIon of the postmodern aesthetiCS of schizophrenIa
sits uneasily with his analysis of the "omnipresence of the theme of paranoia" in the same essay. I thi.nk
we can make more sense of this apparent contradiction (without having to latch onto some compromise
formulation like "paranoid schizophrenia") if we return to the temporal anomaly I discussed in n.8 above.
The novelists Jameson discusses could be seen as representatives of an earlier attempt to make sense of
the hyper-production of information in global capitalism, before a schizophrenic relinquishing of
epistemological control becam~ ~ r,nore appropriat~ cultural respo~se. It must a~so be noted that several
recent articles have tried to cntIclse postmodermsm as a paranOId hermeneutIc, but I have been less
convinced by their rather abstr~ct, philosophi~a~, arg~m7nts than. by Jam.eson's .more historically
rounded analysis. "Postmodermty and ParanOIa, Edltonal, Amencan Phtlosophlcal Quarterly, 27
~1990), 89-90; William Bywater, "The P~anoia of ~~stmodernism," Philosophy .and Literatu~e, 14.
(1990), 79-84; Linda Fisher, "H~rmeneutlcs of SuspIcion and Postmodern ParanOIa: PsychologIes 01
Interpretation," Philosophy and Literature, 16 (1992), 106-114.

- 123 -
 (iv) The Whole World Is Watching

In tracing the development of the culture of paranoia through Pynchon' s four

novels, we have seen how in the nineties it is transformed (in Jameson's term) into an
empty pastiche of its sixties potential. In this final section I want to explore the
treatment of television in Vineland, because it both continues and disrupts this line of
reading. The novel produces such a concerted portrait of the dominance of television
that, in a final irony, it ends up producing a conspiracy theory of TV as the cause of
conspiracy theory's demise.
A brief account of Vineland's engagement with television might highlight some
of the following features in a novel, as Frank Kermode complained, saturated with pop
65
culture. Most of the major characters are shown sitting in front of the TV, as if this
were the one activity they all have in common; Ortho Bob, one of the Thanatoids,
Vineland's ultimate zombified couch-potatoes, jokes that '''there'll never be a
Thanatoid sitcom [... ] 'cause all they could show'd be scenes of Thanatoids watchin'
the Tube'" (171). The dialogues and the interior monologues of nearly all the
characters are shot through with references to all kinds of commodity culture, but the
most important of these-as the novel insistently capitalizes it-is the Tube. The
inhabitants of Vineland choose their comparisons from the world they live in, namely
the endlessly mediated environment of television. 66 Not only are the voices of
characters saturated with TV talk, but the narrator also turns to the Tube for comparison
and elucidation. 67 The action of Vineland takes place in a short-circuit television world,
in which the gap between "real" life-itself already a simulation-and its TV
adaptation is increasingly diminished. 68 The New Age homeopathic motto of the
National Endowment for Video Re-education is, fittingly, "Transcendence through

65For a more exhaustive account of television in Vineland see Brian McHale, "Zapping, the Art of
Switching Channels: On Vineland," in Constructing Postmodernism, pp.115-41, and 10han Callens,
"Tubed Out and Movie Shot in Pynchon's Vineland," Pynchon Notes, 28-29 (1991), 115-41.
66 For example, Zoyd describes his "inner feelings" to Frenesi during their tense meeting in Hawaii,
saying that he '''feel[s] like Mildred Pierce's husband, Bert'" (57); "'You think I'm one of these kids on
Phil Donahue," Prairie complains to DL (103); Vato and Blood the towtruck duo argue whether.the story
of DL and Takeshi will turn out to be a sitcom or a "Movie of the Week where the dude has an Incurable
disease" (179); Roscoe, Brock's sidekick, likewise declares after a particularly hair-raising mission that it
"'feel[s] like we been in a Movie of the Week!'" (271).
67 A list of examples might include the following: the relationship between Zoyd and Hector is
characterised as "a romance over the years at least as persistent as Sylvester and Tweety's" (22); each
year at marijuana harvest-time the Vineland County s?eriff, Wi1,~is Chunko (an "old media hand"), sh.ows
up "as sure a precursor of the se.ason as the l~rry LeWIS .telethon (220-21); ~nd when DL and ~a~eshl a~e
using the Puncutron machine-!n a wh?le epIsode tha.t Itself ~esembles nothIng. s,~ much as a nInja movie
anyway-they "lie hooked up SIde by SIde lIke actors In a braIn-transplant mOVIe (165).
68 Here we might point to the TV movie of the previous year's NBA play-offs (371); the case of ~il1ru:d
Hobbs who started out as an actor doing commercials for a lawn company and ended up becommg hiS
character, the Marquis de Sod; the "primal Tubefreek mir~cle" of Frenesi's ~antasy highway ~atrolman
materialising just as she settles down to masturbat,e .In ~ront of. a .CHIPS rerun; Zoyd s a~n.u~1
t t estration that is staged for TV; and the narrator s Iromc questIonmg of the Tubal Detox clImc s
~:~::e of success-"What kind of 'outside world' could they be rehabilitating him for?" (336).
- 124 -
Saturation" (335).
In addition to this aesthetic of saturation, Vineland contains a more direct-that
is to say, more obvious-attack on the Tube. The novel develops two interrelated
versions of a dystopian argument against popular culture. The first is summed up by
the Tubal Detox clinic's house hymn, every bit as comically forthright as the Yoyodyne
glee in Lot 49 and the paranoia show-tune in Gravity's Rainbow:

Oh ... the ... Tube!

It's poi-soning your brain!
Oh, yes ... .It's dri-ving you, insane!
It's shoot-ing rays, at you,
Over ev'ry-thing ya do,
It sees you in your bedroom,
And-on th' toi-Iet too! (336)

As much as it is a medium for entertainment, the Tube is also a sinister instrument of

panoptical surveillance that "sees you in your bedroom." This paranoid vision of the
TV of course owes a lot to Orwell's 1984, an intertext never too far away in a novel
whose present action takes place in that much-discussed year. 69 Hector is watching TV
late one night, when-fittingly-right in the middle of The G. Gordon Liddy Story he
"saw the screen go blank, bright and prickly, and then heard voices hard, flat, echoing"
(339). With what begins to look like a test run for the declaration of martial law,
Hector feels that it is "as if the Tube were suddenly to stop showing pictures and
instead announce, 'From now on, I'm watching you'" (340).
On the other hand, television is also figured as a less direct means of control,
forming at best an addiction, and at worse a freely chosen poison. And here the
obvious model is Huxley's Brave New World, which imagines a world in which the
clumsy mechanisms of oppression have been replaced by the carefully manipulated
power of mass entertainment. The final irony of the government's counterintelligence
programme to break-up the counterculture comes in Vineland with the announcement
that Brock Vond's Political Re-education Program [PREP] camps have been defunded
because, as Hector explains, "they did a study, found out since about '81 kids were
comin in all on their own askin about careers" (347). TV takes its place-albeit a
supremely important one-in a whole armoury of stultifying activities: "sooner or later
Holy tail was due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the
old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory-reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless,
defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance of drug-free Americans all pulling their
weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family
specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good
behavior, maybe a cookie" (221-22).

69The dystopian aspect of Vineland is discussed at length by M. Keith Booker... Vineland and Dystopian
Fiction," pynchon Notes, 30-31 (1992), 5-38.
- 125 -
 This dystopian view of the power of television to dupe its passive viewers into
conformity resembles nothing so much as a return to the attack on mass culture
mounted by fifties intellectuals such as Clement Greenberg, Dwight MacDonald and C.
Wright Mills, writing in magazines like Partisan Review and Dissent. As we saw in
Chapter 2, in their view mass culture was to be distinguished from older and more
authentic forms of folk culture, in that it was a vehicle for top-down domination by the
"lords of kitsch" who could manipulate the masses into automatic consumption. This
position in effect amounted to a conspiracy theory of mass culture, which expressed
concerns about America heading towards a Stalinised version of totalitarianism, in
which the people were easily shaped into political conformity. In Vineland this debate
is still alive for the older generation at the Traverse-Becker get-together: "other
grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States
still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied
years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes
all showing the same bright-colored shadows" (371). Whether 1984 turned out to be
only a dress rehearsal, or whether the struggle has been lost years ago, the conspiracy of
television is still being taken seriously, both by those old enough to remember the
world without it, and by the novel as a whole. Vineland represents a strange
temporality, then, in which conspiracy theories of mass culture are given an airing in a
novel which at the same time presents a world in which the language of conspiracy no
longer makes any sense-not least because the depth of paranoia has been flattened out
by the saturation of images pumped out by the Tube. It is almost as if one last
conspiracy theory-out-moded, nostalgic, ironic-is necessary to account for the
demise of the cultural possibilities of paranoia.
Vineland returns to the conspiracy theory of mass culture, I believe, because it is
concerned to test out some of the competing popular explanations for the failure of the
sixties revolution. Three candidates are offered: the first is the story of government
infiltration; the second is represented by Brock Vond's "genius" insight that there were
"in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for
it" (269); and the third involves television as a mammoth distraction. As Prairie's
boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four explains to an uncomprehending Zoyd:

"Whole problem 'th you folks's gener~tion, .nothing personal,.i s you

believed in your Revolution, put your lIves nght ou~ there for It-but
you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. MInute the Tube got
hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative A~erica, el dea~o
meato, just like th'lndians, sold it a~! to your real enemIes, and even III
1970 dollars-it was way too cheap. (373)

Isaiah's analysis highlights the many characterisations of television in Vineland as a

"distraction," admittedly only one of many, but nevertheless the most ubiquitous and
. 'dI'OUS . In a conversation between Mucho Maas (a survivor from Lot 49) and Zoyd
Inst
on his way up to Vineland at the end of the sixties, the record company impresario

- 126-
speculates on how the State will nullify the radical acid visions of the counterculture.
'''They just let us forget,' " Mucho argues, "'give us too much to process, fill up every
minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for'" (314). Although the narrator ends
the conversation with the disclaimer that "it was the way people used to talk," the
argument is still very much alive in Vineland.
In Vineland the success of television becomes the ultimate revenge on
countercultural hopes. Until the College of the Surf debacle, the 24 fps collective
maintained a wide-eyed faith in the power of film as a countercultural weapon. Their
belief reflects a common opinion of the time that to expose the actions of state to
viewers would be sufficient to precipitate, if not its collapse, then certainly the demise
of those practices. In the counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies, Vietnam
became the focus for these aspirations. Former SDS [Students for a Democratic
Society] leader, Tod Gitlin, tells the story of the "ideological domestication" of the
peace protests by the nightly news coverage in his 1980 book, The Whole World Is
Watching, the chant of the SDS when in front of the cameras. 70 The phrase speaks of an
appropriation and reversal of the paranoid fear of surveillance (They have Us in their
panoptical gaze), into a possible weapon of the counterculture (We are monitoring
Their activities). What we find in Vineland is that, contrary to Gil Scott Heron's
seventies anthem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the sixties revolution was
indeed televised, turned into a six-part mini-series, and repeated every year-or perhaps
it was done as a TVM with Hector's "zippy working title, 'Drugs-Sacrament of the
Sixties, Evil of the Eighties'" (342).71 Vineland's frequent representations of people
watching the television ironically suggest that the whole world was indeed watching-
glued to the Tube-and that was the downfall of the sixties protests.
The dystopian, conspiratorial account of mass culture is, however, only one line
of representation in Vineland, albeit, like the Tube itself in the novel, a very visible and
intrusive one. As much as Vineland presents an attack on the "mindless pleasures" of
mass culture, it also betrays an enormous affection for them. It is rumoured that
Pynchon had assistance from friends for the arcane research in his first three novels.
But with Vineland one can feel fairly certain that Pynchon did all the research himself,
sprawled out in front of the Tube on countless late nights. One solution to the riddle of
what Pynchon has been doing during all those years of silence-surely he cannot have
spent 20 years working on Vineland?-is perhaps prefigured towards the end of
Gravity's Rainbow. The reading of Tyrone Slothrop's tarot cards "point openly to a
long and scuffling future," which is enough "to send you to the tube to watch a seventh

70 Tod Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
71 Several critics have pointed out how Vineland establishes a dichotomy between the revolutionary
ower of film, and the mind-numbing trap of television. See, for example, McHale, "The Ar~ of
~apping,,, Callens, "Tubed Out and Movie Shot," and David Thoreen, "The Economy of ConsumptIOn:
The Entropy of Leisure in Pynchon's Vineland," Pynchon Notes, 30-31 (1992), 53-62 (Thoreen also
makes reference to the ironic reversal of Gil Scott Heron's claim).
- 127 -
rerun of the Takeshi and Ichizo Show, light a cigarette and try to forget the whole
thing" (GR, 738). Zoyd's dream of "carrier pigeons ... landing and taking off again
one by one" (3) at the start of Vineland suggests that repeats of those lovable kamikaze
pilots' TV show have been showing ever since-Takeshi in fact becomes one of the
main characters in Vineland. As Frank Kermode laments, there is no short cut to
gaining an encyclopaedic familiarity with pop culture. Dr Deeply of NEVER describes
Hector's case to Zoyd as "'one of the most intractable cases any of us has seen [... ]
Known in our field as the Brady Buncher, after his deep although not exclusive
attachment to that series'" (33). When Zoyd in reply begins to remember "'01' Marcia"
with a little too much alacrity, Deeply gives him a piercing look and suggests that Zoyd
should give the detox clinic a call himself. As with Zoyd, the suspicion lingers that
Pynchon knows just too much about TV for comfort. As much as Vineland constitutes
a diagnosis of TV culture, then, it might also be another symptom of its 10gic. 72
Like the "guerilla elements" which add an extra letter S to Sid and Ernie's
sky written banner proclaiming a "Drug Free America," thereby "changing the message
some" (342), Vineland retains an unrepentant exuberance in the depiction of all those
"mindless pleasures" which the novel simultaneously calls into question-thereby
changing the novel some. Apart from the usual triumvirate of sex, drugs and
rock'n'roll, Vineland revels in the vocabulary and paraphernalia of fast food, fast cars,
fast-forward culture, and so on. As much as popular culture is characterised as the
State's means of pacification of its people, it also is figured as a site of something
resembling resistance, precisely because its exuberant mindlessness goes against the
grain of the Reagonomic culture of constraint and utility. In Mucho Maas's end-of-the-
sixties analysis of things to come (angled to be all the more credible because he predicts
that one day Reagan will be President), he claims that "soon they're gonna be coming
after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it,
anything that could remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all
that" (313). His response is to pre-empt that clamp-down by "renounc[ing] everything
now." Vineland, by contrast, written in a time when no conspiratorial "they" is
necessary in a culture of self-policing through diet and health obsessions, plays up the
possibilities of "mindless pleasures" as a defence against the encroachment of a "zero
tolerance" America.
In conclusion, then, I want to suggest that Vineland constructs a picture of its
author as both a fan and a critic of mindless pleasures, as someone who still wants to
tell conspiracy theories at a time when they no longer make any sense. In this way
Vineland takes its place alongside other replottings of the sixties by "survivors" of the

72 Since completing this chapter I have watched The Brady Bunch Movie (1995). With its near pe~ect
nistic recreation of the TV family in present-day America, the film manifests an obseSSIve
anac h r O·a S:or the suburban innocence of the sixties (I.e.
. before th"
e turmOl·1" 0 f th IS
e strugg es:Jor racla
. I an d
nos ta Igl JI f . . h d
sexual equality). The popularity of. th~ fi~m suggests that a large part 0 American socIety as a eep
attachment to that series and all that It SIgnifies.
- 128-
decade and its aftermath. Indeed, the project of cultural studies, which itself emerged in
the sixties and is now undergoing a process of plotting its own history, has attempted to
do justice to being both a fan and a critic. 73 We have seen in this chapter how Theodore
Roszak's novel, Flicker, reads as an affectionate homage to the movie culture the
author is obviously extremely familiar with, while also producing a conspiracy theory
about the insidious effects of entertainment technology. A similar mini-narrative could
be told about Tod Gitlin, whose first book tells a story of media co-optation, but whose
subsequent book, Inside Prime Time, struggles to avoid conspiracy theories about the
manipulation of audiences by programme controllers for advertising markets. On the
whole the book presents a picture of audiences as "sophisticated enough to recognize
that media images are stereotypes"; but Gitlin also argues that television is an
extremely potent source of ideology, which is "nothing more or less than a set of
assumptions that becomes second nature; even rebels have to deal with it."74 Former
sixties "rebels" have been dealing with it, and Pynchon's strategy in Vineland is to
resurrect a conspiracy theory of mass culture alongside an obituary of the cultural logic
of paranoia.

73 On bein both a fan and a critic, see Constance Penley, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and t~e Study of
gl ,,' C ltural Studies Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds
Popular Cu ture, In u , I I d'
1992) 479-500 The volume also contains many examples of cu tura stu les
(London: Routl~ ge,.
d ' pp.. .
turning its attention to Its own history.
74 Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp.249, 333.
- 129 -
 CHAPTER 4

BODY PANIC:
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS AND THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA

- 130-
So far in this study I have used the term "paranoia" to designate no more than a
widespread interest in conspiracy theories in and of 1960s American culture. As we
saw in the previous chapter, many other commentators have likewise bracketed off any
psychological content to the concept of paranoia. Richard Hofstadter, for example,
announces that in using the expression "paranoid style," he is not "speaking in a clinical
sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes."1 Although Hofstadter makes it
plain that his interest is more in a political style than a clinical pathology, his analysis
does occasionally gesture towards psychosexual factors. In particular he calls attention
to how "the sexual freedom often attributed to [the enemy], his lack of moral inhibition,
his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, gives
exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and freely express
unacceptable aspects of their own minds."2 Hofstadter goes on to suggest that in the
paranoid style repressed sadomasochistic imaginings of illicit sex are projected onto the
bodies of the demonised but desired enemy. This chapter will explore in more detail
Hofstadter's hints towards a psychology of conspiracy which is worked out through
fears and fantasies about the body.
In particular it will concentrate on the work of William S. Burroughs, a writer
who, along with Pynchon, has been described as one of "our most complex literary
paranoid spokesmen."3 Burroughs' novels develop a highly idiosyncratic and lurid
mythography of paranoid fantasies which tap into feelings of disgust and desire about
the body. My aim, however, is not so much to diagnose him as an extreme and even
psychotic proponent of the paranoid style, as to locate his writings within postwar
discourses of homosexuality, drug addiction and disease. My readings therefore
strategically play down the disturbing bizarreness of Burroughs' highly individual
imagery and plots, in order to draw attention to the way they cohere with and comment
upon contemporary debates about the social control of the body's pleasures, functions
and failures.
The first half of this chapter begins by discussing how Burroughs' writings of
the 1960s empty out the psychoanalytical notion of paranoia as a private delusional
system into a materialist analysis of institutional structures of persecution and control.
Not only do Burroughs' novels portray these forces of domination working on the body,
I argue, they also characterise the body itself as a conspiratorial threat to the self. In
effect these novels rework the notion of paranoia as an externalisation of private fears
by highlighting the internalisation-and even the literal incorporation-of public
surveillance. I then go on to explore how Burroughs produces a further twist to the

IRichard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in The Paranoid Style in American
Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967), p.3.
2 Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style," p.34.
3 John Kuehl, Alternate Worlds: A Study of Postmodem Antirealistic American Fiction (New York: New

York University Press). p.232.

- 131 -
logic of paranoia, with his carnivalesque scenes of junkies and queers (in the titles of
two of this novels), which function as satirically exaggerated materialisations of
American society's worst fears. 4
The second half of this chapter considers the possibilities and pitfalls of reading
Burroughs in the light of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and conversely, of reading his
novels as a map of the contemporary culture of body panic. On the one hand, the
epidemic has brought about a deeply disturbing literalisation of the latter's fantastical
scenarios of corporeal paranoia. On the other hand, his novels uncannily anticipate and
prescript some of the scenarios of bodily infiltration, drug addiction, viral epidemic and
sexual paranoia in which the HIVI AIDS epidemic has been written. In short,
Burroughs' grotesque mythography has come to look less fantastic over the last decade.
Reading Burroughs in the 1980s and '90s is problematic, I therefore want to suggest,
because his novels construct entirely literal conspiracy theories about viral epidemics,
at the same time as they anatomise the conspiratorial metaphors and narrative logic in
which viruses are inscripted. In this section I read elements of Burroughs' novels
together with selections from the already copious literature on the HIVI AIDS epidemic.
This strategically "literal-minded" and loaded re-reading has two purposes. The first is
to make Burroughs' conspiratorial variations more intelligible, by connecting their
imagery and plotting to current debates about identity, sexuality and body boundaries.
The second aim is to investigate how the latter's extreme dramatisations of paranoia can
perversely come to function as guides to remapping the individual and the social body
in the age of AIDS.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSPIRACY

The term "paranoia" dates back to Hippocratic times, though originally it

conveyed only a non-specific sense of insanity, literally meaning "beyond reason."5
Notions of chronic suspiciousness and excessive religiosity occur in various classical
writers, but it was only in the eighteenth century, in the work of writers such as Kant,
that the concept began to crystallise into what we might now recognise as paranoia.
The late Victorian proto-psychoanalyst Emil Kraepelin is generally credited with being
the first to define the constellation of attributes which constitute the clinical
understanding of paranoia as an illness.
Freud offered the first complete psychoanalytical analysis of the mechanisms of
paranoia. He developed his theory through a reading of Memorabilia of a Nerve

4 Burroughs, Junky (1953; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977), and Queer (l985: London: Picador, 1986).
5The origins of the term are traced in D. Swanson, P. Bohnert and J. Smith, The Paranoid (Boston:
. 1 B & Co 1970) and W Meissner The Paranoid Process (New York: Jason Aaronson.
Lltt e. rown ., , . ,
1978).
- 132 -
Patient by Daniel Paul Schreber, published in 1903. Schreber was a high-ranking judge
who became convinced first that his physician was plotting to tum him into a woman in
order to sexually abuse him, and then that God had specially chosen him to be the
unique redeemer of the human race through a process of sexual transformation which
involved God's rays beaming into the judge's anus. With Schreber's descriptions of his
pleasure in defecation and his habit of "standing before the mirror or elsewhere, with
the upper portion of my body bared, and wearing sundry feminine adornments," it
comes as no surprise that Freud posits sexual repression as the cause of the
Senatspdisident's illness. 6 He goes on to put forward the hypothesis that the various
manifestations of paranoia-delusions of persecution, erotomania, jealousy, and
apocalyptic nightmares-result from unconscious transformations of the basic, but
untenable, proposition that "I (a man) love him (a man)."7 On this view, paranoia is
based therefore on a repressed (male) homosexuality, in which the forbidden love for a
fellow man exceeding the bounds of companionship becomes inverted into hatred, and
projected onto the surrounding community. 8 In other words, the paranoiac's
construction of reality is delusional, driven out of kilter by the unconscious frustrations
of homosexual desire. 9
For Burroughs, however, paranoia is less a manifestation of repressed fantasies,
than an accurate and necessary cognitive stance in contemporary society. "The
paranoid," Burroughs once observed, "is the person in possession of all the facts."lo
The "facts" he has in mind are those about the operations of power by elite and
governmental forces, culled from his reading of newspapers, magazines and National
Enquirer-style conspiracy revelations. For example, Burroughs had been accused for
many years of paranoia in his insistence that the magazine Encounter was subsidised by
the CIA~ when it was finally revealed that it had been, Burroughs felt vindicated on the
principle that, in J.G. Ballard's version of the apocryphal saying, "the psychotic is
someone who really knows what's really going on."11 In an essay on "Freud and the

6 Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Cas~ of Paranoia

(Schreber)," Case Histories II, Penguin Freud Library, 15 vols (Harmondsworth: PenguIn, 1985), IX,
p.15l.
7 Freud, "Schreber," p.200.
8 Naomi Schor discusses the gender implications of Freud's theory in "Female Paranoia: The Case for
Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism," Yale French Studies, 62 (1981), 204-219.
9 It must be noted, however, that Freud himself demonstrates moments of un~ertainty ~ to the verac.ity o~
paranoid delusions. Noting the pru:allels bet~e~n details of ~chreber' s delUSIons and hI~ own theones of
libidinal cathexes, Freud (paranOlacally?) InSIStS that he can. nevertheless call a fnen? and f~llow­
specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of ~aranola .before I became acquaInted ~lth the
's book" Freud concludes the case hIstory WIth a moment of doubt, declarIng that,
conten ts f Sohreber
c· . . . d l"k
"It remains for the future to decide whether there IS more. delUSIOn In my theory than I shoul 1 e to
admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delUSIOn than other people are as yet prepared to
believe" ("Schreber," p.218).
10 Quoted in Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (London: Calder & Boyars, 1977),

p.159.
II J.G. Ballard, endorsement on the back cover of Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (1983; London:

- 133 -
 Unconscious," Burroughs follows up on this insistence on a material explanation for
what might be taken as a manifestation of paranoia. If a paranoiac hears voices, he
argues, it is because those voices have been deliberately planted:

N?~ the psychiatrists tell us that any voices anyone hears in his head
ongInate there, aJ?-d ~hey do not and cannot have an extraneous origin.
T~e whole psychIatnc dogma that voices are the imaginings of a sick
mInd has been called into question by voices which are of extraneous
origin ~nd a~e objectively and demonstrably there on tape. So the
psyc~Ot1C patIents may be tuning in to a global and intergalactic network
of VOIces, some using quite sophisticated electronic equipment. 12

For Burroughs, presidential assassins like Sirhan Sirhan are not isolated lunatics
suffering from the personal pathology of paranoia (which was the view held by the
psychiatric textbook that I discussed in Chapter 1 above). Instead he speculates that the
CIA has the ability to plant suggestive voices in a potential assassin's head (AM, 94-95,
117). In a similar fashion, a review of one of Burroughs' novels made the accusation
that "Mr. Burroughs for all his worldliness seems to succumb to the 'secret forces at
work' syndrome that characterizes so much countercultural thinking." Burroughs
refused to accept the charge that he suffers from a "syndrome," replying curtly that "the
Watergate scandals would seem to indicate that forces which for good reason would
prefer to remain secret are indeed at work" (AM, 194). Whereas Freud argues that
paranoia operates by a projection of internal desires onto the external world, Burroughs
is determined to show how those forces are "really" out there.
In his novels of the sixties Burroughs develops his position that the paranoid is
in possession of all the facts. Although Naked Lunch and the novels of the Nova trilogy
(The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) fragment the linear
coherence of plot, underpinning these novels there is a cosmic conspiracy that has been
in place from pre-historic times, and continues to structure society into the science-
fiction future. 13 In the fictional landscape of Interzone (first outlined in Naked Lunch
and elaborated in subsequent novels), it is the task of the Factualists (and later the
benign Nova Police) to expose what is really going on in the "naked lunch" of power
politics. Ascertaining the "facts" is never an easy matter, however, since the Nova
conspiracy is in control of producing what is taken as normality in its Reality Studios.

Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1993). For the details of the Encounter episode, see the biography by Ted
Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1988; London: The Bodley
Head, 1991), p.450.
12 Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (1986; New York: Arcade, 1993), p.59. Further
references will be abbreviated to AM, and included in parentheses in the text.
13 Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959; London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1993), The Soft Machine (1961;
New York: Grove, 1993), The Ticket That Exploded (1962; London: John Calder, 1985), and Nova
Express (1964; New York: Grove, 199~). Refere.nc~s to each of these editions will be pla~ed in
arentheses in the text, with the respectIve abbreVIatIOns NL, SM, TTE, and N E. The complIcated
~ublication history of each of these novels is related in Jenni Skerl,. Willi~m S.. Burroughs (Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1985). In brief, the first three were each first publIshed. In ~arls; Naked Lu,.,ch ~nly
· the USA in 1962 ' .
appeare d In and became
. the subject of
.one .of .the .last major lIterary censorship trIals;
each novel was revised several times In the course of thelf repnntIng In the 1960s.

- 134-
"The scanning pattern we accept as 'reality,'" the narrator of Nova Express announces,
"has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented
towards total control" (NE, 53); likewise, in The Ticket that Exploded the narrator
informs the reader that "the reality film has now become an instrument and weapon of
monopoly" (TIE, 151). From what Agent Lee has been able to uncover, the basic story
involves a struggle between the Senders, the Liquefactionists and the Divisionists to
gain control of society.14 Each party seeks to dominate by obliterating dissent into
conformity. The Divisionists replicate identical copies of themselves, so that
"eventually there will only be one replica of one sex on the planet" (NL, 133). The
Liquefactionists aim to absorb all opposition. "It will be immediately clear," Agent Lee
informs the reader, "that the Liquefactionist Party is, except for one man, entirely
composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorption who is whose dupe"
(NL, 131). The Senders, led by Salvador Hassan O'Leary, plot to bring the world under
their unilateral control through telepathy, until a situation of totalitarian obedience is
produced. In this way, Burroughs' scenarios of apocalyptic conspiracy are very much
in line with the anti-Stalinist attacks on the increasing homogenisation of American
society in the fifties and sixties. They are also part of a much longer tradition of
American libertarianism, encapsulated in Emerson's aphorism that "society everywhere
is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."15 Burroughs'
novels, I want to argue, reread this proposition so as to place emphasis on the way that
society conspires against the manhood, or masculinity, of some of its members.
Burroughs develops this analysis with a pointed attack on bureaucracy as the
major channel through which society seeks to shape and control "deviancy." The Nova
conspiracy operates not so much by directly coercive displays of force as through the
continual and pervasive attention of bureaucratic management. Dr Benway, a character
who appears in various guises across Burroughs' reuvre, is the chief functionary of the
bureaucratic process. In Annexia (a parodic version of a Scandinavian welfare state)
the mad doctor is called upon to implement a programme of "Total Demoralization."
His "first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, under certain limited
and special circumstances, the use of torture" (NL, 31). The reason, he explains, is that
brutality is "not efficient." In the place of direct force, he constructs "an arbitrary and
intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct" (NL, 31). The
state of Annexia employs an array of Kafkaesque methods of panoptical interference in
the life of its citizens, supposedly in the name of an all-embracing care:

every citizen of Annexia was requi~ed to apply for and ~~rry on his
person at all times a whole portfolIo of .documents. CltIz~nS were
subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Exaffilner, who

14 "Lee" is the pseudonym Burroughs used for the publication of his first novel. Junky. The name is
taken from his maternal grandmother.
15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," in Essays (1841).
- 135 -
 might be in plain clothes, in various uniforms [... ] after checking each
paper, would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was
required to show the properly entered stamps of his last inspection. [... ]
New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one
bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet the impossible
deadlines. 16 (NL, 31-32)

The Nova conspiracy's plans for enforced consensus thus work themselves out through
the bureaucratic pacification of citizens on a mundane and daily basis. The force of the
satire in Naked Lunch and its subsequent variations is frequently against bureaucracy,
which Benway characterises as "a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary
direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action"
(NL, 111).
Burroughs' concern in this quartet of novels is therefore to show that fears of
persecution are not something to be explained away or read as symptoms of neurosis,
but are fully warranted responses to state control of private pleasures through "forms of
disciplinary procedure" (NL, 33). Benway's Foucauldian vocabulary is appropriate,
since the novels highlight in particular the institutional mechanisms of disciplinary
control of illicit sexuality and drug use. The four novels replay variations on two key
scenarios, namely the Customs Shed and the Examination Room, which I now want to
explore.
The Customs interrogations operate on a principle of invasive but arbitrary
scrutiny. The following example is taken from Naked Lunch:

Lee swallows a handful of tranquilizing pills and steps into the Pigeon
Hole customs shed. The inspectors spend more than three hours pawing
through his papers, consulting dusty books of regulations and duties
from which they read incomprehensible and ominous excerpts. [... ]
They go through his papers with a magnifying glass. [... ] "Maybe he
figures to sell them for toilet paper. Is this crap for your own personal
use?"
"Yes."
"He says yes."
"And how do we know that?"
"I gotta affidavit."
"Wise guy. Take off your clothes."
"Yeah. Maybe he got dirty tattoos." , .
They paw over his body probing his a~s fo~ contraband and eXamIne It
for evidence of sodomy. They dunk hIS haIr and send out the water to be
analyzed. "Maybe he's got dope in his hair." (NL, 138)

The principal object of the shakedown is drugs, but the random search aims to uncover
not so much actual merchandise as signs of Lee's being a drug user. The Customs
Officers proceed as if a lifestyle were incorporated into the very fibre of his hair. They
seek further evidence in his writings, and, through the association of narcotic with
sexual "deviancy," in signs of his being homosexual which they "read" in his tattoos

16 In the quotations from Burroughs' tex~s I hav~ ,added square brackets to my ellipses in order to
distinguish them from the frequent ellipses m the ongmal.
- 136-
 and his anus.
The fictional variations of the Customs Shed scenario are based on an episode
which Burroughs recounts in the collection of interviews, The Job:

In December, 1964, I returned to the States and was detained three hours
a~ c~stoms while. narcotics age.nts read my notes, letters and diary.
Flnd.lng ~o narcotIcs, th~r then Informed me that I was subject to fine
and lmpnsonment for falhng to register with the Department when I left
the country, and failing to inform the customs officer of my narcotics
record on my return. The law requiring addicts to register only applies
to those who have been convicted under [... ] the Harrison Narcotics Act
or the Marijuana Act of 1937. I have been arrested twice in the United
States. [... ] In neither case was I convicted. In any case, this law would
seem to make it a crime ever to have been an addict. I7

With the criminalisation of identity in place of individual acts, paranoia becomes a

permanent condition, a result of a constant self-policing. As the Appendix to Naked
Lunch points out, a feeling of paranoia can result from taking or withdrawing from
certain drugs. It is significant that for Burroughs the content of these paranoid drug-
induced nightmares usually gestures back to threat of police persecution as an ever-
present possibility. In The Soft Machine, for example, the young junk-sick explorer
Carl finds himself in a town square deep in the South American jungle, surrounded by a
horror-movie version of the border formalities:

A man in a moldy grey police tunic and red flannel underwear one bare
foot swollen and fibrous. [... ] He gasped out the word "Control" and
slipped to the ground. A man in grey hospital pajamas eating handfuls
of dirt and trailing green spit crawled over to Carl and pulled at his pants
cuff. [... ] From all sides they came pawing hissing spitting: "Papeies,"
"Documentes," "Passaport." (SM, 103-104)

Likewise, the frozen moment of terror when the Customs Officer's hand hesitates an
inch from the false bottom of his suitcase becomes a permanent threat that punctuates
dream sequences and cut-ups in Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy: "frozen forever
hand an inch from the false bottom" (NL, 158), and, "the track gave out forever an inch
from the false bottom" (SM, 47). Less important than any particular police inspection is
the fact that "control measures conjure up phantom interrogators who invade and
destroy your inner freedom" (The Job, 108); in other words, the real threat of police
persecution conjures up subsequent paranoid delusions.
In the same way that during the Customs Shed incident police attention shifts
from illegal narcotics to prohibited sexuality, a verbal elision is created from the "false
bottom" of the suitcase to the victims' untrustworthy (because secretive) "bottom."
Burroughs continues his reflections on the encounter with US Customs in 1964 with an
acknowledgement that "penalizing a state of being, apart from any proven legal act, sets
a precedent that could be extended to other categories of 'offenders. '" Though in

17 Daniel Odier, The Job: Inten'iews with William S. Burroughs (197-l; Harrnondsworth: Penguin, 1989).
p.147. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text.
- 137 -
interview Burroughs denies a connection between homosexuality and drug addiction,
his novels establish structural similarities between the criminalising of addiction and
the pathologising of homosexuality. 18 In an anticipation of Michel Foucault's analysis
in History of Sexuality of the privileging of identities over acts in the creation of the
category of "the homosexual," Burroughs' medical Examination Room routines focus
on the creation of a paranoia about being a certain sexual identity.I9 In Naked Lunch,
for example, young Carl Peterson is summonsed before the ubiquitous Dr Benway, now
ensconced in the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis in Freelandia:

"\yhat on earth.coul~,they want with me?" he thought irritably .... "A

mIstake most hkely. But he knew they didn't make mistakes ... .
Certainly not mistakes of identity. (NL, 148)

Peterson's sexual identity is precisely the issue in this medical examination, which aims
to ascribe a scientifically fixed label to the young man's "condition." Benway explains
how the State regards "sexual deviation" as "a misfortune ... a sickness ... certainly
nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned" (NL, 150). The examination is a mixture of
Kafka's The Trial, and Razumov's interview with Councillor Mikulin in Conrad's
Under Western Eyes. 20 Benway's turn-of-the-century mannerisms and academic
euphemisms barely conceal the threat implicit in the meeting. Medical knowledge
works hand-in-glove with legal powers; indeed, half way through the routine the
"examination" transforms into a police interrogation about drug contacts, a preview of
the Hauser and O'Brien tough cop/con cop shakedown routine later in the novel.
The effect of the "enveloping benevolence" (NL, 149) and seeming scientific
dispassion of the interview is to create in Peterson a hostile suspiciousness, first
towards a gay tourist who sees him coming out of the Institute, and then towards his
own self. When he provides a semen sample for the Kleiberg-Stanislouski semen
floculation test (whose name keeps mutating in Kafkaesque fashion) he feels that
"something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the
shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum" (NL, 153). Paranoia in these

18Burroughs' denial of a connection between homosexuality and drugs is made in The Job, p.121.
However in his fictional writings key images forge links between the two. Associations are made
between ~enetration by a needle and by a penis. In Naked Lunch, for example, there is a routine about
how "the President is a junky but can't take it direct because of his position. So he gets fixed through
me .... From time to time we make contact, and I recharge him. These contacts look, to the casual
observer, like homosexual practices, but the actual excitement is not primarily sexual" (NL, 64).
19In particular, Foucault argues that, "as defined by the ancient civil or ~an?~ical co~es, sodomy was a
category of forbidden acts' their perpetrator was nothing more than the Jundical subject of them. The
nineteenth-century homos~xual became a personage, a past, ~ case. history, a~~ a childhood, in additio.n
to being a type of life, a life form [... J Nothing that went mto ?IS c~mposltlOn w.as unafhfe~t~d ?dY' hiS
't It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all thelf actIons because It was t elr lOS1 10US
sexual I y. . d b db' h
and indefinitely active principle; written im":,odestly on hiS ~ace an 0 y ecause It. was a secret t at
always gave itself away." Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An introductIOn, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p.43.
20 Burroughs describes the transformations he performs on Conrad in "Cutting Up Characters" (AM, 189-

91).
- 138 -
scenes thus comes from the internalisation of the panoptical gaze of the state in
connection with homosexuality, rather than the projection of personal fantasies onto the
external world. In other words, in Burroughs' novels paranoia is not so much a
consequence of repressed homosexuality, as a justifiable reaction to the state's desire to
exercise its power in order to "cure" or suppress homosexuality. Likewise, it is the
proscription of certain activities as forbidden pleasures that produces in citizens the
paranoid fear that the State will discover their secret. In Annexia a mentalist is
employed to guide police "to whatever the man wishes to hide: a tube of vaseline, an
enema, a handkerchief with come on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol" (NL, 32). The
only defence against this fear of discovery of one's secret or repressed activity is to
make everything as overt as possible, so that "they" do not have a hold over you.
"Needless to say," Benway acknowledges, "the sex humiliation angle is contraindicated
for overt homosexuals" (NL, 36). A programme of deliberate over-exposure therefore
forms part of the aesthetic strategy of Naked Lunch and its sequels. In The Soft
Machine, for example, Uranium Willy issues orders for a counter-attack against the
Nova Mob, and "his plan called for total exposure" (SM, 151). Ostensibly it is a call for
the exposure of the power structures of a "rigged universe," but it can also be read as a
rallying cry to put an end to shame through an explicit presentation of sex. In The Job
Burroughs makes clear the logic of this approach, with his observation that "it is
precisely this breakdown of shame and fear with regard to sex that the Nixon
Administration is all out to stop so that it can continue to use shame and fear as
weapons of political control" (The Job, 11).
Instead of seeking to understand the psychology of paranoia, then, Burroughs'
novels of the early sixties investigate and expose the politics of conspiracy. His
strategic and satirical materialisations of psychological categories need to be read
alongside contemporary discourses, such as the work of the anti-psychiatry movement
whose aim was to replace psychoanalytic profiles of patients with an analysis of the
institutional frameworks which simultaneously create and constrain those
"pathological" identities. 21 For example, in a 1962 paper which rethinks the
psychological notion of paranoia, E. M. Lemert writes that:
the general idea th~t t~e 'paranoid. per~on. symbolical~y fabricates the
conspiracy against hIm IS In our estimation Incorrect or mc?mplete. Nor
can we agree that he lacks insight, as is so freq~ently claimed. To ~he
contrary many paranoid persons properly realIze that they are be~ng
isolated 'and excluded by concerted interaction, or that they are bemg
manipulated. 22

21 1968 Burroughs was invited to participate in "The Dialectics of Liberation," a confere~ce organised
I
b ~he anti-psychiatry movement, headed by R.D. Laing and David Cooper, ~t whIch Stokeley
J'armichael. Angela Davis, Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse also spoke. See DaVId Cooper, ed., The
Dialectics of Liberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
22E.M. Lemert, "Paranoia and the Dynamics of Exclusion," in Human Deviance, Social Problems, and
Social Control (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967), p.207.
- 139-
 Lemert goes on to argue that it is the very real threat of psychiatric institutionalisation
which creates a more than understandable sense of persecution in some people-which
then necessitates their hospitalisation.
Burroughs' novels push this materialist analysis even further: not content
merely to critique the psychology of conspiracy theory, they produce a conspiracy
theory about the institution of psychology. The repeated scenes of psychiatric
intrusions in the lives of Burroughs' characters lead to the suggestion that the mental
health and medical institutions have a vested interest in maintaining a certain
percentage of the population as patients. In Naked Lunch, for example, Dr Benway
expounds the theory that, unlike an anarchic cooperative, a state "bureau operates on
the opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence" (NL, 111). When
Peterson turns up at the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis he is shown
straight into Benway's office, leaving him with the suspicion that it is "as if he had
nothing to do but wait for me" (NL, 149). Peterson's paranoiacally egocentric reading
of the situation is in a certain sense accurate, since Benway needs to create patients in
order to sustain his business as a doctor. Likewise, in an essay on "Sexual
Conditioning," Burroughs discusses the fact that it was not until "December 3rd, 1973,
[that] the American Psychiatric Association decided that homosexuality would no
longer be considered a mental deviation" (AM, 88). Noting that many members saw
this decision as a "psychiatric Watergate," he observes wryly that "they just don't like
to see any prospective patients escaping; it could start a mass walk-out." In the novels
institutions such as the APA become figured as a vast bureaucratic conspiracy, fuelled
by the need to pathologise as many people as possible in order to further the range of its
own power. For Burroughs, narcotics agents likewise have a vested interest in seeing
not the eradication of "drug abuse," but its proliferation. First the police "create a
narcotic problem then they say that a permanent narcotics police is now necessary to
deal with the problem of addiction" (SM, 51). Throughout his writings of the sixties
Burroughs manifests an unswerving faith in the apomorphine cure for heroin addiction;
he even acknowledges that without it he would not have been able to complete Naked
Lunch. Finding that the Federal Drug Administration in America refused to promote or
permit this cure, Burroughs speculated that it was being deliberately suppressed by the
narcotics police who have a vested interest in maintaining their livelihood. "Addiction
can be controlled by apomorphine and reduced to a minor health problem," the narrator
of Nova Express states; "the narcotics police know this and that is why they do not want
to see apomorphine used in the treatment of drug addicts" (NE, 51-52). More than a
question of vested interests, though, he argues, "drug laws are a pretext to extend police
power, expand police personnel, and set up a police state with the aid of a controlled
press" (The Job, 68). For Burroughs, then, moral panics about drugs and
homosexuality serve the purpose of furthering the interests of the elite. It is not drugs

- 140-
 or homosexuality that are the problem, but the social panic they arouse. 23
What is significant about Burroughs' scenarios of institutional conspiracy is that
they reverse the usual direction of Cold War demonology which read "deviancy" as a
sign of "un-American activities."24 Instead of picturing "dope fiends" and "sex queens"
(NL, 176) as an un-American threat to society, Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy focus
attention on the ways in which American society is a threat to those who have been
included in the category of "deviancy." In addition to their conspiracy theories about
the politics of demonology, these novels add a further twist to the logic of Cold War
conspiracy. Whereas many gay writers and campaigners in the fifties and sixties were
concerned to dismantle the characterisation of homosexuality as an un-American
activity through an insistence on the "normality" of homosexuals, Burroughs enacts a
parodic confirmation of the most wildly paranoid fears.25 In his novels of this period
the language of agents, contacts, secret signs, covert codes, shady assignations and
hidden messages is taken from the homophobic world of espionage thrillers, and
reapplied to the politics and practices of gay cruising and scoring for drugs in the
bathhouses and on the street comers of Interzone. In The Soft Machine, for example,
Jimmy, who is dressed in "banker drag" so as to preserve anonymity, goes out on a
mission, the purpose of which is contained in the elusive messages punctuating the text:
"come and jack off," "passport vending machines," "Came to the World's End Pissoir
and met a boy with wide shoulders," and so on. The narration then elides into secret
agent mode as Jimmy-code-named K9-goes out on the pick-up: "K9 had an
appointment at the Sheffield Arms Pub but the short wave faded out on the location-
Somewhere to the left? or was it to the right?" (SM, 53-55). During an era in which
secrecy was taken as a manifestation of guilt, Burroughs' fictional heroes make a virtue
out of the historical necessity of being undercover agents. "Homosexuality is the best
all-round cover story an agent can use," comments Bill the junky when he is forced into
hiding after he escapes from Hauser and O'Brien of the narcotics police in Naked
Lunch (NL, 170-71). In the novel as a whole, however, it might be more accurate to
claim that the conspiratorial language of secret agents is a necessary cover story for a
homosexuality which is regarded as a threat to straight society.

