| The shift to a
simulacral basis of narrative raises fundamental problems for historian
and fiction writer alike (indeed, it begins by collapsing many distinctions
between them). Charles Newman, the postmodern Dr. Johnson, aphorizes that
"[i]f a writer announces the Death of Literature and the Debasement
of Language in the Reign of Silence, he should have the good sense to practice
what he preaches and re-evaluate his career objectives" (177). But
where is the doomsday comet to wipe out the Writers, the blast that will
terminate literary history? Perhaps the event to watch for is not explosion
but its inverse, the "implosion of meaning" announced by Jean
Baudrillard: "an absorption of the radiating model of causality, of
the differential mode of determination" into a semiotic economy of
copies without originals, signifiers lacking signifieds (57). Such a simulacral catastrophe may well be upon us; yet even this state of affairs seems not to put the period to narrativity. The incredulity toward master stories has a fairly long history in its own right. Peter Brooks traces its beginnings to the demise of Providence traditions in the time of Darwin and Freud (6), and on from there into Beckett, Borges, and the heyday of modernism. And yet even in the wake of the Wake and interminable end games, writers continue to produce new master narratives on which we whet our unbelief. Witness the popularity surge of the espionage genre in the decades following World War II (from Graham Greene and John Le Carré to Ian Fleming and Len Deighton), or the paranoid-historical genre in the sixties and seventies (Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon), and in more recent years, what we might call the post-paranoid or chaotic subgenre of conspiracy fiction (from Don DeLillo and Umberto Eco to cyberpunks like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Neal Stephenson). Breakdown implies both collapse and continuity. Waiting for the explosion that does not come may amount to having the explosion, or to living through it in some strangely troped or modulated form. As the west has moved from Oedipus to anti-Oedipus, from continuous natural selection to punctuated equilibrium, from Euclid to Mandelbrot or Aristotle to Derrida, the problem of narrativity has neither abated nor achieved climax. It has instead shifted into a state of permanent crisis. No doubt in writing this one exposes a familiar theoretical vein to various arché debunkers. Claims about the immanence of crisis evoke the querulous tones of nominal apocalypse as exploded by Derrida, "climax inflation" as exposed by Newman, or the inherent fraudulence of all terminal prophecies as revealed by Kermode. Most tellingly, it will also sound suspiciously like what Marilouise Kroker has named "post-male hysteria," a hyperanxious response to the lost conjugation of sex and power. In the lists of writers above, you will find only two people of color and a single woman. Paranoia it's a phallogocentric thing, you wouldn't understand. Perhaps. Andrew Ross locates the cyberpunk genre firmly in "Boystown," and perhaps the creative paranoids belong there too. As David Porush points out, the apocalyptic impulse in technological fiction has perhaps too much in common with the pathology of paranoia, including a belief in an imminent explosion of signification (106-107). Is the fictive paranoid simply another version of Mailer's writer-as-psychopath, deliberately regressing through the "locks of incest" in an attempt to re-wire his (always his) nervous system ("White Negro," 278)? What is the relationship that connects narrative, paranoia, and technologique? The project of narrative, especially historically ambitious or apocalyptic narrative, faces a deepening skepticism about its nature and purposes, even among the writers who practice it. This may result from shifting geopolitics, nascent info-capitalism, and/or irredentist white-male privilege. At its best, the mythology of paranoia was a way of finding skew lines, producing disorder or at least dissent in the domain of "control and communication," as Norbert Wiener memorably named it. But paranoia is not the gnosis it used to be, and while this decline may be unlamentable, it may also announce important changes in the cultural order changes that go beyond the hothouse world of conspiracy fictions. For the moment, let us reconnoiter the hothouse. Important changes are evident in the realm of espionage or conpiracy fiction, for which the recent work of John Le Carré provides a useful index. It seems highly significant that Le Carré's protagonist in The Russia House, his least perfect spy, is not a professional agent but an obscure publisher. It is also most