208
PARTISAN REVIEW
ordinary trash can, hand-painted with the initials W.A.S.T.E. "She
had to look closely to see the periods between the letters." It's a witty
touch, for those tiny periods flickering near the vanishing-point
could mean nothing at all, but might also make all the difference
between a simple trash can and a system of secret communication
going back centuries; she may have stumbled into the dense un–
derbrush of a hidden reality, something she might have uncovered
"anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly con–
cealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if she'd only looked."
"Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a trans–
cendent meaning, or only the earth."
It should be clear why Pynchon's paranoid myth makes some
claim on us, without demanding that we be paranoid ourselves, or
give any credence to the reality of V. or the Tristero System. Pyn–
chon's paranoia is neither a clinical paranoia nor a literal paranoid
view of history, but instead a metaphor for something the novelist
shares with the mystic, the drug-taker, the philosopher, and the
scientist: a desperate appetite for meaning, a sense at once joyful and
threatening that things are not what they seem, that reality is mys–
teriously overorganized and can be decoded if only we attend to the
hundred innocent hints and byways that beckon to us, that life is
tasteless and insipid without this hidden order of meaning but per–
haps appalling
with
it.
Without farce or violence, Pynchon's paranoia reveals an aliena–
tion from American life greater than that of Heller or any other
comic-apocalyptic writer. Society commands no loyalty in
Lot
49,
though the freaked-out scene of California in the sixties evokes an
anthropological fascination; the rest is a tissue of falsehood and spirit–
ual deadness. The drifter ambience of
V,
which Pynchon himself has
evidently continued to live out, has ripened in good sixties fashion
into a complete rejection of official cant and the square world. Pyn–
chon's sensibility, like that of some of the earlier Beat figures (whom
he resembles in many ways, not including his highly structured style
of writing, and his aversion to personal publicity), foreshadowed
~trikingly
the mood of young people in the late sixties. For them,
paranoia, like radicalism, drug-taking, and communal life, was both
a rejection of the official culrure and a form of group solidarity,
promising a more fully authentic life-possibility.