23 In their sociological classification of moral panics, Eric Goode and Nach~an Ben-Yeh,uda identif~ this
position as the "elite theory" of moral panics (Moral Panics: The Socral ConstructIOn of Devrance
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1994».
24The making of homosexuality into an "un-Ame~i~an activity" ~n the McCarthyite era i~ dis~u,s~ed in
Joh Dn 'Emilio Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Makmg of a Homosexual Mmonl) 1fI the
, ·d C '
Um eSt
't d t 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Davl Savran, ommumsts,
a es, 'II d T W'll'
Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Ml er an 1 ennessee I rams
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and Lee Edelr:nan, "T~arooms and Sympathy; or.
The Epistemology of the Water Closet," in Homographesis: Essays m Gay Literary and Cultural Theory
(London: Routledge, 1994), pp.148-170.
25 Accounts of the rejection of pathological notions of homosexuality by the gay communi~y are included
in D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, esp. pp.15-22, and Jonathan Dolhmore, Sexual
Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

- 141 -
 The novels work to confirm fears about the transmission of secrets by
homosexuals connected by ties of sexual recognition instead of national loyalty.
Burroughs argues that "what we call love is a fraud perpetrated by the female sex, and
that the point of sexual relations between men is nothing that we could call love, but
rather what we might call recognition." (The Job, 118). In Naked Lunch we read, for
example, about how "two agents identified themselves each to each by choice of sex
practices foiling alien microphones, fuck atomic secrets back and forth in code so
complex" (NL, 164), and about how "boys jacking off in the school toilet know each
other as agents from Galaxy X" (NL, 165). Far from seeking to break the Cold War
association of homosexuality with treason, then, Burroughs' novels serve to exacerbate
those fears, making the case that homosexuality is a threat to the American ideologies
of family and nationality. Because "no society tolerates overt rejection of its basic
tenets," Dr Benway argues in Naked Lunch, "homosexuality is a political crime in a
matriarchy" (NL, 41), and, in Burroughs' distorted mythology, America is a matriarchy
(The Job, 122).
From Naked Lunch on, Burroughs' novels perform a strategic confirmation and
materialisation of society's worst fears about "deviants" as a way of imagining a
counter-conspiracy. In the opening section of The Ticket that Exploded, for example, a
Technical Sergeant describes how his unit is being decimated by the "Sex Skin habit"
which produces a frenzy of homosexuality amongst the men. "This situation," he
radios back to Base Headquarters, "has given rise to what the head shrinkers call 'ideas
of persecution' among our personnel." He seems to be suffering from "ideas of
persecution" himself, for he reports that, "as I write this I have barricaded myself in the
ward room against the 2nd Lieutenant who claims he is 'God's little hang boy sent
special to me' that little shave tail I can hear him out there wimpering and slobbering"
(ITE, 5). Towards the end of the novel, however, these archetypically Freudian
symptoms of a paranoid fear of homosexuality are in fact confirmed by the outbreak of
a full-blown mutinous conspiracy. Panic reports are sent back to Base Headquarters
about "patrols cut off light years behind enemy lines," who have been completely taken
over by the Sex Skin habit. The final straw comes with the closure of the Shitola
bathhouse, where the dandified young officers have been quartered:

We had our Castro period and then all the mad queens from camouflage
camped about in Vietnam drag designed for ma~imum exposure of
misappropriated parts. And of course the FLN guls were to be. see!!
buggering each other on every street comer. I.mean we were gettmg It
and getting it steady. So we began to convene m te~se graceful clusters
of incipient conspiracy. Then came th~ order that ~nfl~,~ed us to open
revolt: 'The Shitola baths are closed until further notIce. (ITE, 195)

Cold War collapses into camp costume drama, with the celluloid from the decade's war
zones becoming mixed up with an eighteenth-century romp, hip street slang ("we were
getting it") spliced with decadent parlance ("tense graceful clusters"). All the military's
worst fears about homosexual infiltration are confirmed, as the Nova campaign breaks
- 142 -
into an open revolt by street queens.
Each of the novels of the Nova trilogy contains glimpses of the formation of a
counter-conspiracy of "deviants," a homoerotic alliance between all Burroughs' pulp
fiction heroes. This imaginative materialisation of society's worst fears operates by a
similar appropriative logic to the feminist/lesbian antics of WITCH and Lavender
Menace at the close of the 1960s (see Chapter 2 above); in Burroughs' case, however,
the macho rhetoric of conspiracy is undermined by a homoeroticisation of the decade's
Boy's Own antics. According to Burroughs, writing can act as a literal pre-scripting of
the future, such that the writing of a scenario can become the blueprint for it happening
(The Job, 28). Some scenes in the Nova trilogy indeed prefigure the Stonewall riots in
New York in 1969, when the patrons of a gay bar fought back against a police raid, an
incident which marks a transition of gay politics from a politics of assimilation to a
militant insistence on difference. 26 The glimpses of "tense graceful clusters of incipient
conspiracy" in Burroughs' novels of the sixties find their apotheosis in The Wild Boys
(1971), in which there emerges an unashamed science-fiction envisioning of a counter-
conspiracy of "junkies" and "queers":
We intend to march on the police machine everywhere. We intend to
destroy the police machine and all its records. We intend to destroy all
dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous extension
into tribes, countries, nations, we will eradicate at its vegetable roots.
We don't want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop
talk, priest talk, country talk or party talk. To put it country simple, we
have heard enough of that bull shit. 27

From this novel on, the invocation of a counter-conspiracy of "deviants" becomes one
of the principal concerns of Burroughs' fiction, in which the message is increasingly
that the Wild Boys are straight society'S worst nightmares come true: homosexuality is
just cause for panic, since, if Burroughs had his way, the Wild Boys would take over
the planet-and colonise space. The "open secret" of the closet therefore becomes the
open secret of a counter-conspiracy, a deliberate, if camply parodic, materialisation of
straight society's most paranoid fears. 28

26 Burroughs also witnessed a materialisation of his ideas in the Chicago Democratic Convention riots in
1968, which (along with Jean Genet and scriptwriter of Dr Strange[ove, Terry Southern) he covered for
Esquire magazine (Burroughs, "The Coming of the Purple Better One," Esquire, November 1968, pp,89-
91), In his article Burroughs describes the scenes as a generic, eve,n transhis~orical, revolt of alie~a~ed
youth. In typical Burroughsian fashion, he la~er. retracted his e~he,r enthUSIasm for t?ese late SIxtIes
riots: "the violent student rioting of the late SIxtIes was largely mstIgated by electromc moo~-con,tr~l
devices that were derived from the psychic discoveries of [the CIA's] Project Pandora, The rIots, It IS
now evident, were the first phase of a massive plot" (AM, 151),
27 Burroughs, Wild Boys (1971; New York: Grove Press, 1992), pp,139-40,
28 The materialisation of paranoia received a further twist in the 1980s and early '90s, In ,her study o~ the
mutual circuits of identity construction in postmodern politics, Cindy Patton notes, that "10 the new rIght
't t e [of the 1980s] lesbian and gay men graduated from a covert conspIracy to an open and
I I era u r ' , 'fS: h 1 b'
audacious lobby," Patton goes on to argue that althoug~ ,this transformatIon ,meant 10 elect t adt, es I~n
and gay men had been recognised and accepted as a p~h~cal force" the new rIght cou!d ,now pr~ Ic~te It}
identity on its reinterpretation of the proud performattvIty of comm g out, a~,~np unwlttm.g co~. esslO~ °ht
perversity, "If coming out says, 'We're queer, we're here, get use d to It, atton WrItes, new ng

- 143 -
 THE SOFT MACIDNE

So far we have seen how Burroughs' novels of the sixties satirically materialise
the category of paranoia, deflecting attention from the psychology of an individual onto
those institutions which exercise control over the bodily pleasures of citizens marked
out as deviant. In key episodes of these novels society seeks to exert control through a
disciplining regime of the body; yet they also repeatedly figure the body as itself part of
those conspiratorial forces. In particular, control is not just out there in political
structures, but is wired into the inside, encoded into the very flesh of the body. In this
section, then, I want to explore how Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy display an
obsessive concern to evade all forms of physical influence, in an escape attempt that is
ultimately doomed to failure since incarnation itself is represented as a conspiracy.
This concern with the vulnerability and treacherousness of the body and its
boundaries-a fixation which, if it were not such an overloaded term, we might call
paranoid-represents a further inversion of Cold War demonology. Burroughs' novels
enact a literalisation of those McCarthyite metaphors which displace fears of national
invasion onto fears of bodily infiltration. So, for example, whereas Stanley Kubrick's
1963 film, Dr Strangelove, features the parodic ally paranoid Col. Jack D. Ripper who
speaks of fluoridation as a Communist plot to destroy "our precious bodily fluids,"
Burroughs' novels take seriously the threat of both metaphorical and literal corporeal
contamination.
Burroughs' scenarios of body panic can be loosely sorted under two headings,
namely incorporation and infiltration. The scenarios of incorporation are developed
mainly in Naked Lunch. For example, Bradley the narcotics agent develops an
addiction to pushing junk which takes on a repulsive form. A young junky describes
how Bradley came on to him:

"Most distasteful thing I ever did stand still for. Some way he make
himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he
gets wet all over with green sli~e .. So I. guess he come to some kinda
awful climax .... I come near WIggIng WIth that green stuff all over me,
and he stink like a rotten cantaloupe." (NL, 27)

Called into the District Supervisor's office, Bradley envelopes and digests the D.S. with
a "schlup," giving off a "narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anaesthetizes his
victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence" (NL, 29). In these scenes
Bradley transforms into a junky, a figure of social repulsion whose abject need and
servility takes on a three dimensional form (or rather, formlessness), producing a literal
assimilation of his victim. With the Liquefactionists, this loss of clear distinction

'dentity appropriates this to say, 'We knew it,' and to society, 'We told you so.''' ~indy Patton.
~'Tremble, Hetero Swine!" Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, MIchael Warner.
ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.146.

- 144-
between self and other takes place at the microscopic level, in a process involving
"protein cleavage and reduction to liquid which is absorbed into someone else's
protoplasmic being" (NL, 74). As Tony Tanner suggests in his reading of Burroughs,
the focus on the disgusting viscosity of the "green slime" and "reduction to liquid"
displays a physical horror of body boundaries becoming indeterminate, of bodies
literally being absorbed into the power of another. 29 Unlike critics such as Tanner,
however, I would argue that Burroughs' portrayals of this primeval horror are always
hooked into wider circuits of social meaning. At times in Naked Lunch the fear of
physical incorporation by green slime is, for example, linked to matriphobic fears of
dependence, smothering, and even cannibalism. 30 In the routine "Al's Annual Party,"
for instance, a character called Mary "bites away at Johnny's lips and nose and sucks
out his eyes with a pop," then "she lunches on his prick," before drawing him into her
"with a suction of hungry flesh" (NL, 85-87). But the horror of engulfment also arises
in many sexual and narcotic situations leading to a loss of differentiation, or whenever a
person in power takes over and uses someone weaker; it is not permanently linked to
ideas of feminisation. For example, the Interzone bestiary includes green-jellied
Reptiles who hook themselves up to the Mugwumps, liverless creatures which "secrete
an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism"
(NL, 54). The image suggests an addictive sexuality which preys off the life-fluid of
the Mugwumps. In "Hassan's Rumpus Room," the companion piece to "AJ' s Party,"
the enveloping exploitation is reversed, in a sadomasochistic hanging of a native boy by
a Mugwump. The scene functions as a projected version of the sexual economy of
Interzoneffangiers, in which the expatriates-the narrator included-literally live off
the backs of the young native boys, staving off old age through the purchase and
extraction of youth:
The Mugwump pulls the boy back onto his cock. The boy squirms,
impaled like a speared fish. The Mugwump swings on the boy's bac~,
his body contracting in fluid waves. Blood ~ows down the boy's chIn
from his mouth, half-open, sweet, and sulky In death. The Mugwump
falls with a fluid, sated plop. (NL, 70)
As much as they represent vulnerability, the Mugwumps also act as a projection of the
author's own self-loathing of his sexually rapacious desires which ooze out of him and
take over other people. This scene suggests there is a need to be on the alert not only

29 Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), esp.
pp.117-119.
30 In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian~ Univers~ty
Press, 1994), Elizabeth Grosz discusses the matter ?f slime "a~ a pr~liminary ~o ~er analys!s o~.bo.dlly
fl .d She takes issue with Mary Douglas's claIm that VISCOSIty repels In It~ ~wn nght. SInce
S
"Ut~ k : ess is clinging like a too possessive dog or mistress." Grosz argues that "It IS not tha~ f~male
s IC I n , ., . ." R h hi' .. t the
't . II'ke or resembles an inherently hornfYIng VISCOSIty. at er, sec alms, I IS
sexua l I y I S , ' . . I . d . d
· f an order that renders female sexuality and corporeahty margIna , In etermInate. an
t
pro d uc IOn 0 . . ., . h 'f' . ,. ( 194
viscous that constitutes the sticky and the VISCOUS WIth theIr dISgUStIng, om yIng connotatIon pp. -
95).
- 145 -
for the assimilative tendency in others, but also for the uncontrollable fluidity of one's
own desires.
In addition to scenarios of incorporation, Burroughs develops a series of images
of parasitic invasion. A crude version comes in the shape of the candiru, which is "a
small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long
patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater Amazon basin." It will "dart up
your prick or your asshole or a woman's cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself there by
sharp spines" (NL, 47). The candiru presents the threat of a literal take-over of the
sexual organs, and becomes an enemy weapon in the Nova war to gain control of an
individual. In the "Atrophied Preface" the narrator, William Seward, announces his
heroic intentions, which include the promise to "banish the candiru from your
swimming pools" (NL, 178), or, in other words, to kill off the parasite of invasive
sexuality which can remain hidden in victims, controlling them against their will.
For all its deviousness, the candiru represents an identifiable enemy which can
be grasped and removed from a victim; Johnny, for example, "extracts a candiru from
Mary's cunt with his calipers" (NL, 86). Other parasitic invaders, however, are less
easy to combat, since they become absorbed into the individual. As the process of
infiltration becomes more sophisticated, the task of escaping control requires redoubled
vigilance. There is the admonitory tale, for example, of the "'climactic buboes," a
"virus venereal disease" that "passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and
burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years, a purulent stringy discharge
streaked with blood and putrid lymph" (NL, 46). The body begins to rebel, overflowing
its boundaries, its disgusting behaviour dictated by the viral invader. Since "males who
resign themselves up for passive intercourse to infected partners [... J may also nourish
a little stranger," the only solution, the narrator warns, is "to stop panting and start
palpating," that is, to replace ecstatic passion with a "paranoid" prophylaxis (NL, 46-
47).
In Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy Burroughs reworks and refines the notion
of the virus as a model of external control taking over and recoding an individual's self
will, producing a rebellion of the flesh. In the political set-up of Interzone it is the
Senders who are "The Human Virus." We are informed that "techniques of Sending
were crude at first" (NL, 132): they implanted their will into people's heads with the
literal installation of a "miniature radio receiver," such that "the subject [could be J
controlled from State-controlled transmitters." But the notion of ideological
transmission becomes more refined with the advent of the Human Virus, since it means
that ideas can be encoded into an individual; The Soft Machine, for example, describes
how, in the future of the "war between the sexes," children (known as "the Property")
are encoded with a "life script" from the moment of conception, with "poison virus
agents trooping in and out at all hours" (SM, 154). For Burroughs, what is significant
about a virus is that it works by taking over of the DNA of a cell, replacing the original

- 146-
information with its own, such that the resulting diseased cells look like the host cells ,
but act as fifth colonists inside the body (see, for example, the extended scenario of
"desperate 5th colonists" in ITE, 51-52).
Drug addiction is represented as a special kind of virus, namely the "junk
virus." On this view, certain drugs function as an "alien substance" (NL, 191) which
"take over" (The Job, 148) the will of an addict at the cellular level, with, for example,
the liver becoming "literally ... preoccupied" by a "morphine metabolism" (NL, 189).
Kicking the habit becomes virtually impossible, since "the addict stands by while his
junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse" (NL, 8). Like a virus,
heroin turns the body of an addict into a puppet obeying the dictates of need. Heroin
addiction then becomes the model for other forms of seemingly involuntary behaviour,
which escalate by an "algebra of need" (NL, 12). The Ticket That Exploded, for
example, features rightness addicts, control addicts, pushing addicts, heavy metal (i.e.
nuclear) addicts, orgasm and sex addicts-and the narrator even characterises writing as
an addiction (ITE, 198). In the same way that the notion of addiction is extrapolated
through the algebra of need, so the logic of the virus is extended to cover all forms of
behaviour. In both cases the invading force gains access to the individual through a
point of physical vulnerability, a "tissue of predilection." In The Ticket That Exploded,
Inspector Lee is informed that "in order to invade, damage and occupy the human
organism," a virus "must have a gimmick to get in" (TTE, 58). The body's pleasures
therefore become its weaknesses, making the task of preventing corporeal take-over all
the more difficult. No one can be trusted-least of all oneself.
What makes the "Human Virus" impossible to eradicate is that its "gimmick" is
language. "The word is now a virus" (TTE, 49), the narrator of Ticket That Exploded
announces, or, put the other way round, "in the electronic revolution a virus is a very
small unit of word and image" (The Job, 14). According to Burroughs, the word is a
parasitic organism that has remained undetected because it has reached a state of
relative symbiosis. Like other viruses, though, it threatens to take over the host. "The
word may once have been a healthy neural cell," but "it is now a parasitic organism that
invades and damages the central nervous system" (ITE, 49). Language is described as
a voracious creature (along the lines of a Mugwump) which threatens to engulf an
individual. "The Word," the narrator of the "atrophied Preface" to Naked Lunch
announces, "will leap on you with leopard man claws, it will cut off fingers and toes
like an opportunist land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable
dog, it will coil around your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid
ectoplasm" (NL, 180-81). The virus forces host cells to replicate identical copies of
itself, or, in other words, to further the process of cultural homogenisation and wipe out
individuality by making people obey the instructions of those in control.
In effect, then, Burroughs produces an ultra-deterministic conspiracy theory of
culture, in which the messages written into the mass media, pornography and pulp

- 147 -
 fiction transfer themselves to the spectator like a virus, becoming in scripted into the
viewer-victim's nervous system. 31 The Nova trilogy outlines how the method of control
has remained basically the same, from the repetitious cycle of the Mayan Calendar in
the hands of the priests, to the "images and word" that are "the instruments of control
used by the daily press and by such new magazines as Time, Life, Newsweek," and so
on (The Job, 59).32 In The Soft Machine, for example, the news is written in advance by
an "ffiM machine," which "controls thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions"
(SM, 149). Conversely, the section "1920s Movies" turns a series of homoerotic
initiation scenes into porn films, the details of which are, "record[ed] on the transparent
flesh of present time": "slow 1920 finger rubbing vaseline on the cobra lamps,
flickering movie shadows into the blue void. pulling finger rolls a cuneiform cylinder.
Lens eye drank the boy's jissom on yellow light" (SM, 137).
A series of key images develops the notion of the body being encoded through
word and image. The body is described as a "soft machine," a "soft typewriter" that is
"composed of thin transparent sheets on which is written the action from birth to death"
(ITE, 159).33 Similarly, it is a "ticket" on which is punched at the moment of
conception the viral instructions for the whole of life (TTE, 78). According to the
narrator of The Ticket That Exploded, "a tape recorder is an externalized section of the
human nervous system" (TTE, 163); in the "electronic age" the body becomes a robot,
controlled by electronic tapes which splice together bodily functions and cultural
imperatives. All aspects of embodied existence-thoughts, memories, desires, sense
impressions-are thus susceptible to the inscription of control. In effect, then, to be
incarnated is to be controlled. Discussing his mentor's work, Allen Ginsberg
recognised that for Burroughs "the body itself may be a by-product of a large scale
conspiracy by certain forces in a prison universe made out of parent matter."34
Having identified the body as the site of a cosmic conspiratorial struggle,
Burroughs outlines in the Nova trilogy a series of techniques to escape its control. "As
you know," the District Supervisor informs Agent Lee in The Ticket That Exploded,
"inoculation is the weapon of choice against virus and inoculation can only be effected

31 With his descriptions of mass media as an exteriorised nervous system, Burroughs connects at many
significant points with the work of Marshall McLuhan. Tanner discusses the.int~rs~~~ions betwee~ the
two writers' "defensive, even paranoid attitude towards all forms of commumcatIOn In an appendIX to
City of Words (pp.441-45), but curiously does not mention McLuhan's "Notes on Burroughs," The
Nation, 28 December 1964, pp.517-19.
32 It must also be noted that Burroughs finds the potential for resistance in popular culture; precis~ly
because it does not speak in the language of the authorities, it can accidentally reveal what's really gomg
on. In Benway's talking asshole routine in Naked Lunch, he concludes that such scenarios create "the s~x
that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there's always a space between, 10
popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness" (NL, 111).
33 In Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (London: Methuen, 1985), David Porush. locates. Bu~oughs'
image in a tradition of (para~oid) charac.terisations of the human and the mechamcal. whIch mcludes
Schreber's depictions of invaSIve contraptIons.
34 Quoted in Mottram, The Algebra of Need, p.198.
- 148 -
through exposure" (TTE, 10). Burroughs' compositional techniques in the sixties
indeed amount to a process of inoculation, a scientific programme of exposure to a
weakened form of the images, phrases and scenarios which have most hold over him, so
as to gradually build up resistance to their power. One method of cultural inoculation
involves repeating and re-ordering the word combinations which have been most
deeply imprinted on his memory: "rectal mucus and carbolic soap," "idiot Mambo,"
"dropped his shorts grinning and his cock flip out and up," "shirt flapping in a wind,"
"moldy jockstraps," "young boys need it special," "maze of penny arcades and dirty
pictures," "Sauve qui peut," and so on. It is not so much the smell of the moldy
jockstraps which seems to produce involuntary memories, associations and yearnings as
the very combination of those words. As Burroughs explains, key "word combinations
produce certain effects on the human nervous system" (The Job, 28). The repetition of
these phrases represents something along the lines of Pavlovian de-conditioning, which
becomes one of several techniques for personal liberation. In The Ticket that Exploded,
for example, the narrator recommends exercises "to maintain a state of total alertness
during sexual excitement," such as "jacking-off while balancing a chair" (ITE, 75-76).
Burroughs' narrators dispense many practical tips, making his writings sometimes more
like a Scientology instruction manual for dismantling the conditioned mind than a
novel.
In a similar fashion, having understood that the "grammar of virus has the same
unalterable order" (The Job, 206), the task is then to cut up and rearrange that viral
script. In the sixties novels Burroughs carries out a recoding of the cultural DNA with
his experiments of literally cutting up and resplicing his own texts and tapes with those
from a wide range of cultural sources. The aim is to break up the "lines of control"
which in Burroughs' view program the body, in order to bring about a carefully
controlled randomisation of the pre-scripted universe. In the" 1920s Movies" routine in
The Soft Machine, for example, one of the countless scenes of homoerotic initiation is
gradually cut up with other scenes, namely jungle adventures in Panama, adolescents
jacking off in St Louis, science fiction bathhouses, and so on. The syntax of desire is
broken down into the pure grammar of sexual combination: "'I-you-me-fuck-up-ass-all-
same-time-four-eyes,'" "'We flick-fluck I-you-film-tracks through rectal mucus and
carbolic soap,'" "'I-you-me fuck up neon blind fingers phantom cleavage of boy
impressions Witch Board of Present Time,'" and so on (SM, 138-39). At the end of the
section, the scenes are pared down to their component elements, permutated and
separated out into four different camera scripts for a porn movie. The aim of the Nova
trilogy, then, is to effect an escape, or, more accurately, a "disintoxication" (The Job,
138), from the patterns of fear and desire which are most deeply embedded in the
physical body. The sheer proliferation of Burroughs' experiments, however, seems to
suggest that the programme of disintoxication is always on the point of relapse. No
amount of paranoid suspicion towards the body can be enough.

- 149-
 At key junctures Burroughs' fictions of hyperbolic paranoia threaten to collapse
in on themselves. The scenarios of bodily invasion represent in a problematic way the
body itself as the enemy-though it is hard to specify who or what it is conspiring
against. All forms of addiction and viral invasion are to be rigorously distrusted and
exorcised in this Burroughsian model, but this seems to include one's most intimate and
personal attributes. The Ticket That Exploded for example, includes the following
bulletin from the benign Nova Police's "Rewrite Department" which spells out the
operational tactics of the Nova conspiracy:

The point at which the criminal controller intersects a three-dimensional

human a.gent is known as "a coordinate point"-And if there is one thing
that carrIes over from one human host to another and established identity
of the controller it is habit: idiosyncrasies, vices, food preferences-ewe
were able to trace Hamburger Mary through her fondness for peanut
butter)-a gesture, a special look. (ITE, 57; NE, 56)

In Burroughs' mythology a parasitic virus attacks the host at precisely those

"coordinate points" of habit and taste which would ordinarily define the individuality of
the self. All habits are conceived of as drug habits (or viral diseases, which for
Burroughs amounts to the same thing). Addiction and viral invasion become the
explanation for all behaviour, whether desired or reviled. The individual therefore
becomes a ventriloquist's dummy on both counts, either spouting out the ideologies of
the evil enemy, or mindlessly mouthing the formulae of the friendly partisans, with, for
example, the endless repetition in the Nova trilogy of the apocalyptic rallying cry of
"Word falling-photo falling-Time falling-Break through in Grey Room" (ITE,
104). And if, as Burroughs insists, the only thing not pre-recorded in this pre-recorded
world are the pre-recordings themselves, then the only possibility for resistance is to
replace bad tapes with good ones. In this way, the very free will which is the treasured
object of Burroughs' "paranoid" dramas begins to fade, as responsibility-for good or
ill-is endlessly displaced onto alien chemicals and idea-viruses. 35
If the very workings of one's body are signs of enemy infiltration, and if all
behaviour is dictated by "criminal controllers" through addiction and viruses, then there
seems very little left of the self to be protected from alien infiltration. In The Job
interviews, Burroughs states that the aim of his literary experiments is to "achieve
complete freedom from past conditioning" in order to release "the self that one is, apart
from imposed thinking" (The Job, 21, 89). Yet, paradoxically, the more his fictions
insist on "separating yourself from the 'Other Half" of conditioned reactions, the less
substantial the remaining half becomes. For Burroughs, the only solution to this
problem is the dissolution of the body, encapsulated in his campaign to get "out of time

35 Without mentioning Burroughs, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick develops a similar argument in "Epidemics
of the Will," in Incorporations, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwmter, eds (New York: Zone,. 1992),
582-95 rpt. in Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.130-42. In developmg my
;:~ding of'this aspect of Burroughs' writing, I have also drawn on Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare: Sexual
Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (London: Routledge, 1993).