interesting that the machinations in that novel center on a manuscript demonstrating that weapons development in the Soviet Union has been based on falsified research, making its nuclear deterrent the greatest masterpiece of Russian fiction. Not only are there no perfect spies, there are also no "perfect rockets." In his first treatment of spying in the new world order, Le Carré faces the same fear that stirs such grave concern in Fredric Jameson: the prospect that history (the secret history of the Cold War which furnishes his master narrative) may reduce to a series of texts or to one text in particular. Barley Blair in The Russia House may well be a spiritual descendant of Pynchon's Enzian, and indeed we might rate him the finest scholar-magician of the postwar Zone. Like the prophet of the Schwarzkommando, Blair finds himself in a realm of convergent oppositions, beyond the simple dualisms of East versus West, a true dweller in Paranoia. But unlike his forerunner, Blair actually lays his hands on the textual grail which is, of course, instantly suppressed by military-industrial-intelligence interests on both "sides." However, the truth (or the horror) seems undeniable. The Cold War may have been driven through all its excesses by an international conspiracy to defraud. This insinuation seems especially plausible in the aftermath of Desert Storm, that orgy of simulation which Arthur Kroker has called "the first virtual war" (49). Indeed, according to Le Carré's implications, the Gulf conflict, with its not-so-smart bombs, air-bursting Scuds, and overrated Patriots, may simply mirror a grander pattern of technopolitical deception. "The real war is always there," Pynchon reminds us (Gravity's Rainbow, 645), a contention not among nations but among industrial elites, concentrations of resources, and technologies. Particular threats or cold wars are epiphenomena, designed to "Allow Complexity" and "Introduce Terror" (298). Espionage work is nothing but deception, of course, and as Le Carré's pseudonym suggests, his fiction has always expressed a tension between the crooked and the square. But his latest novels exhibit a deepening anxiety about the great corporate fictions. The Secret Pilgrim, Le Carré's next work after The Russia House, musters George Smiley and his cold warriors out of service with a series of reflections by Smiley's protegé, Ned, on the history and prospects of the covert world. Among the most trenchant of these is Ned's memoir of Ben Cavendish, the once-promising young agent whose career blows up in early disaster. Ben it seems has had a secret passion for Ned, which the stolidly heterosexual Ned recognizes far too late. There is also a woman in the case, Ben's cousin Stefanie, who comes to understand both her cousin's disgrace and Ned's part in it. Though she expresses revulsion for the secret world, she offers literally to seduce Ned away from it. Ned refuses the overture for reasons he does not make plain. There seems to be a choice involved, perhaps between the brotherhood of spies (so vulernable, in its male monasticism, to the homoerotic) and the "siren voices" of the women with whom Ned repeatedly attempts to escape his cloister. In refusing Stefanie, Ned seals his allegiance to the covert world; at which point she gives him a crucial piece of advice that might indeed hang in epigraph over the whole Circus saga: "Let me tell you something. May I? It is very dangerous to play with reality. Will you remember that?" (70). Ned claims that "her words never left my memory" (71), though they do not seem to have shaken his conspiratorial calling. Perhaps more salient is Le Carré's desire to remind readers of the dangers of the cloister and of the increasingly precarious balance between play and reality, history and simulacral text. Such reminders about the implosive and self-fulfilling dangers of dissimulation have become a regular feature of conspiracy fiction in the eighties and nineties. "Plots carry their own logic," Don DeLillo writes in Libra, his novel about the Kennedy assassination. "There is a tendency of plots to move toward death" (221). In that last sentence DeLillo paraphrases his previous novel, White Noise, suggesting that this interrogation of plots and mortality is something of an obsession. But White Noise is a comic novel and Libra a very dark travesty. Its theme is far more sinister than its predecessor's: we may be unwilling to grant mere montages the status of history, but there are other, more terrible implications latent in the union of history and simulation. DeLillo explores the possibility that the logic of prevarication, or hyperrealism, might come to substitute for the ostensibly rational mechanisms of overt history. |