The “Scanty Plot”: Orwell, Pynchon, and the Poetics of Paranoia

Abstract

In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me, In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground. --Wordsworth (199) Not least among the prescient aspects of George Orwell's 1984 is its articulation of a paranoia that is at once dismal and thrilling. If today paranoia's distinctive sensibility--its blend of grandiosity and abjection--has become a commonplace of the modern novel, with writers from Pynchon to DeLillo to Amis riffing on the suspicion that the world might be a setup, Orwell's version lays the groundwork for their sense of paranoia's possibilities. In this essay, I treat the paranoia of 1984 as more than just a topical thematics that reacts to the political conditions of Orwell's time; I argue that the novel also responds to the condition of the of his time. By looking at 1984 and then, briefly, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as counterpoint, I pose Orwell's paranoid poetics as an effort to mediate between competing literary discourses and their attendant models of subjectivity. That explicitly intended 1984 to address topical political realities has been well documented. (1) In a letter to Francis A. Henson in June 1949, commenting on the germ of the novel, he wrote: ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences (Howe 287). Following along these lines, John Atkins, in an early response to 1984, claimed that the world of 1984 is imagination at all but a painstaking pursuit of existing tendencies to what appear logical conclusions (252). Similarly, Irving Howe, a champion of the work, wrote that the thing cared about, the last thing he should have cared about when he wrote 1984 is literature (322). (2) Such statements as these lay the groundwork for reading 1984 in terms of its clear-sightedness, its evocation of history as nightmare (the title of Howe's article), rather than in terms of the work's literary qualities. But it is not only Orwell's visceral revulsion at totalitarian politics that shapes this critical response: it is also 1984's rejection of novelistic conventions. For example, while Howe calls 1984 a remarkable book (321), he also suggests that it does not meet the requirements of the novel as genre: It is not, I suppose, really a novel, or at least it does not satisfy those expectations we have come to have with regard to the novel--expectations that are mainly the heritage of nineteenth century romanticism with its stress upon individual consciousness, psychological analysis and the study of intimate relations. (321) Howe continues: Orwell has imagined a world in which the self, whatever subterranean existence it might manage to eke out, is no longer a significant value, not even a value to be violated (322). Here he gestures toward a possibility for reading 1984 within, rather than outside of, the tradition: Orwell's of the notion of self is not simply a violation of an a priori assumption about the nature of the human; it is the violation of the self as literary category, as a quantity derived through and within the dynamic process of narrative development. In this sense, if 1984 is only dubiously instead of politics, at the very least cares enough to speak to and the novel tradition. What then is the relationship between 1984 and literature, and, by extension, its literary period? We might begin by considering the climax of the novel. The climax appears to be the scene in Room 101, where Winston is introduced to his greatest fear, the rats. Do it to Julia! he cries (190), proving that love is no match for torture, and that the perfected totalitarian state is capable of erasing the last vestige of humanity. …