- 150-
and into space," that is, out of the temporal limits of physical desire and need, into the
unconstrained purity of space. In effect, Burroughs argues not so much for the
liberation as for the obliteration of the embodied self.

In the first half of this chapter I have tried to demonstrate how Burroughs' fictions of
body panic perform a series of strategic reversals and materialisations of Cold War
paranoia. In the following part I will consider the ways in which the HIV/ AIDS
epidemic has to a certain extent produced a literalisation of Burroughs' fictional
scenarios. The epidemic has generated systematic fears about the body, producing what
Arthur Kroker has called a "body McCarthyism" for the 1980s and '90S. 36 I want to
argue that a close attention to Burroughs' fictions of body paranoia offers important
insights into the panic generated by the AIDS crisis, and, conversely, that the AIDS
epidemic demands a rereading of Burroughs. By reading Burroughs alongside some of
the writings about HIV/ AIDS, my aim is not to embed the former in the context of the
latter, but to explore how both participate in larger circuits of meaning about sex, drugs
and paranoia. I will concentrate on three aspects in particular. First, the problematic
politics of conspiracy theories of epidemics which hesitate between the literal and the
metaphorical. Second, the networks of signification in which disease is situated. And
finally, the blurring of "paranoid" body boundaries as a way of replotting the
microscopic, individual and social body.

PLOTTING AIDS

In many ways Burroughs' conspiratorial figurations of homosexuality, drug

addiction and viral paranoia gain an unnervingly prophetic relevance in the light of the
HIV/ AIDS crisis. Rereading his novels of the sixties and seventies can prove to be a
poignant activity. For example, in a review of Edmund's White's The Burning Library,
which contains a 1981 interview with Burroughs, Lucy Hughes-Hallet finds a
"melancholy dual significance" in the fact White could listen to Burroughs speculate
about a virulent new epidemic without either man seeming to be aware of the epidemic
• 37
that was taking shape at that very tIme.

36 The notion of a "body McCarthyism" is discussed by Arthur and Marilo~i~e Kroker in "Panic Sex in
America," in Body Invaders, Kroker and Kroker, eds (London: St. MartIn s Press, .1987), pp.1O- 13.
Deborah Lupton, for example, summarises the media construction of a besie.ged body In Moral Threats
and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media (London: Taylor and FranCIS, 1994).
37 Luc Hu hes-Hallet, "Art, Passion and Gossip," Sunday Times, 10 July 1994, section 7, p.4. White's
. .y (~Thl's Is Not a Mammal' A Visit with William Burroughs") is in The Burning Library:
IntervIew . .
Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality, 1969-1993 (London: Chatto & WIndus, 1994), pp.107-114.

- 151 -
 White was interviewing Burroughs just after the publication of the latter's Cities
of the Red Night, the first part of a new trilogy.38 The novel, which was written in the
latter half of the seventies in New York, seems to anticipate some of the details of the
AIDS crisis which was just reaching public awareness at the time of its publication. It
is composed of three loosely interwoven narrative strands. The first involves an
eighteenth-century Boy's Own fantasy adventure of gay pirates living in proto-anarchist
communes. The second consists of a science fiction story of the ancient Red Cities in
the Gobi desert, which reads as a satirical version of the decadent late-seventies New
York gay leatherbar and Fire Island scene. And the third is a present-day hardboiled
detective fiction tale of a mystery viral epidemic which seems to strike gay men, and
which is associated with homosexual promiscuity, lethally infectious sperm, and the
smell of amyl nitrate poppers. Each of these items became key issues in the early years
of the AIDS epidemic. Much was made of the fact that AIDS-related illnesses were
first discovered in gay men, indicated by the fact that the first name for the syndrome
was GRID, or Gay-Related Immunodefficiency. Furthermore, a lot of time was spent
investigating the epidemiology of the syndrome, with early effort being focused (often
with "paranoid" urgency) on gay bathhouses; aspects of the "gay lifestyle" such as the
use of poppers; and the possibility that sperm itself was infectious (a view popularised
in the phrase "toxic cock syndrome").39
Even more intriguing than these elements, however, is the conspiratorial plot in
which the epidemic is framed in Burroughs' novel. The disease is caused by the B-23
virus, which seems to result from top-secret biowarfare research carried out by the CIA
and the Countess de Vile in her South American hideout. In a boardroom debriefing
scene, Doctor Pierson, working for the CIA, tries to cover up the true nature of the
virus, but it emerges that the idea of using B-23 to produce a "selective pestilence"
(CRN, 86) is still under consideration. The targets of such an attack seems obscure, but
Pierson offers several hints:
I question the wisdom of introduc~ng .Virus ~-23 into ~ontem~or~ry
America and Europe. Even though It ffilght qUIet the uh sIlent ~aJonty,
who are admittedly becoming uh awkward, we must conSIder the
biologic consequences of exposing virgin genetic ~aterial already
damaged beyond repair to su~h an agent, leaVIng a ~ake ~f
unimaginably unfavourable mutations all ravenously perpetratmg then

38 Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (1981; London: Picador, 1982). Page references to this edition are
cited in parentheses in the text, with the abbreviation CRN.
39 Randy Shilts gives an account of the ~ate seventie.s New York/Fire Island scene, a~ well as details
about the early investigations into a pOSSible connectIOn between AIDS and poppers, ~n And the Band
Pia ed On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987; Harmondsworth: Pengu1O: 1988); Paula
Trefchler discusses the nomenclature of "AIDS" and the "kill.er sperm" theories i~ "AIDS, Gender, an~
Biomedical Discourse," in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ElIzabeth Fee.and D~mel M. Fox ~Berkeley.
University of California Press, 1988), pp.200-202; Gerald M. Oppenheimer gives ~n ov~rvlew ~f the
e idemiological investigations, in "Causes, Cases, and Cohorts: The Role of EpidemIOlogy 10 t~e
~storical Construction of AIDS," in AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease, Elizabeth Fee and Damel
M. Fox, eds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp.49-83.
- 152 -
 kind .... " (eRN, 33)

Pierson's euphemisms leave it unclear whether Virus B-23 would be used against the
silent majority, with the resulting danger that the disease would tum them into depraved
homosexual fiends, or whether it is the gay population that is to be decimated, with the
risk that the mutant victims would "ravenously perpetrate their kind." What is clear in
the novel, however, is that gay men are falling ill mysteriously, and that there are good
reasons to believe that the disease was deliberately manufactured.
One of the most popular and persistent conspiracy theories about the AIDS
epidemic is the speculation that the HIV virus was produced as part of the US
government's secret chemical-biological warfare (CBC) project. 40 Burroughs in fact
endorses this theory in a sardonic comment in his satirical "Thanksgiving Prayer" of
1986. In this acerbic prayer he unleashes a tirade that gives thanks, amongst many
other things, for "laboratory AIDS."41 Reading Cities of the Red Night, it can seem that
there is a lot of truth to Burroughs' earlier expressed belief that "events are pre-written
and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out" (The Job, 28). But
Burroughs' "prediction" of a conspiratorial scenario for the AIDS epidemic can be
explained in a more mundane way if we remember that from the early sixties on he was
preoccupied by the possibility of viral warfare. The Nova trilogy, for example, is based

40 Various researchers have latched onto the record for June 9th 1969 of the House of Representatives
Subcommittee on Department of Defense Appropriations. Dr Donald MacArthur, Deputy Director of the
DOD's Research and Technology testified that "molecular biology is a field that is advancing very
rapidly, and eminent biologists believe that within a period of five to ten years it would be possible to
produce a synthetic biological agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity
could have been acquired," a disease which, he later added, "might be refractory to the immunological
and therapeutic process upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease."
To this prophetic testimony is added the fact that AIDS was first detected amongst sexually active gay
men in New York and Los Angeles, with the first appearances of the disease being traced back to 1979-
a year after just over a thousand "non-monogamous" gay men from New York were involved in a test
programme for a new hepatitis vaccine. By 1984 nearly two thirds of that cohort had died from AIDS-
related illnesses; similar tests had been carried out in other major American cities, with similar
"coincidental" mortality rates. HIV, it is believed, was deliberately manufactured in the Army's
Biological Warfare Laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and tested out on unsuspecting gay men
through the hepatitis vaccine test programme. These theories were reported in a New Delhi newspaper,
picked up by the Soviet Press, and repeated in the Sunday Express. Researchers also unearthed a 1972
World Health Organisation (WHO) bulletin of 1972, which urged that, "an attempt should be made to
ascertain whether viruses can in fact exert selective effects on immune function, e.g. by effecting T cell
function as opposed to B cell function. The possibility should also be looked into that the immune
response to the virus itself may be impaired if the infecting virus damages more or less selectively the
cells responding to the viral antigens." The connection is made between the fact that seroprevalence of
HIV was highest in those parts of Africa which had been the subject of a smallpox vaccination
programme administered by the WHO. These twin ~tories of bio~~rfare ex~eri.me~tation ~ere
embellished by many other details about the close connectIOns between mIlItary and mstitutlOnal medical
research in the area of viruses. These details are taken from G.L. Krupey, "AIDS: Act of God or the
Pentagon?," in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, Jim Keith, ed. (Portland, OR:
Feral House, 1993), pp.240-55; substantially the same details are recounted in John Fiske's discussion of
conspiracy theories on black radio: "Black.stre~ Kn~wledge:. Genocide," in Media Matters: EveT):day
Culture and Political Change (MinneapolIs: Umversity of Mmnesota Press, 1994), pp.191-216. FIske
draws on Alan Cantwell, Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot (San Francisco: Aries Rising,
1993).
41 Burroughs, "Thanksgiving Prayer, 1986," rpt. in Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge. Rudy
Rucker, R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, eds (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), pp.l96-200.

- 153 -
on the viral take-over of the population by the Nova Mob, whose forces include the
pulp fiction villain Countess de Vile. Burroughs bases his fictional experiments in part
on his reading, which involves both scientific treatises and news exposes. In The Job
he comments, for example, on the news in the early 1970s that a synthetic gene particle
had been manufactured, leading to the possibility in the near future of viral warfare
(The Job, 14). For Burroughs, if that possibility existed, it would not be long before a
government-and the U.S. government in particular-tested it out.
More significant than the specific details of the case, however, are the ways in
which Burroughs' fictional enactment of a conspiracy theory about an epidemic reflects
on the AIDS crisis. The first thing to note is that stories about the lab manufacture of
an AIDS-like epidemic wholeheartedly counter the widespread tendency in the
mainstream press to blame gay men and drug users, on account of their "unnatural"
practices, for the disease which was first known in medical circles as WOGS-the
Wrath of God Syndrome. 42 A theory about a conspiracy against gay men sets itself up
in opposition to those Moral Right conspiracy theories which link the spread of AIDS
to gay "promiscuity." By the mid-1980s the accusation that the sixties-and the
"sexual revolution" in particular-were to blame for many of America's troubles had
become widespread. For Gene Antonio, author of The AIDS Cover-Up?, the AIDS
epidemic provides confirmation that "permissiveness" and "promiscuity" did not form
the solution to social problems through a liberation of the oppressed libido, but were in
fact their very cause:
AIDS, it is argued, is merely an incidental biological party spoiler. If it
were not for the worrisome possibility of personal and societal self-
extinction, everyone could have continued wallowing in libertinism and
perversion ad infinitum ad nauseam without negative consequences ...
There is a fundamental premise lacking in the get-to-know-your-
partners-first and crank out the condoms response to the AIDS and
venereal disease epidemics. It is the glaring reality that the lax sexual
mores of Western culture have proven destructive to the social fabric of
civilization, apart from any of the infectious diseases accompanying
promiscuity.43
In support of his suspicion that "this new sexual freedom is not what people are led to
believe," Antonio quotes Dr Armand Nicoli, a "Harvard therapist," who concluded as
early as 1965 that "somehow there has been a great deal of deception going on.
Somehow a lot of people have been deluded."44 It does not take Antonio long to name

42 Treichler discusses the naming of AIDS in "AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse," p.198; see
also Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985), pp.22-24.
43 Gene Antonio, The AIDS Cover-Up? The Real and Alarming Facts about AIDS (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1987), p.194.
44 Dr Armand Nicoli, Essays on Love (Downers Grove, 111.: Intervarsity Press, 1978), p.35; quoted in
Antonio, The AIDS Cover-Up?, p.l95. To match Antonio's claim that ,the thre~t of ~asual (heterosexual)
.' f AIDS has been played down there is Michael Fumento s conspIratorIal argument that the
transmiSSion 0 1 d F t Th M ·th if
possibility of heterosexual transm~ssion has been deliberate y exaggerate. umen 0,
.
e ) 0
Heterosexual AIDS (New York: BaSIC Books, 1990).
- 154-
the culprits in this conspiracy to dupe the American public into giving up "Biblical
standards of sexual morality": it is "homosexual activists and their sympathetic allies in
the media" who have conned America into accepting these "grossly insanitary,
pathological behaviors."45
In addition to the lab-manufacture and gay-plague theories, AIDS has been
written into many different conspiracy theories, ranging from accusations that it is a
capitalist plot to create new markets for pharmaceutical products, to a Pravda cartoon
that shows a Russian scientist handing over a vial of HIV to a CIA officer in return for
money.46 While the HIV/ AIDS epidemic has created new constellations of paranoid
fears, it has also been interpreted in the light of many existing demonological stories.
Many commentators have found in the epidemic a powerful symbol which "confirms"
their suspicions about homosexuality, drug use, and so on. What makes one story about
the origin of AIDS more plausible than another is far from straightforward. In some
gay communities the possibility of an intelligence agency conspiracy was taken as a
serious possibility from the outset, for the alternative explanations were scarcely
credible. A gay doctor in San Francisco, for example, reacted to the news about AIDS
in the following way:
A disease that killed only gay white men? It seemed unbelievable. I
used to teach epidemiology, and I had never heard of a disease that
selective. I thought, they are making this up. It can't be true. Or if
there is such a disease it must be the work of some government
agency-the F.B.I. or the C.I.A.-trying to kill us all. 47

For this doctor at least, the idea that his government might be trying to kill him was a
frighteningly plausible scenario. Certain conspiracy theories about the origin of HIV, I
would argue, need to be recognised as popular forms of representation which can have a
strategic effectiveness in contesting the monopoly of knowledge held by the political
and medical authorities which has marked the AIDS crisis. Questions of credibility in
these circumstances have less to do with precision of evidence than with notions of
cultural resonance. In many ways the theory about African men either eating, having
sex with or being bitten by a green monkey-once the "official" version of the origin of
the origin of HIV-holds as much verifiability as the lab-manufacture story.48 Both
stories gained popularity because they spoke to and articulated already existing fears
and fantasies. The theory about the government plotting against socially marginal

45 Antonio, The AIDS Cover-Up? , p.190.

46 In "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epi~emic of Signification," in AIDS: Cu.ltural
. Cultural Activism Douglas Crimp, ed. (Cambndge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), TreIchler
A na Iy S I S , '
t he ways in which AIDS has been characterised; out of her I'1st 0 f 38 Items,
. roug hi y a
enumerates some 0 f . . d' Kru "AIDS A t
third amount to conspiracy theories (pp.33-34). The Pravda cartoon IS repnnte In pey, : c
of God or the Pentagon?," p.240.
47 Cited in Treichler, "An Epidemic of Signification," p.48, n.37.
48 On the green monkey theory, see Patton, "Inventing African AIDS," in Im'ellting AIDS (London:
Routledge, 1990).
- 155 -
communities finds its "confirmation" not in the revelation of documents from the past,
but in an awareness in the present that the public health authorities and the government
remain unconcerned as long as the disease does not threaten the "general population."
Conspiracy theories about AIDS-Burroughs' highly fictional version included-
should therefore not be dismissed out of hand. Their factual allegations are always part
of a much larger context of socially contested meanings, in which factual accuracy is
not the only concern. They say as much about social epistemology as they do about
epidemiology. Even if the theory about the lab manufacture about AIDS turns out not
to be true (though with the intelligence agencies' strategy of "plausible deniability" the
matter could never be finally disproven), it is a plot which strategically brings together
several important narrative threads in the history of "deviancy" and the state. 49

VIRAL CULTURE

Some of the most powerful writings on AIDS have started from the premise
that-as I have been arguing in the case of conspiracy theories-the "facts" are
themselves enmeshed in a whole range of cultural, political and scientific discourses.
Paula Treichler, for example, insists that we "cannot ... look 'through' language to
determine what AIDS 'really' is." Rather, she concludes, "we must explore the site
where such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is
created: in language." Treichler therefore argues that "the AIDS epidemic-with its
genuine potential for global devastation-is simultaneously an epidemic of a
transmissable lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification. "50 This
position has been taken up by a variety of critics, including Douglas Crimp, Lee
51
Edelman, Cindy Patton, Susan Sontag, Simon Watney and Judith Williamson.
Burroughs' theories of the viral logic of cultural transmission are therefore obviously
extremely relevant to the discussion about HIV/AIDS. In his view a virus is never
"purely" a physical organism or "merely" a cultural fiction, but is instead an incarnation
of the word which materialises cultural imperatives (about sexuality, reproduction,
family, nation, and so on) in the body. That is, a virus is simultaneously a fact and a

49In Policing Desire: Pornography: Aids and The Media (London: Methuen/Comedia, 1987), Simon
Watney counsels against conspiracy theories of media-induce? moral panics, since, he argues, the attack
on gay men is not a sudden and inexplicable outburst, but. IS part of .a much l?nger and much lar~er
history of oppression structured by the discourses of family. and natlO~. While I ~ould agree ~Ith
Watney's Foucauldian analysis, I wo~~d also .argue that conspiracy theones can organise hopes, deSires
and fantasies as a form of popular polItIcal resistance.
50 Treichler, "Epidemic of Signification," p.33.
51 I dd'tI' t the works by Watney (cited in n.49 above), Edelman, and Williamson (cited in n.52 and
n a I on see 0
Crimp, "How to Have Promiscuity In.
an Epl' d ' ".In C'
emlC, nmp, e d ., AIDS: CuIt ura I
n. 53 b eI ow ) , h ". III M h
Analysis, Cultural Activism, and Sontag, "AIDS and Its Metap ors, In ness as etap or
(Harmonds worth : Penguin, 1989).
- 156-
value, and therefore needs to be understood in both material and semiotic terms.
For Burroughs, then, the task of investigating and tackling a virus combines
both medical and cultural intervention. In Cities of the Red Night, for example, Clem
Snide's enquiries into the mysterious B-23 virus and its young gay victims lead him
from forensic examinations of the decapitated corpses, to a short manuscript entitled
"Cities of the Red Night," which tells the story of the ancient cities. But the book turns
out to be merely a copy, and Snide is commissioned by the Venusian Iguana twins to
recover the original. In response to the detective's scepticism about the need for the
originals, the Iguana sister replies that:

"Changes, M~ Snide, can only be e~fected by alterations in the original.

The only thIng not prerecorded In a prerecorded universe are the
prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word
for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble
it-it will reassemble in the same form." (CRN, 151)

In Cities of the Red Night fighting the B-23 virus therefore becomes inextricably linked
to challenging the cultural "prerecordings" in which the origins and transmission of the
virus are fixed. The copies of this book-within-a-book "are composed in a variety of
styles and periods":

Some of them seem to stem from the 1920s of The Great Gatsby, old
sport, and others to derive from the Edwardian era of Saki, reflecting an
unbearably flawed boyishness. There is an underlying current of
profound frivolity, with languid young aristocrats drawling epigrams in
streets of disease, war, and death. There is a Rover Boys-Tom Swift
story line where boy heroes battle against desperate odds. (CRN, 151-
52)
It is Snide's task to stop these powerful cultural scripts falling into enemy hands, and he
decides to do this by fabricating the complete originals. He speculates that the originals
"may contain the truth, which these books cover with a surface so horrible and so
nauseously prettified that it remains impervious as a mirror ... and as misleading"
(CRN, 152-53). Book III of Burroughs' novel emanates from Snide's rescripted version
of the "originals." What it reveals are the sexual violence and panic which are
"prettified" by the Boy's Own stories, and brought back to the surface by Snide,
Burroughs' substitute novelist figure. Only by recombining the viral pattern of the
"original," Snide believes, can the power of these narratives of masculinity-and the B-
23 virus-be defused. For Burroughs, as well as for Treichler, Patton, Watney and
other critics, fighting viruses is as much a matter of reshaping dominant narrative
descriptions as it is a question of obtaining medical prescriptions.
What Burroughs' novels contribute in particular to these arguments is their self-
awareness as fictional constructs. In Cities of the Red Night the story of the B-23 virus
is plotted in a self-consciously fictional way. For example, the novel contains within
itself two further books entitled "Cities of the Red Night," namely the pamphlet of the
Iguana twins, and the fabricated version produced by Clem Snide. The final section of

- 157 -
the novel operates as a series of Chinese boxes, in which the story of the Cities is
framed and reframed, first as a dream by three American boys recovering from a drug
overdose in a Greek hospital, then as play contained within a vast gymnasium, and
finally as a story written by Audrey Carsons, one of the characters within the stories of
the Red Cities. In this novel Burroughs once again deploys his trope that "reality" is a
film produced by those in power, and there are many references to cinematic and
theatrical mechanisms.
Most importantly, there is the scene in which Snide is kidnapped and taken to
the headquarters of the CIA-friendly Countesses. The episode is a hammed-up version
of a James Bond story. At the heavily-guarded secret hideout the renegade, shadowy
forces of evil have established a rocket-launching pad as part of an insidious and
improbable plan to take over the world through selective biowarfare, repopulating it
with thirty "ideal specimens of white Anglo-Saxon youth" (CRN, 180). At the centre of
the scene is one of those set-piece dialogues in which the villains reveal to the hero
their devilish plans (they are going to dispose of him anyway). Doctor Pierson outlines
the plot to Snide, and reveals that they want him to join their campaign:

The table of thirty boys flashed in front of my eyes. "Pretty neat. And
you want me to write the scenario."
"That's it. You've written enough already to get the ball rolling."
(CRN, 181).

Snide is called upon to help pre-script the story of a viral epidemic, which is itself
already heavily indebted to the codes of pulp fiction genres. By repeatedly
fictionalising in very self-reflexive ways the stories in which viral epidemics are told,
Burroughs' novels serve to bring to light the political process of "naturalisation" which
surrounds the medical discussion of disease. In her essay, "Every Virus Tells a Story:
The Meanings of HIV and AIDS," Judith Williamson seeks to highlight "the wider
sense in which AIDS takes its place within the narrative systems along whose tracks
events seem to glide quite naturally."52 Lee Edelman develops this approach in "The
Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and 'AIDS,'" arguing that:

the "AIDS" epidemic ... serves as the breedi~g ground f~r any nUI?ber
of figural associations or projections whose vlfulence ?env~s preCIsely
from their naturalized presentation under the aspe~t of hteraht~. Ind~~?,
. . . the most disturbing feature of the W estern dIsco~rse on AIDS IS
the way in which the literal is recurrently and tendentIously produced as
a figure whose figurality remains strategically occluded-and thus a
figure that can be used to effect the most repressive political ends. 53

Novels such as Cities of the Red Night, I would argue, consistently refuse to naturalise
the fictional scenarios in which disease is written, thereby producing a strategic

52 Judith Williamson, "Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meanings of HIV and AIDS," in Taking Liberties.
Erica Carter and Simon Watney, eds (London: Serpent's Tail, 1989), p.69.
53 Lee Edelman, "The Plague of Discourse," in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural
Theory (London: Routledge, 1994), p.80.

- 158 -
 repoliticisation of the discourse of medicine.
In addition to their emphasis on the virology of culture, Burroughs' novels focus
attention on the culture of virology. His scenarios of viral invasion are scripted in an
exaggerated version of the language and style of Cold War thrillers and science fiction,
but the development of virology and immunology were themselves caught up in the
cultural logic of those times. In her summary of the history of these two branches of
science, Cindy Patton explains how both were recognised as independent disciplines
only in the postwar period when new technology could "prove" the existence of the
microscopic organisms which each theorised. Moreover, Patton continues,
"immunology came to public attention in the 1960s"; Burroughs, for example, mentions
in The Job reading The Mechanisms of Virus Infection, a collection published in 1963
which aspired to present a "balanced picture of the present state of knowledge ... ,
together with free speculations and discussions about much that remains to be
discovered. "54 Patton describes how in the 1960s "immunology provided the grammar
for the shifting dominant metaphors of disease from offense to civil defense":

Increasing concern with domestic unrest and lingering Cold War

paranoia demanded that our immune systems should conform to a
policing and confessional ideology which suggested, not that the
Commies had got through the door, but rather that there was a more
general weakness within the body politic. . . . Autoimmunity-a
condition in which the body "attacks" itself-created a theoretical
problem, but the anxious sixties culture had a ready answer. . . .
Pathology was no longer conceived in terms of an assault by an
overwhelming enemy, but as a slow degeneration that occurred after the
tolerant host had diminished its controls or surveillance. 55

What Patton's brief history demonstrates is that science borrowed heavily from sixties
narratives of invasion, infiltration, and, finally, uneasy assimilation. But it is also
important to note that Cold War politics legitimated its claims by reference to the
"natural" sciences of virology and immunology, with talk of defending the national
body from alien invaders and infiltrators. A self-perpetuating loop of justification
establishes itself, then, in which politics naturalises its project by appeal to a science
that had drawn its terms from contemporary politics. 56 In summary, I want to suggest
that Burroughs' exaggeratedly fictional cross-contamination of both discourses drives a
wedge into the circuits of exchange between the literal and the figural, and the natural
and the political.

54 Wilson Smith, ed., Mechanisms of Virus Infection (London: Academic Press, 1963), p.vii.
55 Patton, Inventing AIDS, p.60.
56 The mutual naturalisation of medicine and politics has continu~d in the AIDS era. I~ Donna ~araw~y.
"Th Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self m Immune System DI~course, and ~
Cyb~rg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism, in the Late .T,:"entleth Century," m
··
S lmzans, Cyb rgso and Women'
, · The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free . ASSOCiatIOn BookslRoutledge,
1991) Donna Haraway discusses the postmodernisation of immunological metaphors,. from the language
of ba;t1egrounds to images of Star W~s/~ulf War-style infor~atio? technology m the form of the
military's new doctrine of C 3I (commumcatlOn-command-control-mtelhgence).

- 159 -
BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES

The AIDS crisis has been written into a whole series of interlocking divisions
which have structured public perceptions and policies about the epidemic: not only
between the natural and the political, but also between the innocent and the guilty; the
so-called "general population" and the "at risk" groups; gay and straight; official
knowledge and pseudo-science; the material and the informational; the human and the
viral; host and parasite; the self and the non-self, and so on. 57 Although the conspiracy
scenarios deployed in Cities of the Red Night and the Nova trilogy serve to destabilise
the relationship between the natural and the political, in many other ways Burroughs'
work is organised by a comparable series of Manichean divisions, generated by the
countless scenarios of incorporation and invasion which threaten the vulnerable self.
The conspiracy theory about the B-23 virus, for instance, represents it as a totally alien
enemy, the responsibility of an evil other, a manreuvre which is necessary in order to
posit a purely victimised "us." In this final section I want to argue that at critical
junctures Burroughs' texts produce a breakdown of these "paranoid" distinctions, and
that this failure to maintain body boundaries is ultimately a more productive strategy of
resistance than an ever more insistent manning of the barriers. In particular, I want to
look at how these distinctions begin to blur first at the microscopic level, then in
relation to the individual body, and finally in the realm of the social body.

(i) Horror Autotoxicus

Many discussions of the HIV virus have figured it as an invading agent in a

vicious war fought out in the "inner space" of the body. For example, a National
Geographic article entitled "Our Immune System: The Wars Within" includes pictures
(under the caption "Cell Wars") of macrophagocytes enveloping a bacterium in a
58
photograph that looks like nothing so much as an episode from Star Wars. The article
uses a militarised language of enemies and invasion:
Besieged by a vast array of invisible enemies, the human body. enlists a
remarkably complex corps of internal bodyguards to battle the Invaders.
They can cleanse the lungs of foreign particles, rid the bloodstream59 of
infectious microorganisms, and weed tissue of renegade cancer cells.

When it comes to discussing HIV, the body-as-battlefield becomes fused with elements
from an espionage tale:

57 Treichler offers an exhaustive list of the binary oppositions which have structured thinking about
AIDS, in "An Epidemic of Signification," pp.63-64.
58 Peter Jaret, "Our Immune System," National Geographic, June 1986, pp.702-35 (the photographs are

by Lennart Nilsson).
59 Jaret, "Our Immune System," p.702.
- 160-
 Many of these enemies have evolved devious methods to escape
detection. The viruses that cause influenza and the common cold, for
e~ample, co~st~~tly mutate, changing their fingerprints. The AIDS
v~fl:1s, mos~ InsIdIouS of all, employs a range of strategies, including
hIdIng. out In healthy cells. What makes it fatal is its ability to invade
and kIll helper T cells, thereby short-circuiting the entire immune
response. 60

The inert virus is imbued with malicious agency, while the self is repeatedly
metonymised into ever more microscopic particles of defence, forming immunological
homunculi which are figured as miniaturised special agents. This kind of
anthropomorphised plotting of alien invasion is familiar to us from Burroughs'
apocalyptic Nova campaign, with his call to "fight cell by cell through bodies and mind
screens of the earth" (NE, 59). In the sixties, Burroughs characterised himself as a
"cosmonaut of inner space," and in the Nova trilogy the body indeed becomes a
miniaturised cosmic battlefield, fought over by opposing intergalactic agents. 61
"Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation, the narrator announces in the
"Atrophied Preface" to Naked Lunch, but the fight for the body seems doomed,
"because all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out" (NL, 163). Unlike the kind of
scientific popularisations of cell warfare represented by the National Geographic
article, Burroughs' scenarios are always in danger of collapsing the distinction between
the vehicle and the tenor in the metaphorical contract. His comparisons can take on a
life of their own, so that viruses become metaphors for invasion just as military
invasion provides the metaphorical vehicle for viral activity.
Moreover, whereas the dramatisations of the immunological conflict in
(popular) scientific discussions often mask the strangeness of conceiving of the self-as-
macrophagocyte, Burroughs' self-consciously science-fictional imagery of the body
serves explicitly to defamiliarise the self that is under attack, to make it as "alien" as the
invading virus. 62 So, for example, the most intimate bodily functions come under
scrutiny:
The realization that something as familiar to you as the movement of
your intestines the sound of your breathing the be~tin~ of your hea~ is
also alien and hostile does make one feel a bIt Insecure at fust.
Remember that you can separate yourself from the "Oth~r Ha~f' from
the word. The word is spliced in with the sound of your mtestmes and
breathing with the beating of your heart. (ITE, 57)
The task becomes to make unfamiliar what seems most natural about the body. In order
better to defend the self, it becomes necessary to encourage, as it were, the

60 Jaret, "Our Immune System," p.709.

61 Burroughs coins the phrase "cosmonaut of inner space" in "Censorship," Transatlantic Review. 11

(Winter 1962), p.6; cited in Skerl, William S. Burroughs, p.72.

62 S & ample Elizabeth Martin's discussion of the self-horror a group of students expre~sed when
ee, lor ex , ., . h "h t'l nt"
h h d them a documentary about spenn cells "invading" and survlvmg 10 t e os I e envlronme
~feasw~:an. Martin, "Body Narratives, Body Boundaries," in Cultural Studies. Lawrence Grossberg.
Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.409-23.
- 161 -
immunological concept of horror autotoxicus, a horror of the self. 63 The narrator
recommends a programme of violent defamiliarisation of the workings of the body,
which involves recording the sounds of bodily processes, then "splic[ing] your body
sounds in with air hammers," so as to "blast jolt vibrate the 'Other Half right out into
the street" (TTE, 50). This process of defamiliarisation is developed in the "soft
typewriter" imagery, which serves to make strange both body and machine. This
figuration of the body as a biological machine captures a sense of it as incarnate
information; fused at the level of DNA, the categories of the material and the semiotic,
the natural and unnatural, become blurred.
In crucial ways Burroughs' fictions of cell-by-cell resistance undermine the
humanist faith in self-possession which animates his libertarian project of escaping
externally imposed control. In a moving passage from the "Atrophied Preface" to
Naked Lunch the narrator recognises that penetration and possession by alien influences
are not necessarily momentary disasters, but a permanent condition:

"Possession" they call it. ... Sometimes an entity jumps in the body-
outlines waver in yellow orange jelly-and hands move to disembowel
the passing whore or strangle the neighbor child in hope of alleviating a
chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to goof
off now and again .... Wrong! I am never here . ... Never that isfully in
possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves ....
Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation .... No matter how tight
Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this
straight jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead
of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien
inspection. 64 (NL, 174)
For Burroughs, then, the body is simultaneously something you have, and that which
you are. It is both a treacherous "straight jacket of jelly" in which you are trapped, and
a fortress to be patrolled. In his writings the dividing lines between "self' and "other,"
"here" and "there," and "inside" and "outside" are continually being renegotiated,
contested, and resisted. Burroughs never gives up on the vigilant patrolling of the
boundaries of his body, but neither does he ignore the insight that, at the microscopic
level, the permeability and the alterity of one's own body ensure that what is to count as
the self cannot be guaranteed in advance. In this way, Burroughs' novels rethink the
fiction of a self-identity in isolation from society, at the same time that they promote a
strengthening of the immune system's powers of recognition of non-self. His fictions

63Paul Ehrlich's theory of horror autotoxicus is discussed in Arthur M, Silverstein, A History of

Immunology (London: Academic Press, 1989), pp,160-189,
64 In the Introduction to Queer, Burroughs discusses how he "live[s] w~~h the cO,nstant ,threat of
'on and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control (p,18); 10 particular, he
possessl • ' , "d ' b th "U 1
attributes the shooting of his wife in the infam~us W,tlham Tell lOCI ent to posses,slon , ~ : ,g ~
S ' 't" In his biography of the writer, Barry Miles gives an account ~f, Bun:oughs p~rtlclpatlOn In <I
pI,n , A ' n sweat lodge ceremony designed to rid himself of the spmt which he claIms has haunted
natIve menca . , d ' V' , 1993)
. ' th hoou'ng I'n 1951 Miles William Burroughs: El Hombre In\'lSlb/e (Lon on, Irgtn. •
hIm stnce e s ,.
pp,261-65,
- 162 -
thus produce the kind of immunological remapping of the body which Donna Haraway
argues is vital in the age of AIDS. Haraway claims that, in addition to militaristic
scenarios of the protected and isolated self,

i~unity can also be conceived in terms of shared specificities; of the

~enu-permeable self able to engage with others (human and non-human,
lnne~ ~~~ outer~, but always with finite consequences; of situated
posslblhtles and Impossibilities of individuation and identification' and
of partial fusions and dangers. The problematic multipliciti~s of
P?stmodern sel.ves, so potently figured and repressed in the lumpy
dIscourses of l~munology ~ must be brought into other emerging
Western and multl-cultural dIscourses on health sickness individuality
humanity, and death. 65 ' "

I would argue that Burroughs' fictions indeed bring together scientific and cultural
narratives about the body, which serve to provide new mythologies of the self in the age
of AIDS.

(ii) Just Say No

The "just say no" logic of the 1980s and 1990s has brought with it a fanatical
66
quarantining of the self in general, and of gay/drug-using individuals in particular.
The widespread and often fantastical panic about the "exchange of bodily fluids" in the
era of AIDS has produced spectacles such as the use of protective rubber gloves by San
Francisco police force at the 1983 Gay Freedom Day Parade. 67 Noting that an opinion
poll "showed that an enormous number of people believe that homosexual intercourse
can cause AIDS even if neither party had the virus," Burroughs commented, "Now
that's an immaculate conception !"68 As we have seen, his novels frequently stage
scenes of horror in the face of an invasion or incorporation of the self by another. I now
want to argue, however, that in a series of key themes and techniques they also open up
the possibility that throwing a cordon sanitaire around oneself might ultimately be
futile, and even undesirable.
The first example of interpersonal merging I want to explore arises from the
countless bathhouse scenes in Burroughs' novels. During the eighties the issue of
closing bathhouses was fiercely debated. Medical commentators and public health
officials painted lurid pictures of bathhouses as "breeding zones" of diseased

65 Haraway, "Biopolitics," p.225. In "Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Othe~ Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body
in the Postmodern," in Essays in Postmodern Culture, Eyal Amnan and John Unsworth, eds (OUP,
1993), pp.37-56, Allison Frai~erg de~el0r.s. Hara~~y' s notions of permeable selves in her discussion of
the ambiguous politics of keep 109 bodIes dIscrete 10 the era of AIDS.
66 Goode and Ben-Yehuda outline the main contours of the War on Drugs in Chapter 12 of their Moral

Panics.
67 Details about this incident are recorded in Shilts, And the Band, pp.334-35.

68"Burroughs: On Tear Gas, Queers, Naked Lunch, and the Ginsberg Affair," ~n interview with David
Ehrenstein, Advocate, 581 (16 July 1991), p.43; cited in Edelman, Homographesls, p.257, n.15.

- 163 -
 promiscuity. While some gay writers and activists such as Randy Shilts concurred in
closing down the bathhouses as a necessary measure for survival of the urban gay
communities, others have insisted that the bathhouses were an integral and important
feature of radical gay sexual politics. 69 In his autobiographical account of the bathhouse
culture of New York in the 1960s Samuel Delaney seeks not to "romanticize that time
into some cornucopia of sexual plenty," but rather to keep the memory-and therefore
the possibility-alive for a future that is currently scarcely imaginable:

What is the reason, anyone might ask, for writing such a book as this
half.a dozen ye~rs in~o th.e .era of AIDS? Is it simply nostalgia for a
~edIcally u!1feasIb~e ~IbertIms~? Not at all. If I may indulge in my one
pIec~ o! SCIence fICtIon for thIS memoir, it is my firm suspicion, my
COnVIctIon, and my hope that once the AIDS crisis is brought under
control, the West will see a sexual revolution to make a laughing stock
of any social movement that till now has borne the name. 70

Foucault, for instance, speculated in an interview that the public's horror of bathhouses
was tinged with fascinated jealousy at the lack of regulation and boundedness in the
relationships between gay men:

I believe it is politically important that sexuality should be able to

function as it functions in the bathhouses. There you meet men who are
like you, who are like what you are for them: nothing other than bodies
with which combinations, fabrications of pleasure are going to be
possible. You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own
past, in your own identity. It is regrettable that such sites do not still
exist for heterosexuals. 7 !

Burroughs' depictions of bathhouses tap into both sides of this debate. The narrator of
Nova Express warns the reader in the opening debriefing that "Their Garden of Delights
is a terminal sewer," "a man-eating trap that ends in green goo" (NE, 6). Although the
narrator warns the reader to "stay out of the Garden of Delights," the novel repeatedly
shifts into scenes of homoerotic combinations. On the one hand, the blurring of body
boundaries is always liable in Burroughs' cosmography to mutate into horrific scenes of
cannibalistic violence. On the other hand, the proliferating permutations of bodies and
pleasures offers a model of escape from the rigid constrictions of the conventional self
into a transpersonal zone of polymorphous identity. In particular, a sense of mystique
is reserved for the descriptions of anal penetration, in which the "exchange of bodily
fluids" seems to produce a momentary exchange of identity, brought about by the
ejaculation in one man's anus appearing to spurt out of the other's penis. More
significantly, these orgasms bring not only a temporary "jump" into another's body, but

69 For an overview of the debates, see Crimp, "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic," and Leo
Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" in AIDS, Crimp, ed., pp.197-222.
70Samuel Delaney, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village,
1957-1965 (New York: New American Library, 1988), p.175.
7!Michel Foucault, "Le Gai Savoir," Mec, June 1988, p.36; quoted and translated by Savran.
Communists, Cowboys, and Queers, p.163.

- 164-
a jump cut in the textual narration, a change of scene and time.
The bathhouse scenes are often punctuated by ritual hangings, which likewise
function to violently disrupt the borders of personal identity:

I saw him reach up with an obsidian knife and cut the rope held the
platform a~d I fell and silver light popped in my eyes like a flash bulb-
I got a. whIff of ozone and penny arcades and then I felt it start way
down I!l my. toes thes~ bone. wrenching spasms emptied me and
everyth~ng spIlled out ShIt runnIng down the back of my thighs and no
C?ntrolin my ~ody.paralyzed, twisting up in these spasms the jissomjust
SIphoned me fIght Into Xolotl's cock and next thing I was in his ass and
balls flopping around spurting all over the floor. (SM, 17)

In an obvious way (albeit ignored by most critics), these episodes relate to hardcore slm
practices of erotic strangulation. They also form a vivid emblem of involuntary action,
a lack of control over the boundaries of one's bodily fluids, combined with a corporeal
rebellion of spontaneous erection and orgasm which takes over not only the victim, but
also the spectators through the viral logic of pornography. Furthermore, for Burroughs
the hanging enacts the basic exchange of exploitative sexuality, in which the surplus
value of energy is literally "creamed off' youth by those in power, a situation which is
made all the more stark by the colonial framework of many of the hangings, in which
native boys are hanged by older expatriates. Yet in spite of this model of violent sexual
politics, the hanging scenes also disturbingly offer a mythology of out-of-body
experience. The moment of orgasm is both a flash bulb which imprints physical
conditioning on the photographic paper of the body (because "sex and pain form flesh
identity" (ITE, 130)), and also a moment of escape from identity, through a
transposition into another body. The hangings are thus a brutal means of breaking open
the bodily prison to transplant the self into a new environment and historical period;
they come to represent, in effect, a form of time-travel. The narrator of Cities of the
Red Night explains the logic of this forcible rupture of the self from its moorings in the
here and now:
a difficulty in organ transplants is that they are r~jec.ted as a ~oreign
body. Drugs must be administered to susp~nd t~e reJectIon. ~ t~IS case,
the shared experience of being hanged WIll dIssolve the rejectIon ~hat
would otherwise occur, giving rise to the phenomenon of mul~Iple
personalities, where only one personality can occupy a body at ~)J~e tl~e.
The hanging experience acts as a solvent. The two personalItIes WIll
blend into one. (CRN, 137)
In Cities of the Red Night a blending of personalities is also achieved via the head
decapitation experiments, and, in The Ticket That Exploded, with the descriptions of the
U.S. Army's experiments with sensory deprivation tanks. These tanks induce a "loss of
body outline, awareness and location of the limbs occurs quickly, giving rise to panic in
many American subjects" (TTE, 84). In each of these cases, the permutation of
personality forms a positive, if disturbing, release from the prison of identity into the

- 165 -
freedom of "communal anonymity."72
This possibility finds its most developed exploration in Burroughs' linguistic
experiments with cut-ups. These can take the relatively simple form of a splicing
together of his own text with that of another writer, producing a textual analogue of the
head-swapping experiments in Cities of the Red Night. So, for example, in Nova
Express a student counsellor is called on to write a legal brief for a trial about the
biological take-over by one life form of another through the control of the oxygen
supply. The submission to the Biological Court is "a preparation derived from one
page of Kafka passed through the student's brief and the original statement back and
forth until a statement of biologic position emerges" (NE, 138). Kafka's paranoid
visions of bureaucratic control are biologised and mythologised into Burroughs' science
fiction scenario. In the combined result phrases from each of the three sources are still
recognisable, but the new hybrid version takes on an identity of its own. The hybrid
becomes a "third mind," as the title of Burroughs' "explanatory" book on his writing
method terms it. 73
These linguistic experiments in effect reconceive the notion of "collaboration,"
from a mark of failed immunological resistance (when the body's defence system lets in
the enemy), to a model of artistic cooperation and mutation. Burroughs'
"collaborations" range from literal shared projects (principally with Brion Gysin),
through comparatively simple splicings such as the Kafka piece, to the complex cut-ups
of the Nova trilogy. These latter examples weave together phrases from Burroughs'
own writings (both previous novels and the work-in-progress), immediate sense
impressions, and the many strands of his reading: literature (principally, T.S. Eliot,
Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and Graham Greene), popular and alternative science
(including Wilhelm Reich, and L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology), pulp fiction (such as
Amazing Stories, detective fiction, westerns, and science fiction), and mass culture (for
instance, advertising slogans, popular songs, pornography, and graffiti). In an essay
entitled "Les Voleurs," Burroughs describes how he had "been conditioned to the idea
of words as property-one's 'very own words'" (AM, 20). Once he had abandoned this
idea, he felt free to instigate a shameless campaign of plagiarism of the phrases, ideas
and characters which struck him in his reading and general experience. In a spoof
manifesto (written in collaboration with Brion Gysin) he encourages the artist to get
"out of the closet and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert
halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. . .. A bas
['originalite, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons as it creates" (AM, 21). For

72 Robin Lydenberg uses the phrase "communal anonymit~" ~n h~r .discussion of Bu~ro~g~s'
intertextuality, in Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice In WIllwm S. Burrough~ FIctIOn
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1~87), p.49; in ~, ~i~!la~ ~ashion, Geoff ~~rd wntes abo~~
Burroughs' "random and promiscuous couplmg of phrases, m WIlham Burroughs. Literary Outlaw,
Cambridge Quarterly, 22 (1993), p.3Sl.
73 Burroughs (with Brion Gysin), The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978).

- 166-
 Burroughs, then, cut-ups provide an escape from the treasure houses of individuality
into an anonymous intertextuality, the literary equivalent of the bathhouse.
Language becomes a "common vocal apparatus" in which characters form ,
merge, and dissolve:

Sooner or later The Vigilante, The Rube, Lee The Agent, A.J., Clem and
Jo~y The Ergot T'Y ins , Hassan O'Leary the After Birth Tycoon, The
~a~lor, T,~e Externunator! Andrew Keif, "Fats" Terminal, Doc Benway,
FIngers Shafer are subject to say the same thing in the same words to
oc~upy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time.
D sIn~ a common vocal apparatus complete with all metabolic appliances
that IS to be the same person - a most inaccurate way of expressing
Recognition. (NL, 175)

Because they say the same things, their bodies and their characters come to occupy the
same time-space in moments of textual intersection. The strict boundaries of self and
non-self dissolve at the microscopic level of linguistic recombination and mutation.
For all his aspirations to immunisation, Burroughs' "original" sentences and those he
has "copied" become fused, and stylistic identity becomes unstable, as the social
totality is incorporated into every cell of the body of text. Although much of Naked
Lunch is concerned with "paranoid" attempts to avoid assimilation or infiltration, the
shared intersections of discourse reduce the chances of Burroughs' numerous carny
characters and autobiographical disguises being apprehended or "recognised" by the
enemy. On this view, a rigid insistence on separateness can be as threatening as the
loss of personal definition.
Burroughs' novels therefore form highly ambiguous texts for the "just say no"
decade. Although, as Sheila Jeffreys asserts, Burroughs is "the darling of the
counterculture" and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, it is important to remember that
his fierce attack on prurience is countered by an equally adamant distrust of all sexual
pleasures. 74 As much as his writings make the case for sexual freedom, they also enact
a struggle towards a freedom from sexuality. Furthermore, while (in Geoff Ward's
phrase) the "random and promiscuous coupling of phrases" gestures towards a non-
figural "promiscuity" whose absence is lamented by gay commentators from Delaney to
Foucault, it also brings about a rethinking of what promiscuity might mean. For the
notion of promiscuity only takes shape against a background of stable relationships and
stable identities, and Burroughs' experimental zones of behaviour and language call
both categories into question.

(iii) Recognition

In the AIDS epidemic the fear of immunological and personal contamination

74Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: The Women's
Press, 1990), p.76.
- 167 -
has been replicated in various ways on the social level. It was not until Thanksgiving
1987-some six years and 25,644 known deaths into the epidemic in America-that
President Reagan ordered the Department of Health and Human Services, as he so
tellingly put it, "to determine as soon as possible the extent to which the AIDS virus has
.
penet rat ed our socIety. "75 Th·
IS comment expresses the logic of containment which sees
the HIV virus as a promiscuous sexuality which threatens to violate the clean body of
the American populace. AIDS became inscribed into a rhetoric which divides society
into "our population" (read: white, straight, monogamous, non-drug-using, family-
centred), and the so-called "four-H risks groups," of homosexuals, heroin addicts,
Haitians and haemophiliacs. These classifications came under strain, however, first
when it emerged around 1983 that women and babies were HIV positive (that is, it
could be amongst "us"), and then in the summer of 1985 when it was disclosed that
Rock Hudson was being treated for AIDS-related illnesses (which was taken to mean
either that one of "us" could turn out to be "one of them," or that the disease could
spread to the "general population").76 The cover story of u.s. News and World Report
in January 1987, for example, announced that "suddenly the disease of them is the
disease of US."77
These confusions over "safe"I"at risk" categories contributed to a crisis of
recognition as the strategy of containment came under stress. Senator Jesse Helms
insisted that "the logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected," while the
columnist William F. Buckley proposed that "everyone detected with AIDS should be
tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttocks to
protect victimization of other homosexuals."78 For some Americans, then, recognising
a homosexual or a drug user has become of paramount importance, in order to maintain
the shakily constructed notion of an "innocent" "general population." This could only
be possible if homosexuality and drug use were fixed identities which encouraged
disease, rather than there being a set of practices and acts by which transmission of
infection can take place unless precautions are taken. As we have seen, although
Burroughs' writings present graphic depictions of homosexuality and drug addiction,
they also work to destabilise the rigid classifications which have allowed the
persecution of some people under these categories.
In a more general way, his novels interrogate the concept of recognition. For

75 Quoted in Crimp, "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism," in AIDS, Crimp, ed., p.ll.
76 Treichler ("AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse") and Patton (Sex an~ Germs) discuss t~e
gendering of AIDS in the early eighties. Richard Meyer discusses the. reconstructlo~ of R~ck Hudson s
life and death in "Rock Hudson's Body," in Inside/Out: Lesbian TheOries, Gay Theories, DIana Fuss, ed.
(London: Routledge, 1992), pp.259-88.
77 Cited in Treichler, "AIDS, Gender and Biomedical Discourse," p.193.
78 The Jesse Helms comment is cited in Crimp, "AIDS: Cultural ~nal~sis/Cul~ural Activism:: ,p.8.:
William F. Buckley, Jr., "Crucial Steps in Combating the AIDS EpIdemIC: IdentIfy All the Carners.
New York Times, 18 March 1986, p.A27.

- 168 -
Burroughs, recognition is both a necessary part of the immunological defence of the
self, and a misrepresentation of the possibilities of escape into the "common vocal
apparatus" of language. It is also both the paradigm for sexual relationships between
men, and a source of anxiety when mutual recognition fails.79 In Burroughs' writings
these dramas of recognition and rejection are not purely autobiographical, but are
presented as part of a larger social crisis of knowledge of homosexuality. In The Soft
Machine for example, one routine features the Public Agent, a violently homophobic
character in the style of Mike Hammer. The Agent receives his "instructions from
street signs, newspapers and pieces of conversation," as if the imperative to persecute
queers and junkies is written into the culture surrounding him. He describes his current
assignment, which involves "intercept[ing] blue movies of James Dean before the stuff
gets to those queers supporting a James Dean habit":

The first one of the day I nailed in a subway pissoir: "You fucking
nance!" I screamed. [... ] And I sloughed him with the iron glove and
his face smashed like a rotten cantaloupe. Then I hit him in the lungs
and blood jumped out his mouth, nose and eyes, spattered three
commuters across the room huddled in gabardine topcoats and grey
flannel suits under that. The broken fruit was lying with his head
damning the piss running over his face and the whole trough a light pink
from his blood. "I can smell them fucking queers," I sniffed warningly.
"And if there's one thing lower than a nance it's a spot of bloody grass."
(SM, 27-28)
The Public Agent prides himself on his supposedly unerring powers of recognition,
which seem to depend on a metonymic compression of the "smell" of homosexuality,
sodomy, "shit" [=junk], and public toilets. 80 Yet, for all his attempts at containment, he
is unable to prevent the whole trough turning a "light pink," as homosexuality
overflows its bounds. The phrase "rotten cantaloupe" echoes the description in Naked
Lunch of Bradly the Buyer who engulfs the young rentboy in green slime, with a "stink
like a rotten cantaloupe" (NL, 27). The extreme violence is thus associated with the
fear of incorporation, of losing a clear distinction, in this case, between gay and
straight. In the novel this scene is cut up immediately, with the resulting rearrangement

79 Queer provides a poignant fictionalised account of Burroughs' unrequited passi~n for the Allerton
character with whom he travelled to South America in search of yage; the novel contams many scenes of
"misrecognition" between the novelist and his companion.
80 Burroughs' novels occasionally make a connection between paranoia and scatology. I~ Th~ Soft
Machine, for example, a cut-up sequence momentarily crystallises into a courtroom scene, With a Ju~ge
sentencing someone who stands "accused of soliciting with prehensile piles" (SM, 169). The pro~ecutlOn
seems to consist of a "paranoid ex-Communist" whose rantings hint a~ a ~~fia-Moscow conspIracy to
create homosexual pollution: "'I want you to smell this bar stool ... Stmk JU,I,:e, and ~o~ ma~ q.uote me
has been applied by paid hoodlums constipated with. Mosc~w goldwasse~. In thiS ~Ight It IS worth
noting some of the contributions to the longest runmng senes of letters m the TLS, m response to a
review of Dead Fingers Talk, the week before Kennedy was shot in Novem~er 1963. The ano~ymous
. ote that "struggling upstream through [the book] is not unlike wadmg through the drams of a
reviewer wr 1 ., d' h d b t
. 't" ("Ugh "TLS 14 November 1963, p.919). Edith Sitwell, for examp e, Jome III tee a e.
b Ig CI Y ... , , . .. TLS
writing that "I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose to other people's lavatones ( .
28 Nov. 1963, p.993).
- 169-
producing a hiatus of recognition:

P~ss running over his face. !?on't know who I work for. I get mine from
hIS blood, news~ap,~rs and pIeces. "I can smell them fucking the air the
~ay a vulture wIll. In any case bloody grass. I sloughed him with the
Iron r,?om and stra~gled him like a rotten cantaloupe. [... ] I was the
bloo~ Jumped out his mouth, nose receding flesh to finish. [... ] So I am
publIc agent and the whole trough a light pink instruction from street.
(SM, 28-29)

In this distorted variation, the queer-basher now receives a "light pink instruction from
the street," as if he were automatically attracted to the scene of sodomy. It is now
ambiguous whether it is instructions from "newspapers and pieces," or whether it is
something else which he gets from "his blood." More confusing still, we read that "I
was the blood jumped out his mouth," a disjunction which suggests, in the surreal logic
of the unconscious that the cut-ups can reveal, that the Agent is already incorporated
into the body of his victim, or even that his own identity has bled into a homosexual
form. The loss of grammatical coordinates means that "I" am now both the "public
agent" and the "whole trough."
Within the logic of The Soft Machine as a whole, the Public Agent chapter is set
against the Private Eye routine: the reverse image of the public recognition of queers as
a threat is the private recognition of desire between gay men, albeit a desire that is
implicated in the complexities of the Nova conflict. Clem Snide the "Private Ass Hole"
is on the trail of Johnny, who is involved in the international erotic strangulation plot.
The boy "gave me the sign twisting his head to the left and up" in the imitation of a
hanging, and Snide "gave him the sign back" (SM, 75). The Nova Police then catch up
with the Private Eye (whose loyalty is far from clear), and they look through the photos
in his files, exclaiming '''there's one of them'" (SM, 76). Snide continues his quest in
Rome, and at a camply decorated gay bar he gives "the sign" to a "boy very dark with
kinky hair," who comes back with the detective to his hotel. As the boy sucks himself
back into shape after orgasm, he declares warmly, "'I can see you're one of our own'"
(SM, 78). The moment of sexual connection is far from straightforward, however,
because the boy turns out to be working for the Contessa di Vile, one of the principal
orchestrators of the Nova heat. Yet the "secret" signs of queerness can also offer the
basis for the formation of a counter-conspiracy, literally "breathing together" with
shared desire. In Burroughs' writing, then, erotic recognition represents a dangerous
and subversive counterpart to the homophobic identification of deviancy as something
to be smashed.
In these recodings of the agent-hero, Burroughs latches onto the contradictory
poles of secrecy and obviousness which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies as
structuring the epistemology of the closet. She perceives that homophobic knowledge
frequently vacillates between the wisdom that "it takes one to know one," and the

- 170-
assertion of the queer-basher that "I know one when I see one."81 Sedgwick goes on to
argue that much anxiety has been aroused in Western society in this century by the need
to maintain the impossible dividing line between what she terms "homosocial"
behaviour and homosexual activity. On this model, nothing brings men closer together
than shared homophobia, but that very proximity can generate desires which threaten to
undermine the rituals of male entitlement. Men can experience what Sedgwick terms
"homosexual panic" either from the waywardness of their own same-sex desires, or
from the fear of becoming the object of such desires. "Because the paths of male
entitlement," Sedgwick explains, "required certain intense male bonds that were not
readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable
state of what I am calling male homosexual panic became the normal condition of male
heterosexual entitlement."82 Burroughs' reworkings of all-male adventure genres
destabilise this heavily policed dividing line, producing confusions both between and
within the dual logic of homosexual recognition. He performs a kind of cultural
sabotage on popular fiction genres-spy, detective, empire-adventure, comics, sci-fi,
Western, porn, and so on-with the result that the male heroes transgress the line
between manly company and outright gay sex. 83 Or, to put it another way, he
transforms the Amazing Stories of his youth into gay porn, bringing back to the surface
what those tales strove so hard to repress. 84 Typically in his novels, the unspoken
barrier between the homosocial and the homosexual quickly dissolves as the young
pirates, spacemen, explorers, imperial administrators, spies, and detectives merge
fluidly together in homoerotic couplings. Far from seeking to clarify categories of
gender and genre, then, Burroughs' writings actively produce crises of recognition.
It is therefore significant that some commentators have experienced difficulty in
"recognising" Burroughs as a gay writer. Norman Mailer, for example, manifests most
clearly the convoluted process of adaptation and recontainment that is necessary for
him to come to terms with Burroughs. On the one hand, Mailer describes in a 1954
essay why his villains were always homosexual:
I did not know any homosexual because obviously I did not want to. It
was enough for me to recognize someone as homosexual, .and I would
cease to take him seriously as a person .... I always saw hIm as at best
85
ludicrous and at worst ... sinister.

81 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
82 Sedgwick, Epistemology, pp.184-85. Her discussion arises from a reading of Billy Budd. which is a
frequent intertext in Burroughs' work. .
83 For a discussion of the contradictions of masculinity in empir~ adventure tales. see Joseph Bnstow.
Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World (London: Harper Collms, 1991).
84 For background material on the genre of Ama::.ing Stories I have drawn on P.aul ~. Ca:ter . The
Cation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction (New York: ColumbIa UnIversIty Press,
1;;7), and Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum." in Strange Weather: Culture.
Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso. 1991), pp.101-36.
. "h H I V'll . " (19S.t) in Advertisements for Myself (London: Andre
85 Norman Maller, T e omosexua 1 am -,
- 171 -
 On the other hand, Mailer was forced to admit that:

Burroughs may be gay, but he's a man. What I mean is the fact that he's
g~y is incidental. He's very much a homosexual, but when you meet
hIm that's not what you think of him. "86

It is precisely the ambiguity in knowing what to think of Burroughs that makes his
novels valuable in the age of AIDS. As much as they "confirm" society's worst fears
about junkies and queers, they also serve to disrupt the logic by which those "identities"
are recognised.

In this chapter I have been arguing that Burroughs' conspiratorial variations

offer a critical leverage on the "paranoid" modes of thinking which have structured the
AIDS epidemic. I have also implicitly been claiming that his works take on especial
significance in the light of AIDS. One effect of my deliberately skewed reading of
Burroughs through the lens of AIDS is that it focuses attention on his homosexuality
and drug addiction. In the last decade other commentators have, however, sought to
play down these aspects of Burroughs' writings. For example, in her 1987 monograph
on Burroughs, Robin Lydenberg scarcely mentions homosexuality or drug use, let alone
AIDS.87 Homosexuality is always cashed out as sexuality or the play of textual desire;
she writes, for example, about the "communal anonymity" of textuality, without
signalling that there might also be a more literal form of collective coupling in the gay
bathhouses, whose future was very much at stake in the mid-eighties. To criticise
Lydenberg for her failure to engage with these issues is perhaps unfair, since it is her
expressed aim to bypass the moralising debates surrounding Burroughs in order to
focus on his radical linguistic strategies. But her frequent references to the radical
political potential of Burroughs' work rings hollow if it functions at such a level of
abstraction that it does not impinge on "issues" like AIDS.
David Cronenberg's 1992 film adaptation of Naked Lunch likewise tones down
Burroughs' depictions of homosexuality and drug use. In the case of drugs,
Cronenberg reveals that he didn't want viewers to have Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No"
slogan in mind when they watched the film, so he stripped the film of any references to
real drugs, substituting bug-powder addictions instead. Similarly, Cronenberg has
denied that he had any special AIDS parables in mind with Naked Lunch, or his
previous films which feature Burroughsian scenarios of body panic. 88 The effect of

Deutsch, 1961), pp.200-20S.

86 Quoted in Morgan, Literary Outlaw, p.S81.
87 Lydenberg, Word Cultures. In a similar fashion to Lydenberg'.s own lengthy disc~ssion of the ta~~ng
asshole routine, Wayne Pounds offers a Bakhtinian reading that IS -:v~olly de-sexuah~.ed. P?unds, ~he
Postmodern Anus: Parody and Utopia in Two Recent Novels by WIlham Burroughs, Poetics Toda). 8
(1987), 611-29. .
88 The film critic Mitch Tuchman observes that, "without Burroughs, Cronenbe~g ma~ .be wl~ho~t
. magery" For details about Cronenberg's life and influences, see the collectIOn 0 Jntervl;ws,
~ronenb~rg on Cronenberg, Chris Rodley, ed. (London, Faber and Faber, 1992). The comment rom

- 172 -
 Cronenberg's desire to create universalist, metaphysical studies of disease is to empty
out the specificity of the involvement with HIV/ AIDS by drug using and gay
communities which (along with blacks) have born the burden of the epidemic
disproportionately in the USA and across the world. 89
Stripped of its specificities of sexual and narcotic logic, Cronenberg's
adaptation of Burroughs' novels becomes a portrait of the artist as a young man, turning
the writer's life (especially his marriage) into a parable of artistic freedom. 90
Cronen berg has defended his interpretation, arguing first that the film reflects
Burroughs' own ambivalence about his "deviant" sexuality in the fifties, but then, more
pertinently, that:

I'm male and my unconscious fantasies are male . . . I've talked about
admiri~g Na~e~ Lunch. One o~ the barriers to my being totally 100 per
cent wIth WIlham Burroughs IS that Burroughs' general sexuality is
homosexual. It's very obvious in what he writes that his dark fantasies
happen to be sodomizing young boys as they are hanging. 91

Cronenberg goes on to insist that, "I'm not afraid of the homosexuality, but it's not
innate in me."92 In Cronenberg's 1990s reworking of Burroughs, homosexuality is not
"innate," it is just an arbitrary fantasy Agent Lee "happens to" choose upon. In this
chapter I have attempted to demonstrate, however, that fantasies such as the hanging
scenes are not-or rather, not only-arbitrary and inscrutable products of a lone
writer's twisted imagination. They are, I believe, vital to the structure of Burroughs'
conspiratorial mythography, which itself presents paranoia about queers and junkies as
a central dynamic in postwar America.
If the sexualised politics of conspiracy are omitted from one film of 1992 in
which they should feature, then in another film from the same year they are included

Tuchman is quoted on p.ISS. On Cronenberg's conspiratorial poetics, see Fredric Jameson, "Totality as
Conspiracy," in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London: BFI, 1992).
89 Over eighty percent of HIV -positive people in the world are believed to be black; and as many as half
of the gay men in New York might be infected (figures cited in Fiske, Media Matters, p.191, and
Watney, Practices of Freedom, p.xvii). It is important to note, of course, that such classifications are not
mutually exclusive.
90 Richard Dellamora provides a detailed critique of Cronenberg's heterosexualisation .of Burroughs, in
Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (~ew Brun~wlc~, NJ: Ru.tgers
University Press, 1994); Andrew Parker makes a similarly p~rsuaslve case !n his. analysIs of
Cronenberg's adaptation, "Grafting David Cronenberg: MonstroSity, AIDS Media, NatlOnal~Sexual
Difference," in Media Spectacles, Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock and Rebecca L. Walkowltz, eds
(London: Routledge, 1993), pp.209-31. In "The Wrong Body," Sight and Sound, 2.1 (1992), 8- 10, Amy
Taubin likewise concludes that, "brilliant as it is, Cronenberg's Naked Lunch never resolves the
incompatibility between the heterosexual driv.e of it~ narrative and ~he remnants of .Burrough~·
homoerotic fantasy. The amazing insect typewnter, which collapses deslfe. f~r buggery with paranOl~
about being bugged, could never have produced the encounter between WIlham Lee and Joan Frost
(p.IO).
91 Cronenberg on Cronenberg, p.99.
92Cronenberg on Cronenberg, p.162. Cronenberg offers this as a reason for the fact that "I probably
want women in the film."
- 173 -
 when by all rights they should have had no place. As we saw in Chapter 1, Oliver
Stone's JFK inserts a homosexual component into the assassination plot, fabricating a
gay hustler as a key witness, as well as implicating the conspirators by showing them
entwined in a surreal montage of bodies in a gay orgy. Cronenberg' s recent replotting
of Burroughs as an icon of countercultural freedoms, whose homosexuality was just a
convenient disguise, is surely dictated by the same logic which leads to Stone's implicit
insistence on a necessary connection between homosexuality and a plot to "un-man"
93
America. There is thus a noticeable lack of symmetry in these reassessments of the
sixties: when a scapegoat is required to account for the AIDS epidemic or the
assassination of JFK, gay promiscuity and drug abuse are put forward as the prime
culprits; but when Burroughs is championed as a forerunner of the sexual and literary
freedoms of the sixties, his sexual and narcotic preferences are quietly subsumed into
the language of universal personal freedoms. 94
It is of course extremely problematic to make any kind of link between
homosexuality, drug use and AIDS; much of the best writing on the epidemic has in
fact attempted to counter the "natural" ease with which these associations are forged. 95
In one respect it is therefore highly appropriate that Lydenberg and Cronenberg should
chose to ignore the relevance of Burroughs' work to an analysis of the demonological
discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS. In the same way that the acts rather than the
"identity" of an individual are what counts in HIV transmission, so too is it plausible
that Burroughs' "identity" as a homosexual and a heroin addict is not relevant to an
understanding of his writings. Yet to fail to engage with the centrality of these two
aspects of Burroughs' writings is to lose the opportunity of examining why the
connections between private pleasures and public fears have been made so persistently
and paranoiacally in the era of AIDS and the War on Drugs in particular, and in postwar
America more generally.

93 There are other possible points of comparison between the public disco~rse ~urrounding th~, AI~S
epidemic and that of the JFK assassination. Much lab time has ~een s~ent. m trymg to find th~ ma~lc
bullet" drug to combat the virus; similarl~, muc~ of the earlY"mvestIgatlOn,~ .were preoccupied With
finding the "Patient Zero," the epidemiologIcal eqUIvalent of the lone gunman m t?e Kennedy case. In
the same way that evidence of multiple causal origins of AIDS led t? t?e abandonmg of the hunt for a
"Patient Zero" in the case of AIDS, so too is the Warren CommiSSIOn Report now r~ad by some
researchers not so much as an indictment of a "lone gunman," as a document of th~ unpredictable and at
times bizarre coincidences spreading back through time and out across the natIOn ~ro~ those seven
. D lIas Finally in the same way that investigation into the Kennedy assassmatlon uncovered
secon d s m a . , . . I f AIDS 1d
networks of power, corruption and vested interests, so too has the epldemlO ogy 0 revea e
institutionalised prejudice and fossilised patterns of unequal burdens.
94 Michael Goodman, for example, notes that Naked Lunch was "th~ last wo~k of l~terature. to ~
'b d I'n thI'S nation's struggle between its belief in free expressIOn and ItS PUrItan herItage.
proscn
Goodman,e Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History . .F B urroug h s ' UNak ed L UllC h"
OJ

(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1981), p.l.

95 See, for example, Patton's section on "Degaying AIDS: The Queer Par~digm" in .~~\'ellti"g .AIDS.
116-20' see also Simon Watney's rethinking of this position, "Re-gaymg AIDS, m Practices of
7,.~edom: Selected Writings on HIVIAIDS (London: Rivers Dram, 1994), pp.153-55.
- 174 -
CONCLUSION

- 175 -
In tracing through the culture of conspiracy in the USA since the 1960s, the preceding
chapters have revealed a story of uneven and at times contradictory development. We
have seen how the Cold War language of conspiracy has been requisitioned, rewired
and upgraded in the formation of new social constituencies. But we have also seen how
the logic of conspiracy has expressed and produced antagonisms between and within
these movements. Both Betty Friedan and William Burroughs, for example, employ
the paranoid style in their discussion of the threat posed by American motherhood, yet
neither, it hardly needs to be said, would endorse the other's position. The postwar
period has thus witnessed not simply a popularised reversal of conspiracy theories told
by Them to ones told about Them, but a fragmentation and proliferation of
demonological rhetoric in entirely new areas.
At the same time as an increase in the creation of conspiracy theories, there has
also surely been an unprecedented increase in the likelihood of conspiratorial
surveillance and control of citizens, with the rise of the National Security state.
Paranoia has become both a necessary diagnosis of a political mode dominated by
fantasy, and a justifiable response to the conditions brought about by Cold War logic.
Nuclear proliferation might thus have resulted from the institution of paranoia as a
national policy, but paranoia now seems a suitable reaction to the threat of nuclear
annihilation. As the joke goes, I may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean they're not out
to get me. The possibilities for paranoia have become endless, but the culture of
conspiracy, I have been arguing, cannot simply be mapped onto a historical account of
the new world order as a vast interlocking plot. Although the distinction between
demonological fantasy and investigative accuracy has been eroded in this period, this
does not mean that we should either blithely accept or reject all conspiracy theories on
principle. I have been claiming instead that we must call into question the dominant
interests that are served in fixing certain boundaries between the orthodox and the
alternative, the literal and the metaphorical, the plausible and the speculative, and so on.
We have also seen how the 1960s represent an important departure in the
history of the paranoid sty Ie, in the way that the very concept of a conspiracy theory
becomes recognised, classified and popularised. Postmodern novelists such as DeLillo,
Pynchon and Burroughs combine an attention to the content of conspiracy theories with
a self-conscious reflection on the epistemological contrivances of that mode of
historical explanation. Moreover, as my reading of Pynchon' s Vineland suggested, it is
now at least conceivable that the modernist desire for depth and secrecy has collapsed
in on itself in a postmodern hyperrealisation of the sign-as-clue, such that paranoia is
simultaneously more necessary than ever (since the globe has reached new levels of
sinister connections), and entirely pointless (because all signs are endlessly made
visible). Alongside Lyotard' s pronouncement of and call for the end of master
narratives, there must also be placed the multiplication of conspiracy theories which
function as distorted and displaced substitutions for those traditional metanarratives.

- 176 -
As we saw in examples such as The Manchurian Candidate, history has come to
resemble its fictional representation, as the literary depiction of paranoid fears has
become caught up in a complex circuit of exchange with, and materialisation of, the
factual.
In addition to the postmodernisation of conspiracy theories, however, there
remains the possibility of older, more direct revelations of conspiratorial activities. As I
write this conclusion, the trial of OJ. Simpson is reaching its final stage. Through the
language of conspiracy, the case has brought into the light the dramatic polarisations
that the issue of race still produces in American society. Opinion polls have
consistently reported that while only a quarter of white Americans believe the former
football star is not guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, three quarters of the
African American population are convinced that 0.1. was the victim of a police
conspiracy to frame him. The extremely detailed scientific DNA evidence in the case
must be set alongside, for example, the plausibility of a cover-up by the Los Angeles
Police in the light of the Rodney King incident (it is, of course, quite possible that
although OJ. committed the murders, there was also a police conspiracy to fabricate
evidence). The dramatic splitting of opinion in the United States along lines of colour
must also be reconfigured in terms of class (0.1. was of course extremely wealthy) and
gender (many feminists continue to be alarmed that the victim, Nicole Brown-Simpson,
is left out of the picture in a case that is as much about the "private" matter of domestic
violence as it is about the public issue of race). In the limited scope of this study there
has not been space to address directly the issue of racial paranoia in postwar America,
the politics of which, as the foregoing example suggests, is always present and always
extremely complicated. An examination of this question would have to bring together
an analysis of the origins of the complex history of sexualised fantasies of race with an
investigation into the actual effects of these deep-seated prejudices; it would also have
to take into account the strategic materialisations of society's worst fears about its
demonised others with the formation of black militant and separatist organisations,
without losing sight of the stories of "real" conspiracies and cover-ups orchestrated
against these organisations. Materials for such a study might include the wildly
conspiratorial novels of Ishmael Reed such as Mumbo Jumbo (1972), or Spike Lee's
counterpart to Stone's JFK, namely Malcolm X (1993), along with, say, the documents
of and white reactions to the Black Panthers.
In addition to working in an analysis of racial paranoia, an exhaustive survey of
the culture of conspiracy in the new social movements of the 1960s would also have to
tackle the emergence of environmental concerns, which have frequently been inflected
through the logic of conspiracy. This would be particularly revealing, since models of
ecological causality and complexity produce new paradigms for plotting agency and
responsibility. Furthermore, as the release of the film Outbreak (1995) demonstrates,
conspiratorial scenarios of viral manufacture are now imbricated with concerns about

- 177 -
environmental manipulation. 1
We must therefore conclude that there is no single key which would unlock the
nature of conspiracy theories in postwar America. If we were to take the issue of drugs,
for example, it quickly becomes apparent that there are several different stories which
must simultaneously be taken into account. We might begin with a materialist analysis
of the causal association between certain narcotics and a feeling of paranoia. But the
existence of this well-documented connection does not tell us whether illegal drugs
created or captured the mood of a generation. In addition to a discussion of the
rhetorical sources and effects of anti-drug hysteria, there would also have to be an
investigation of drug users' fear of persecution and prosecution for using illegal
substances. And as we saw in the Burroughs chapter, the representation of "controlled
substances" as alien chemicals which take control of the brain is itself reliant on
paranoid conceptions of the isolated and immune self. We would also have to take
seriously Burroughs' argument that drugs constitute a real threat to conventional
society since they can induce alternative epistemologies which promote an implicit
questioning of what constitutes "reality," and of whose interests are served through the
maintenance of a monopoly of knowledge about that "reality." Finally, an account of
the sixties drug culture would also have to investigate the particular economic and
political hidden agendas associated with certain substances. As Jay Stevens
demonstrates in Storming Heaven, the story of LSD cannot ignore the involvement of
the CIA.2 In one final twist of complexity-a kind of conspiratorial intertextuality
which in the course of this study has both amused and amazed me-we would also
have to consider the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the office of the New
Orleans district attorney in October 1963 in order to ascertain the legality of importing
LSD into the USA for the purposes of starting a social revolution-the main source of
that drug in 1963 being, of course, the CIA. 3
Each example of conspiracy theory cannot therefore be decided in advance, but
must be examined and reframed in a series of interlocking analyses. The study of
conspiracy culture in postwar America must combine both the realist and the symbolist
approaches to the paranoid style, through an analysis of the connections between
conspiracy plots and narrative plots. It necessitates attention to historical, political,
economic, psychological and rhetorical factors, in an attempt to understand not only
how each of these realms impinges upon the paranoid style, but also how each of these
categories is itself reconfigured by and through the culture of conspiracy.

1 Outbreak, dir. Wolfgang Petersen (1995).

2 Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1988; London: Flamingo. 1993).
3This claim was outlined by Martin A. Lee, Robert Ranftel and Jeff Cohen, in R~lling Stone.? M~rch
· B b C II h Who Shot JFK'" A Guide to the Major Consplfac." TheOries (~ev.
1983; reported In 0 a a an, ..
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp.llO-ll.
- 178 -
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

(List of Works Consulted)

- 179 -
Aaron, Daniel, "How to Read Don DeLillo," in Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don
DeLillo, pp.67-82

Adamsi~ad, "There's Nothing Like a Good, Wicked Plot," ito i, October 1992, pp.l2-

Adorno, Theo.dor a?d Max ~orkheimer, "The Culture Industry as Mass Deception," in
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; London: Verso,
1986), pp.120-67

Agel, Jerome, ed., The Radical Therapist (New York: Ballantine Press, 1971)

Ambrose, Stephen E., "Writers on the Grassy Knoll: A Reader's Guide," New York
Times Book Review, 2 February 1992, pp.23-25

Amiran, Eyal, and John Unsworth, eds, Essays in Postmodem Culture (Oxford: OUP
1993) ,

Antonio, Gene, The AIDS Cover-Up?: The Real and Alarming Facts about AIDS (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987)

Ballard, J.G., The Atrocity Exhibition, revised edn., with a Preface by William
Burroughs (1970; London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1993)

Banner, Bob, "Statement of Purpose," Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and

Metphysics, 26 (1990), p.2

Barker, Adam, "Cries and Whispers: What is a Paranoia Movie-Looking at Work

from Coppola to JFK," Sight and Sound, 1.10 (1992), 24-25

Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, Mark Poster, ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988)

- - - , The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard & Caroline Schutze (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1988)

Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1965)

Bell, Michael, "How Primordial is Narrative," in Nash, ed., pp.172-98

Bell, Pearl K., "DeLillo's World," Partisan Review, 59 (1992), 138-46

Bennett, Tony, ed., Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading

(London: Routledge, 1990)

Berressem, Hanjo, Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993)

Bersani, Leo, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990)

, "Is the Rectum a Grave?," in Crimp, ed., pp.197-222

Berube, Michael, Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics
(London: Verso, 1993)
Best, Steven, "Jameson, Totality, and the Poststructuralist Critique," in Kellner, ed ..
pp.333-68

- 180-
 , and I?ouglas Kel.lner, Postmodem Theory: Critical Interrogations (Lo d .
MacMIllan and Gmldford Press, 1991) non.

, "Creative Paranoia: A Postmodern Aesthetic of Cognitive Mappin In

Gravity's Rainbow," Centennial Review, 36 (1992), 59-87 g

Billig, Michae~, ."Anti-Semitic Themes and the British Far Left," in Graumann and
MOSCOVICI, eds, pp.115-36

Blackstock, Ne~son, COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom (New
York: VIntage, 1976)

Blau, Herb, "From '(Re)Sublimating the 60s,'" in Sayres et aI., eds, pp.316-20

Bloom, Allen, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1987)

Bloom, Harold, ed., Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" (New York: Chelsea
1986) ,

Booker, M. Keith, "Vineland and Dystopian Fiction," Pynchon Notes, 30-31 (1992) 5-
38 '

Born on the Fourth of July, dir. Oliver Stone (1989)

Bowlby, Rachel, "'The Problem With No Name': Rereading Friedan's The Feminine
Mystique," in Bowlby, pp.76-94

- - - , "Soft Sell: Marketing Rhetoric in Feminist Criticism," in Bowlby, pp.95-106

- - - , Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis
(London: Routledge, 1992)

Bradbury, Malcolm, and Howard Temperley, eds, Introduction to American Studies

(London: Longman, 1989)

Braudy, Leo, "Providence, Paranoia and the Novel," ELH, 48 (1981), 619-37

Brennan, Teresa, Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989)

- - , "The Age of Paranoia," Paragraph, 14 (1991), 20-45

Bristow, Joseph, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World (London: Harper Collins,
1991)

Bromley, David G., and James T. Richardson, eds, The Brainwas~ing~ Deprogramm.ing
Controversy: Sociological, Psychological, Legal and Historical Perspectives
(New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1983)

Brooke, "What's Wrong with Sex Role Theory," in Redstockings, eds, pp.84-85

Brooke-Rose, Christine, "Ill Locutions," in Nash, ed., pp.154-71

Brookeman, Christopher, American Culture and Society since the 1930s (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1984)

- 181 -
 Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984'
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) ,

Brown, J.A.C. , Techniques of Persuasion: From Propaganda to Brainwashing (1963'

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) ·

Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1975)

Brussell, Mae, "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination," The
Rebel, 22 November 1983, pp.22-35

Buckley, William F., Jr., "Crucial Steps in Combatting the AIDS Epidemic: Identify
All the Carriers," New York Times, 18 March 1986, p.A27

Burroughs, William, Junky (1953; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977)

- - , Naked Lunch (1959; London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1993)

- - , The Soft Machine (1961; New York: Grove, 1993)

- - , The Ticket That Exploded (1962; London: John Calder, 1985)

- - , Nova Express (1964; New York: Grove, 1992)

- - - , "The Coming of the Purple Better One," Esquire, November 1968, pp.89-91

- - , Wild Boys (1971; New York: Grove Press, 1992)

- - , with Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1978)

- - , Cities of the Red Night (1981; London: Picador, 1982)

- - , The Place of Dead Roads (1983; London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1993)

- - , Queer (1985; London: Picador, 1986)

- - - , The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (1986; New York: Arcade, 1993)

- - , "Thanksgiving Prayer, 1986," Rucker et aI., eds, pp.196-200

- - - , Western Lands (1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988)

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

(London and New York: Routledge, 1990)

, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge,

1993)

- - - , and Joan Scott, eds, Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge.
1992)

Bywater, William, "The Paranoia of Postmodernism," Philosoph)' and Literature, 14

(1990), 79-84

CaIendrillo, Linda, "Cloaks and More Cloaks: Thomas Pynchon' s V. and the Classic
Spy Novel," Clues, 5 (1978), 58-65

- 182 -
Callahan, Bob: Who Shot JFK?: A Guide to the Major Conspiracy Theories (New
York: SImon & Schuster, 1993)

Callens, Johan, "Tubed Out and Movie Shot in Pynchon's Vineland" Pynchon N t
28-29 (1991),115-41 , 0 es,

Cameron, Deborah, ed., The Feminist Critique of Language (London:

Routledge, 1990)

Cantor, Paul, "Friedrich Nietzsche: The Use and Abuse of Metaphor," in Miall,
ed., pp.77-88

Carroll, John, Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive: A Sociology of Modem Culture (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977)

Carroll, Noel, "Conspiracy Theories of Representation," Philosophy of the Social

Sciences, 17 (1987), 395-412

Carter, Dale, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State
(London: Verso, 1988)

Carter, Erica, and Simon Watney, eds,Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics
(London: Serpent's Tail, 1989)

Carter, Paul A., The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)

Caserio, Robert, Plot, Story and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern
Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)

Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and
Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)

Chambers, Judith, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Twayne, 1992)

Chambers, Ross, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)

Chomsky, Noam, Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian (Stirling:

AK Press, 1992)
Chow, Rey, "Postmodern Automatons," in Butler and Scott, eds, pp.101-20

Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984~
London: Picador, 1985)

Clarke, Brian M., Editorial, Undercover, June 1993, p.4

Cockburn, Alexander, "John and Oliver's Bogus Adventure," Sight and Sound, 1.10
(1992), 22-24
___ , "The Kooks Have It," New Statesman & Society, 17 January 1992, p.14

___ , "Propaganda of the Deed," New Statesman & Society, 19 November 1993,
pp.30-31
Cohan, Steven, and Linda M. Shires, Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of
Narrative Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988)

- 183 -
Cole, David, "Fascinating S~arch f<?r Fascist Conspiracy," Herald (Monterey CA) 18
January 1976, magazIne sectIOn, pp.15-17 ' ,

Collins, Max Allan, In the. Line of Fire, based on the screenplay by Jeff Ma uire
(London: HarperColhns, 1993) g

Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate (1959; Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1993)

, "Manchurian Candidate in Dallas," The Nation, 28 December 1963, pp.449-50

, Winter Kills (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974)

Connor, Steven, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the

Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)

- - , Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)

"Conspiracy Theorist Mae Brussell Dies of Cancer," Herald (Monterey, CA), 4

October 1988, p.17

Cooke, Fred 1., "Some Unanswered Questions," The Nation, 13 June 1966, pp.705-15

Cooper, David, ed., The Dialectics of Liberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)

Crary, Jonathan, and Sanford Kwinter, eds, Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992)

Crimp, Douglas ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis - Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1988)

Crotty, William J., ed., Assassinations and the Political Order (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971)
- - - , "Assassinations and Their Interpretation within the American Context," in
Crotty, ed., pp.3-53
Crowdus, Gary, "Clarifying the Conspiracy: An Interview with Oliver Stone,"
Cineaste, 19 (1992), 25-27
___ , "The Allen Dulles Memorial Bibilography of the 10 Best Books on the JFK
Assassination," Cineaste, 19 (1992), p.35
Crowther, Hal, "Clinging to the Rock: A Novelist's Choices in the New Mediocracy,"
in Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo, pp.83-98

Cubitt, Geoffrey, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-
Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)

Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of

Literature (1975; London: Routledge, 1992)

___ , The Pursuit of Signs (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)

D'Emilio, John, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Maki~g of. a Homos~xual
Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: Umverslty of ChIcago
Press, 1983)

"Dallas Prosecutor's News Conference," New York Times. November 26th. 1963. p.l.+
- 184-
Daly, Mary, GynlEcology The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978~ London: The
Women's Press, 1984)

Davis, David Brion, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion
from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972)

Davis, Flora, Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960
(New York: Simon & Schuster: 1991)

Davis, Lennard J., Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987)

de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,

Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979)

- - - , The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)

DeCurtis, Anthony, '''An Outsider in This Society': An Interview with Don DeLillo,"
in Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo, pp.43-66

Deitcher, David, ed., Over the Rainbow: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America Since
Stonewall, (London: Boxtree, 1995)

Delaney, Samuel, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the
East Village, 1957-1965 (New York: New American Library, 1988)

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984)

DeLillo, Don, The Players (1977~ London: Vintage, 1991)

- - , Running Dog (1978; London: Picador, 1992)

- - , The Names (1982~ London: Picador, 1987)

___ , "American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK,"
Rolling Stone, 8 December 1983, pp.21-22, 24, 27-28, 74

- - , White Noise (1984; London: Picador, 1986)

- - , Libra (1988; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989)

- - , Mao II (1991 ~ London: Vintage, 1992)

Dellamora, Richard, Apocalyptic Overtu~es: ~exual Politics and the Sense of an Ending
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Umverslty Press, 1994)

Denning, Michael, Cover Stories (London: Routledge, 1987)

Dickstein, Morris, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic
Books, 1977)
Dipple, Elizabeth, Plot, The Critical Idiom Series (London: Methuen, 1970)

, The Unresolvable Plot: Reading Contemporary Fiction (London: Routledge,

1988)
·ss,·dence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault
Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual D,
- 185 -
 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)

Donner, Frank J., The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods 0'1' A .,
P o I"
ltlca IInte II'1gence System (New York: Random House, 1981) 'J mencas

Donougho, Martin, "Postmodem Jameson," in Kellner, ed., pp.75-95

Douglas, Ann, The Feminisation of American Culture (New York' Alfred A Knopf
1977) . . .

Dowell, Pat, "Last Year at NUremberg: The Cinematic Strategies of IFK" Cineaste 19
(1992), 8-12 ' ,

Dr Strange love, or, How I learned to Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
dir. Stanley Kubrick (1964) ,

Dugdale, John, Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power (London: Longman

1990) ,

Dworkin, Andrea, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women's

Press, 1981)

Eagleton, Terry, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism," in Against the Grain

(London: Verso, 1986), pp.131-48

- - - , "Estrangement and Irony," Salmagundi, 73 (1987), 25-32

Echols, Alice, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)

Eco, Umberto, Foucault's Pendulum, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (1989;
repro London: Picador, 1990)

- - - , Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine-Brooke Rose, Interpretation and

Overinterpretation (Cambridge: CUP, 1992)

Edelman, Lee, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (London:
Routledge, 1994)

Eisenstein, Hester, Contemporary Feminist Thought (London: George Allen &

Unwin, 1984)

Eisner, Judith A., "Mae Brussell: Fears 'Hidden Government' Plans Assassinations,"
The Pine Cone (Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA), 21 September 1972, pp.43-44

Elam, Diane, Romancing the Postmodem (London: Routledge, 1992)

Ellroy, James, American Tabloid (London: Century, 1995)

Embree, Alice, "Brainwashing: The Facts," in Redstockings, eds, pp.178-92

Epperson, A. Ralph, The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of

History (Tucson, AZ: Publius Press, 1985)

Epstein, Edward J., Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of the
Truth (London: Hutchinson, 1966)

Evans, Sara, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights

- 186-
 Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)

, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York· The

Free Press, 1989) .

Ewen, Stuart, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary

Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988)

Eysenck, Ha?s J. and Glenn D. Wilson, eds, The Experimental Study of Freudian
Theorzes (London: Methuen, 1973)

Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York-
Crown, 1991) .

Farr, Robert M., "Self/Other Relation and the Social Nature of Reality" in Graumann
and Moscovici, eds, pp.203-218 '

Featherstone, Mike, "Postmodernism, Cultural Change, and Social Practice," in

Kellner, ed., pp.117 -39

Fee, Elizabeth, and Daniel M. Fox, eds, AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988)

- - - , eds, AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease, (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1992)

Feierabend, Ivo K., Rosalind L. Feierabend, Betty A. Nesvold, and Franz M. Jaggar,
"Political Violence and Assassination: A Cross-National Assessment," in
Crotty, ed., pp.54-140

Ferraro, Thomas 1., "Whole Families Shopping at Night!," in Lentricchia, ed., New
Essays on "White Noise," pp.15-38

Fields, Ingrid Walker, "Paranoia, Politics, and the Popular Imagination: Conspiracy in
Contemporary American Literature" (unpublished PhD diss., University of
California, Santa Cruz, 1993; abstract in DAI, 53 (June 1993), 4325A)

Firestone, Shulamith, and Anne Koedt, eds, Notes from the Second Year (New York:
Radical Women, 1970)

Fisher, Linda, "Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Postmodern Paranoia: Psychologies of

Interpretation," Philosophy and Literature, 16 (1992), 106-114

Fiske, John, "Blackstream Knowledge: Genocide," in Media Matters: Everyday

Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994), pp .191-216

Ford, Gerald, Portrait of the Assassin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965)

Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

(London: Tavistock Publications, 1970)

___ , The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, 1990)
Freedman, Carl, "Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K.
Dick," Science Fiction Studies, 11 (March 1984), 15-24

- 187 -
Freely,~aureen, "Wet Dreams in Dallas," Independent on Sunday, 2 February 1992, p.

Freiberg, Alison, "Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body in
the Postmodern," in Amiran and Unsworth, eds, pp.37 -56

Freud, Sigmund, "Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of

Paran<?ia ("Schre~er")" (1911), trans. James Strachey, rvd. Angela Richards, in
Penguin Freud Library, 15 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985) IX pp 131-
226 ' ".

, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The "Wolf Man")" (1918 [1914]),
in Case Histories II, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, 15 vols
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), IX, pp.227-366

, Totem .and Taboo, in The Origins of Religion, trans. James Strachey, Penguin
Freud Library, 15 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), XIII

Fried, Yehuda, and Joseph Agassi, Paranoia: A Study in Diagnosis, no. 50 of the
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel,
1976)

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)

- - , The Second Stage (1981; London: Sphere, 1983)

- - - , The Fountain of Age (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993)

Frow, John, "The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise," in Lentricchia,
ed., Introducing Don DeLillo, pp.175-92

Fukuyama, Francis, "The End of History?," The National Interest, Summer 1989, pp.3-
18
Fulcher, James, "American Conspiracy: Formula in Popular Fiction," Midwest
Quarterly, 24 (1992), 152-64

Fumento, Michael, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS (New York: Basic Books, 1990)

Fuss, Diana, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London: Routledge,
1992)
Gallop, Jane, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Criticism (London:
Routledge, 1992)
Garber, Marjorie, Jann Matlock and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds, Media Spectacles
(London: Routledge, 1993)
Garrison, Jim, On the Trail of the Assassins (1988; Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1992)

Gitlin, Tod, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1980)

, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1985)

___ , The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987; revised edn, New York:
Bantam, 1993)

- 188 -
Goode, Eric, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of
Deviance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)

Grant, J. Ker:Y' A Companion to tiThe Crying of Lot 49" (Athens, GA: University of
GeorgIa Press, 1994)

Grauman, Carl F., '.'~onspiracy: History and Psychology-A Synopsis," in Graumann

and MOSCOVICI, eds, pp.245-50

, an.d Serge Moscovici, eds, Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy (New York:

Spnnger-Verlag, 1987)

Gray, Paul, "The Spores of Paranoia," Time, 15 January 1990, pp.69-70

Green, Geoffrey, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery, eds, The Vineland Papers:
Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994)

Greene, Gayle, Changing the Subject: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991)

Greening, Thomas, "The Psychological Study of Assassins," in Crotty, ed., pp.222-66

Griessinger, Andreas, "Social Conflict and Conspiracy in Nuremberg 1789-1797," in

Graumann and Moscovici, eds, pp.137-49

Griffin, Susan, Rape: The Power of Consciousness (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1979)

Groden, Robert J., "The Killing of a President," Arena, Autumn 1993, pp.120-35

Groh, Dieter, "The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or: Why do Bad Things Happen
to Good People ... ," in Graumann and Moscovici, eds, pp.I-37

Gross, David, "Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of
Postmodernism," in Kellner, ed., pp.96-116

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds,Cultural Studies (London:
Routledge, 1992)

Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994)
Guetti, James, "Aggressive Reading: Detective Fiction and Realistic Narrative,"
Raritan, 2 (1982), 133-54
Hailey, Foster, "Lone Assassin the Rule in U.S.; Plotting More Prevalent Abroad," New
York Times, 25 November 1963, p.9

Hanisch, Carol, "The Personal is Political," in Agel, ed., pp. 152-157

Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Free Association Books, 1991)

Hartogs, Dr Renatus, The Two Assassins (New York: T. Cromwell, 1965)

Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of

Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)

- 189 -
Hawkins, Harriet, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and
Popular Modem Genres (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)

"He Shf~~i~. ~iver Stone Looks Back in Anger," Editorial, Independent, 18 January

Hertzberg, Hendrik, and David C.K. McClelland, "Paranoia: An Idee Fixe Whose Time
Has Come," Harper's Magazine, June 1974, pp.51-60

Hilfer, Tony, American Fiction Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1992)

Hitchens, Christopher, "On the Imagination of Conspiracy," in For the Sake of

Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (London: Verso, 1993), pp.12-
24

Hite, Molly, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus, OH: Ohio
State University Press, 1983)

Hoberman, J., "When Dr No Met Dr Strangelove," Sight and Sound, 3.12 (1993), 16-21

Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1966;
New York: Vintage, 1967)

Hole, Judith, and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle
Books, 1973)
Holland, Max, "After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination," Reviews in
American History, 22 (1994), 191-209
Horne, Haynes, "Jameson's Strategies of Containment," in Kellner, ed., pp.268-300

Houston, R. "Flying in to Love," Review, New York Times Book Review, 11 October
1992, pp.13-14
Hughes-Hallet, Lucy, "Art, Passion and Gossip," Sunday Times, 10 July 1994, section
7, p.4.
Hiihn, Peter, "The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective
Fiction," Modem Fiction Studies, 33 (1987),451-66

Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London:

Routledge, 1988)
___ , The Politics of postmode rn ism (London: Routledge, 1989)

Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986)

In the Line of Fire, dir. Wolfgang Petersen (1993)

Inglehart, Robert, "Extremist political Positions and Perceptions. ~f Conspiracy: Even
Paranoids Have Real Enemies," in Graumann and MOSCOVICl, eds, pp.231-244
' N' Ie "Demoniac Conspiracy" in Graumann and Moscovici. eds,
J acques- Chaquln, ICO , '
pp.71-86
Jaffe, Harold, Introduction, Assassination Rhapsody, by Derek Pell (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1989), pp.7-10

- 190-
Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symb l" A t
(1981; London: Routledge, 1989) 0 IC c

5;~~~tmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," NLR, 146 (1984),

, "Review of The Names," Minnesota Review, 22 (1984), 116-22

, For~word, in Jean~Fran~ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff

BennIngton and Bnan Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester University Press
1984, repro 1991), p.vii-xxi '

, "Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary

Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1988) pp 347-
58 ' ,.

, "Periodizing the 60s," in The Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols (London: Routledge,

1988), II, pp.178-210

- - - , Postmode rn ism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso
1991) ,

- - - , The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System

(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, and London: BFI,
1992).

Jaret, Peter, "Our Immune System," National Geographic, June 1986, pp.702-35

Jayne, Edward, "The Dialectics of Paranoid Form," Genre, 11 (1978),131-57

Jeffreys, Sheila, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Feminist

Revolution (London: The Women's Press, 1990)

Johnson, Barbara, A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: The Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1987)

Johnston, Sheila, "Reel Life: Escape To Reality," Independent, 17 January 1992, p.19

Jones, Amelia, "'She Was Bad News': Male Paranoia and the Contemporary
New Woman," Camera Obscura, 25 (1991), 297-320

Jones, Ann, Women Who Kill (New York: Ballantine, 1981)

Kadrey, Richard, Covert Culture Sourcebook 2.0: F~~ther, Deeper, Stranger

Explorations of Fringe Culture (New York: St. Martm s, 1994)

Kaplan, Ann E., ed., Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices (London:
New Left BooksNerso, 1989)

Kaplan, Cora, "Radical Feminism and Literature: Rethinking ~i.llett' s Sexua~

Politics" in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London.
Verso, 1986), pp.15-30
Kappeler, Susan, The Pornography of Representation (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986)

Keith, Jim, ed., The Gemstone File (Atlanta: IllumiNet Press, 1992)

- 191 -
 , Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (Portl d OR'
Feral House, 1993) , an, .

Kellner, Douglas, ed., PostmodernismiJamesonlCritique (Washington: Maisonneuve

Press, 1989)

, "Jameson, Marxism, and Postmoderism," in Kellner, ed., pp.1-42

Kennedy, Florence, "Institutionalized Oppression vs. The Female," in Morgan,

ed., pp.438-446

Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1966'
Oxford: OUP, 1977) ,

- - - , "Decoding the Tristero," in Mendelson, ed., pp. 162-66

- - - , "That Was Another Planet," London Review of Books, 8 February 1990, pp.3-4

Kimball, Roger, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education
(New York: Harper & Row, 1990)

Kroker, Arthur, and Marilouise Kroker, eds, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental
Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986)

- - - , eds, Body Invaders (London: St. Martin's Press, 1987)

- - - , "Panic Sex in America," in Kroker and Kroker, eds, Body Invaders, pp.10-13

Kruglanski, Arie W., "Blame-Placing Schemata and Attributional Research," In

Graumann and Moscovici, eds, pp.219-230

Krupey, G.L., "AIDS: Act of God or the Pentagon?," in Keith, ed., pp.240-55

Kuehl, John, Alternate Worlds: A Study of Postmodem Antirealistic American Fiction

(New York: New York University Press, 1984)

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1980)

Landry, Donna, and Gerald MacLean, Materialist Feminisms (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1993)
Lane, Mark, Rush to Judgement: A Critique of the Warren Com~iss.ion IS Inquiry into
the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tlpplf and Lee Han'ey
Oswald (London: The Bodley Head, 1966)
Larkin, Ralph, and Daniel Foss, "Lexicon of Folk-Etymology," in Sayres et aI., eds,
pp.360-79
LeClair, Tom, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1987)
Lederer, Laura, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York:
Morrow, 1980)
Lehman-Haupt, Christopher, "Vineland, Pynchon's First Novel in 17 Years," New York
Times, 26 December 1989, p.C21

- 192-
..
Leitch, Vincent B., "Postmodern Culture: The Ambivalence of F d'
J arneson, " C0 IIege Llterature,
. 19 (1992), 111-22 re fIC

Lemert,P E.M.,
b "Paranoia
l 'and the Dynamics of Exclusion" ,e Human
I'n V lan D'ce, S ' I
OCla
ro ems, and Soclal Control (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967)

Lentricchia, .Frank, "In Place of an Afterword: Someone Reading," in Critical Terms

for. Llterary. Stu~y, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds (Chicago'
ChIcago UnIverSIty Press, 1990), pp.321-38 .

, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)

- - - , ed., New Essays on "White Noise" (CUP, 1991)

, "The American Writer as Bad Citizen," in Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don

DeLillo, pp.I-6

, "Libra as Postmodern Critique," in Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo,

pp.193-215

- - - , "Tales of the Electronic Tribe," in Lentricchia, ed., New Essays on "White

Noise," pp.87-113

Leon, Barbara, "Consequences of the Conditioning Line," in Redstockings,

eds, pp.66-70

Levin, Ira, Rosemary's Baby (New York: Random House, 1967)

- - - , The Stepford Wives (London: Michael Joseph, 1972)

Levine, George, and David Leverenz, eds, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas
Pynchon (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1976)

Levine, Robert S., Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper,
Hawthorne and Melville (Cambridge: CUP, 1989)

Love Field, dir. John Kaplan (1992)

Lukas, J. Anthony, "Vineland by Thomas Pynchon," BOMC News, April 1990, p.3

Lupton, Deborah, Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1994)

Lydenberg, Robin, Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S.

Burroughs' Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987)

Lyndon, Neil, No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism (London: Sinclair
Stevenson, 1992)

Lyotard, Jean-Fran~ois, The Postmodern Con~ition7 trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi, (Manchester: Manchester Umverslty Press, 1984)

MacDonald, C.M., "The Politics of Paranoia: America and the Americans," History
Today, 34 (1984), 5-9
Mackey, Louis, "Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition," Sub-Stance, 30 (1981), 16-30

- 193 -
 MacNeil, Robert, ed., The Way We Were: 1963, The Year Kennedy Was Shot (New
York: Carroll & Graf, 1988)

Macpherson, Pat, Reflections on "The Bell Jar" (London: Routledge, 1991)

Madsen, ~eborah ~., T~e Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchom (Leicester

LeIcester UnIversIty Press, 1991) .

Mailer, Norman, "The Homosexual Villain" (1954), in Advertisments for Myself

(London: Andre Deutsch, 1961), pp.200-205

, "The Great American Mystery," Book Week Washington Post, 28 August 1966,
pp.l, 11-13

Mainardi, Patricia, "The Politics of Housekeeeping," in Morgan, ed., pp.447-454

Malcolm X, dir. Spike Lee (1993)

Marcus, Sharon, "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape
Prevention," in Butler and Scott, eds, pp.385-403

- - - , "Placing Rosemary's Baby," differences, 5 (1993), 121-53

Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced

Industrial Society (1964; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Marquez, Antonio, "Everything is Connected: Paranoia in Gravity'S Rainbow,"

Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, 9 (1983), 92-104

Mars-Jones, Adam, "Conspiracy Of Violence," Independent, 24 January 92, p.16

Martin, Elizabeth, "Body Narratives, Body Boundaries," in Grossberg et aI., eds,

pp.409-423

Martin, Richard, "Clio Bemused: The Uses of History in Contemporary American

Fiction," Sub-Stance, 27 (1980), 13-24

McCaffery, Larry, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and
Postmodern Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992)

McClure, John A., "Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy,"
in Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo, pp.99-116

McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987)

- - - , Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992)

McLuhan, Marshall, "Notes on Burroughs," The Nation, 28 December 1964, pp.517 -19

Meagher, Sylvia, Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities
and the Report (1964; New York: Vintage, 1992)

Meissner, W.W., The Paranoid Process (New York: Jason Aaronson, 1978)

Mendelson, Edward, ed., Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978)

Mepham, John, "Narratives of Postmodernism," in Smyth, ed., pp.138-55

- 194-
Meyer, Richard, "Rock Hudson's Body," in Fuss, ed., pp.259-88

Miall, David S., ed., Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives (Brighton,

Harvester Press, 1982)

Michael Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of

Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1981) .

Miles, Barry, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (London: Virgin, 1993)

Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics (1970; London: Virago, 1993)

Mitchell, W.J.T., "From CNN to JFK," in Picture Theory (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.397-416

Modleski, Tania, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist"

Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)

Molesworth, Charles, "DeLillo's Perfect Starry Night," in Lentricchia, ed., Introducing

Don DeLillo, pp.143-56

Moore, F.C.T., "On Taking Metaphor Literally," in Miall, ed., pp.I-13

Moore, Pamela, and Devoney Looser, "Theoretical Feminism: Subjectivity, Struggle,

and the 'Conspiracy' of Poststructuralisms," Style, 27 (1993), 530-58

Moretti, Franco, "Clues," in Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of
Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (London:
Verso, 1983), pp.130-56

Morgan, Robin, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Random House, 1970)

- - - , "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape," in Lederer, ed., pp.134-40

Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1988;
London: The Bodley Head, 1991)

Morris, Meaghan, "A-Mazing Grace: Notes on Mary Daly's Poetics" in The Pirate's
Fiancee (London: Verso, 1988)
Moscovici, Serge, "The Conspiracy Mentality," in Graumann and Moscovici, eds,
pp.151-69
Moses, Michael Valdez, "Lust Removed From Nature," in Lentricchia, ed., New Essays
on "White Noise, " pp.63-86

Mottram, Eric, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (London: Calder & Boyars,
1977)
Myers, Kathy, Understains: The Sense and Seduction of Advertising (London:
Comedia, 1986)

Nash, Cris, ed., Narrative in Culture (London: Routledge, 1990)

___ , "Slaughtering the Subject: Literature's Assault on Narrative," in Nash, ed.,
pp.199-218

- 195 -
Nava, Mica, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism (London' Sage
1992) . .

Nelson('Bcary , andkLawrenc~ Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

aSlngsto e: Macnullan, 1988)

New York Radical Women, "No More Miss America! Ten Points of Protest" in
Morgan, ed., pp.521-24 '

O'Donnell, Patrick, "Obvious Paranoia: The Politics of Don DeLillo's Run' D "
Centenial Review, 34 (1990), 56-72 nmg og,

i~T~~~ndering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative," Boundary 2, 19 (1992),

Odier, Danie~, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (1974; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1989)

Oglesby, Carl, The Yankee and Cowboy War (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and
McMeel, 1976)

Olderman, Raymond M., Beyond the Wasteland: A Study of the American Novel in the
1960s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972)

Oppenheimer, Gerald M., "Causes, Cases, and Cohorts: The Role of Epidemiology in
the Historical Construction of AIDS," in Fee and Fox, eds, pp.49-83

Ortony, Andrew, ed., Metaphor and Thought (CUP, 1979)

Outbreak, dir. Wolfgang Petersen (1995)

Packard, Vance, The Hidden Persuaders (London: Longman, 1957)

Packer, Herbert L., "The Warren Report: A Measure of the Achievement," The Nation,
2 November 1964, pp.295-99

Paglia, Camille, Sex, Art and American Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)

Palmer, James W., and Michael M. Riley, "America's Conspiracy Syndrome: From
Capra to Pakula," Studies in the Humanities, 8 (1981),21-27

Palmer, Jerry, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward
Arnold, 1978)
Palmer, Paulina, Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist
Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989)

Parker, Andrew, "Grafting David Cronenberg: Monstrosity, AIDS Media,

National/Sexual Difference," in Garber et al., eds, pp.209-31

Parker, Patricia, "The Metaphorical Plot," in Miall, ed., pp.133-58

Patterson, Lee, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991)

Patton, Cindy, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985)

, "Tremble , Hetero Swine!" in Warner, ed., pp.143-77

- 196 -
 , Inventing AIDS (London: Routledge, 1991)

Pawling, Christopher, ed., Popular Fiction and Social Change (London· MacMillan
1984) . ,

Pearce, Richard, ed., Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981)

Pell, Derek, Assassination Rhapsody (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989)

Penley, Constance, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture," in

Grossberg et aI., eds, pp. 479-500

Peslikis, Irene, "Resistances to Consciousness," in Morgan, ed., pp.337-39

Pfeil, Fred, Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodernist Culture
(London: Verso, 1990)

Phelan, James, Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative

Reporter (New York: Random House, 1992)

Plant, Sadie, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern
Age (London: Routledge, 1992)

Popper, Karl, "Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences," in Popper, pp.336-46,
(first publ. in Library of the 10th International Congress of Philosophy, 1,
Amsterdam, 1948)
- - - , "Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition," in Popper, pp.120-35 (first publ. in
The Rationalist Annual, 1 (1949))

- - - , Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963)

Porter, Dennis, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)

Porush, David, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (London: Methuen, 1985)

Posner, Gerald, "It Was Him All Along," Mail on Sunday, 17 October 1993, p.13

"Postmodernity and Paranoia," Editorial, American Philosophical Quarterly, 49

(1990), 480-88
Pounds, Wayne, "The Postmodern Anus: Parody and Utopia in Two Recent Novels by
William Burroughs," Poetics Today, 8 (1987), 611-29

Pruitt, Dean G., "Conspiracy Theory in Conflict Escalation," in Graumann and

Moscovici, eds, pp.191-202

Pynchon, Thomas, V. (1963; London: Picador, 1975)

___ , "A Journey into the Mind of Watts," New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966,
p.34+
_ _ , The Crying of Lot 49 (1966; London: Picador, 1979)

___ , Gravity's Rainbow (1973; London: Picador, 1975)

_ _ , Slow Leamer (London: Picador, 1984)

- 197 -
 , Vineland (1990; London: Minerva, 1991)

Quantum Leap, BBC2, 22 November 1993

Radicalesbians, "The Woman-Identified Woman," in Koedt et at, eds, pp.240-45.

Rafferty, Terence, "Long Lost," New Yorker, 19 February 1990, pp.l08-112

Raskin, Marcus, "JFK and the Culture of Violence" American Historical Review 97
(1992),487-499 ' ,

Redstockings, "Manifesto," in Morgan, ed., pp.533-36

Redstockings, eds, Feminist Revolution (1975; New York: Random House, 1979)

Reising, Russell, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature
(London: Methuen, 1986)

Rich, Adrienne, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in

Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986; London:
Virago, 1987), pp.23-75

Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the

Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)

Rifkind, Donna, "The Farsighted Virtuoso," Wall Street Journal, 2 January 1990, p.A9

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London:

Routledge, 1989)

Rodley, Chris, ed., Cronenberg on Cronenberg (London, Faber and Faber, 1992)

Rogin, Michael, "Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,"
Representations, 6 (1984), 1-36

- - - , Ronald Reagan, The Movie; and Other Episodes in Political Demonolog)'

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

- - - , "Body and Soul Murder: JFK," in Garber et aI., eds, pp.3-22

- - - , "JFK: The Movie," American Historical Review, 97 (1992), 500-05

Roiphe, Katie, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1993)

Rose, Jacqueline, "Femininity and its Discontents," in Sexuality and the Field of Vision
(London: Verso, 1986), pp.83-104

Rosenberg, Bernard, and David H. White, eds, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts ill
America (New York: The Free Press, 1964)

Rosenstone, Robert A., "JFK: Historical Fact, Historical Film," American Historical
Review, 97 (1992), 506-511

Ross, Andrew, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge.

1989)

- 198 -
 ,Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits
(London: Verso, 1991)

, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Societ\' (London.

Verso, 1994) . .

Roszak, T~eodore, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic

Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1970)
- - , Flicker (London: Bantam, 1992)

Rothstein, David A., "Presidential Assassination Syndrome: A Psychiatric Study of the

Threat, the Deed, and the Message," in Crotty, ed., pp.161-221

Rowbotham, Sheila, Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action

(London and New York: Routledge, 1992)

Ruby, dir. John MacKenzie (1993)

Rucker, Rudy, R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, eds, Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the
New Edge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992)

Rushdie, Salman, "Still Crazy After All These Years," New York Times Book Review,
14 January 1990, pp.l, 36-37

Rushkoff, Douglas, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (London:

Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1994)

Russell, Bertrand, "16 Questions on the Assassination," The Minority of One, 6

September 1964, pp.6-8

Sage, Lorna, Women in the House of Fiction: Post- War Women Novelists
(Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1992)

Sanders, Scott, "Pynchon' s Paranoid History," Twentieth-Century Literature, 21

(1975), 177-92

Sarachild, Kathie, "Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon," in Redstockings, eds,

pp.145-50

Savran David, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the
Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992)

Sayres, Sohnya et aI., eds, The 60s Without Apology (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984)

Schlesinger, Arthur, "JFK and Vietnam," TLS, no.4639 (1992), p.19

Schor, Naomi, "Female Paranoia: The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism,"
Yale French Studies, 62 (1981), 204-219

Scott, Joan W., "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in Weed,

ed., pp.81-100
- - - , "'Experience,'" in Butler and Scott, eds, pp.22-40

- 199 -
 Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics and the Death 011FK (B k I . U' . of
California Press, 1993) er e ey. nIVerslty

Sebestyen~ Amand~, '68, '78, '88: From Women's Liberation to Feminism

(Bndport: Pnsm, 1988)

Sedgwick,. Ev~ Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of

CalIfornIa Press, 1990)

, "Epidemics of the Will," in Crary and Kwinter, eds, pp.582-595

Segal, Lynne, Is t~e Future Female?: Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism

(London: VIrago, 1987)

, and Mary McIntosh, eds, Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography
Debate (London: Virago, 1992)

Sharrett, Christopher, "Debunking the Official History: The Conspiracy Theory in

lFK," Cineaste, 19 (1992), 11-14

Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975; New York:
Dell, 1988)

Shilts, Randy, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
(1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988)

Shulman, Alix Kates, "Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism," Signs, 5
(1980), 590-604

Shumway, David, "lamesoniHermeneutics/Postmodernism," in Kellner, ed., pp.172-

202

Siegel, Mark, Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in "Gravity's Rainbow" (Port Washington:

Kennikat Press, 1978)

Silverstein, Arthur M., A History of Immunology (London: Academic Press, 1989)

Simon, Art, "The Making of Alert Viewers: The Mixing of Fact and Fiction in lFK,"
Cineaste 19 (1992), 14-15

Simpson, Amelia S., Detective Fiction from Latin America (Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 1990)

Singer, Linda, Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of
Epidemic (London: Routledge, 1993)

Skerl, lenni, William S. Burroughs (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985)

and Robin Lydenberg, eds, William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical

Reception 1959-1989 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991)

Smith, Matthew, lFK: The Second Plot (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992)

Smith, Paul, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1988)
Smith, Wilson, ed., Mechanisms of Virus Infection (London: Academic Press, 1963)

- 200-
 Smyth, 1~~Dund J., ed., Postmodemism and Contemporary Fiction (London: Batsford,

Solanas, Valerie, Scum Manifesto (1968; London: Phoenix Press, 1991)

i ~~~)n, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octagon Books,
g
Sonta

, Illness as Metaphor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989)

Steiner, Wendy, "Pynchon's Progress: Dopeheads Revisited," Independent, 3 February

1990,p.30

Stephanson, Anders, "Regarding Postmodernism-A Conversation with Fredric

Jameson," in Kellner, ed., pp.43-74

Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1988; London:
Flanungo, 1993)

Stone, I.F., "We All Had a Finger on That Trigger," I.F. Stone's Weekly, 9 December
1963, pp.I-2

- - - , "The Left and the Warren Commission Report," I.F. Stone's Weekly, 5 October
1964, pp.I-2

Stone, Oliver, "Warren Panel Findings Should Stir Outrage," New York Times, 3
February 1992, p.A14

- - , The Nation, 18 May 1992, p.650

Summers, Anthony, The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980; revised edn., London: Warner,
1992)

- - - , "Who Killed JFK? The Unstoned Version," Independent, 18 January 92, p.27

Swanson, David, Philip Bohnert and Jackson Smith, The Paranoid (Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1970)

Sykes, Charles, Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (New York:
St. Martin's, 1988)

Tallack, Douglas, Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context

(London: Longman, 1991)

Tani Stefano, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to
, Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984)

Tanner, Tony, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (London: Jonathan Cape,
1971)

- - - , Thomas Pynchon (London: Methuen, 1982)

- - , Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (CUP, 1987)

Taubin, Amy, "The Wrong Body," Sight and Sound, 2.1 (1992),8-10

"The Death of a President," Economist, 9 October 1993, p.32

- 201 -
"The Earlier Assassins," Time, 29 November 1963, p.16

The Manchurian Candidate, dir. John Frankenheimer (1962)

"The Mysterious Career of Lee H. Oswald," Timewatch documentary BBC 2 20

November 1993 ' ,

The Parallax View, dir. Alan J. Pakula (1974)

"The Warren Commission Report," Time, 2 October 1964, pp.19-23D

"The Zapruder Footage," Late Show special, BBC2, 22 November 1993

Thomas, D.M., Flying in to Love (1992; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993)

Thoreen, David, "The Economy of Consumption: The Entropy of Leisure in Pynchon' s

Vineland," Pynchon Notes, 30-31 (1992), 53-62

Thomley, Kerry, Oswald (Chicago: New Classics House, 1965)

Treichler, Paula, "AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of

Signification," in Crimp, ed., pp.32-70

, "AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse," in Fee and Fox, eds, pp.200-202

Trujillo, Nick, "Interpreting November 22: A Critical Ethnography of an Assassination

Site," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79 (1993),447-66

U.S. Dept of Justice, "1968 Panel Review of Photographs, X-Ray Films, Documents
and Other Evidence Pertaining to the Fatal Wounding of President John F.
Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas," rpt. in Weisberg

U.S. House of Representatives, Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979)

U.S. President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller
Commission), Report to the President (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1975)

U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to

Intelligence Operations (Church Committee), Alleged Assassination Plots
Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1975)

- - - , The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy:

Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, Book 5, Final Report (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1976)

Vankin, Jonathan, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and

Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1991)

Wainwright, Loudon, "The Book for All to Read," Life, 16 October 1964, p.35

"Wake up America! It Can Happen Here! A Post-McCarthy Guide to Twenty-three

Conspiracies by Assorted Enemies Within," Esquire, May 1966, pp.92-93. 162-
165

Walker, Christopher, "Thomas Pynchon's Vineland," London Re\'iew of Books, 8

- 202-
 March 1990, ppA-5

Ward, Geoff, "William Burroughs: Literary Outlaw" Cambridge Quarterl" 22 (1993)

339-54 ' - " ,

Warner, ~ichael, .ed., ~ear .of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory,
(MInneapolIs: UnIversIty of Minnesota Press, 1993)

Warren Co~mission, Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of

President
1964) John F. Kennedy (Washington , DC: US Government Printing Office ,

Watney, Simon, Polic.ing Desire: Pornography, Aids and The Media (London:
MethueniComedIa, 1987)

,Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HNIAIDS (London· Rivers Oram

1994) . ,

Watts, Cedric, The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots (Brighton:

Harvester, 1984)

Waugh, Patricia, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (London: Routledge

1989) ,

- - - , ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992)

- - - , "Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism: Gender and Autonomy Theory," in

Waugh, ed., pp.189-204

Weed, Elizabeth, ed., Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (London:

Routledge, 1989)

- - - , "Introduction: Terms of Reference," in Weed, ed., pp.ix-xxxi

Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern
Sexualities (1985; London: Routledge, 1993)

Weisberg, Harold, Post Mortem: JFK Cover-Up Smashed (Frederick, MD: H.

Weisberg, 1975)

Weisenburger, Steven, A HGravity's Rainbow" Companion (Athens, GA: University of

Georgia Press, 1988)

Whalen, Jack, and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties
Generation Grows Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989)

White, Edmund, "This Is Not a Mammal: A Visit with William Burroughs" in The
Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality, 1969-1993 (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1994), pp.l07-114.

White, Hayden, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987)

Wicke, Jennifer, "Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the Culture of

Celebrity," South Atlantic Quarterly, 93 (1994), 751-78

Wilgus, Neal, The Illuminoids: Secret Societies and Political Paranoia (Albuquerque:
Sun, 1980)

- 203 -
Williams, Jeffrey, ed., PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy (London:
Routledge, 1995)

Williamson, Judith, "Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meanings of HIV and AIDS," in
Carter and Watney, eds, pp.69-80

Willis, Ellen, "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" in Sayres et al. eds
pp.91-118 " ,

- - - , Foreword, in Echols, pp.v-xiv

Wilson, Elizabeth, Hidden Agendas: Theory, Politics, and Experience in the

Women's Movement (London: Tavistock, 1986)

Wilson, Robert Anton, The Illuminati Papers (Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1990)

- - - , Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales of the Illuminati (Berkeley:
Ronin Publishing, 1992)

Winter Kills, dir. William Richert (1979)

WITCH, various documents, in Morgan, ed., pp.538-56

Wolf, Naomi, The Beauty Myth How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
(1990; London: Vintage, 1991)

- - - , Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st
Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993)

Wood, Michael, "There's Daddy," London Review of Books, 13 February 1992, pp.6-8

Wulff, Erich, "Paranoiac Conspiracy Delusion," in Graumann and Moscovici, eds,

pp.171-189

Wylie, Philip, Generation of Vipers (1942; London: Frederick Muller, 1955)

Zamansky, Harold S., "An Investigation of the Psychoanalytic Theory of Paranoid

Delusions," in The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, Hans J. Eysenck
and Glenn D. Wilson, eds (London: Methuen, 1973), pp.297-316

- 204-