T H E S E C R E T C H I E F O F C O N S P I R A C I E S MARK MADOFF Royal Roads Military College I n Thomas Pynchon’s satirical novel The Crying of Lot 49, protagonist Oedipa Maas blunders into evidence of warring world-wide conspiracies. There comes a crisis of understanding for her, and recognizing her choices she tells herself: Either you have stumbled indeed onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream . . . or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, hiring of professional actors . . . so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. O r you are fantasizing some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.1 But the territory suited to the drama of conspiracy fictions is well within the skull. Their psychological resonance remains, whatever the style or manner. Oedipa’s entanglements are as nebulous and soluble as cotton candy, and Pynchon spins them out in order to evoke a Californian taste for paranoid speculation — and bizarre realities. But the spirit of mad delight for readers, delight in a disruptive and inscrutable meshing of events, is nothing new. The novel ends with Oedipa waiting for the bidding at a stamp auction — for her, nowhere. Her arousal is high, her knowledge pointless. She may choose from visions of real danger, trickery, dream, or madness. And these, too, are nothing new. For novelists of the late eighteenth century in particular, fic tional conspiracies had the same allure of bad dreams and worse awakening. In fact, all the elements of Pynchon’s grim sport were at their disposal. Let’s look at the ancestry of Oedipa and her predicament. To do that we must consider two questions: What do fictional conspiracies resemble? And what appeal do they hold? This second question is especially puzzling. For common sense would predict that conspiracies would be fearsome creations, wholly unattractive. The answer emerges, though, from peculiarly eighteenthcentury changes in aesthetic enjoyment. E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, vi, 4, Winter 1980 The first and most obvious thing that fictional conspiracies resemble is real conspiracies. This point needs to be emphasized because the realistic basis of fictional conspiracies recedes whenever the writer’s chief interest is terror, spectacle, sensationalism, or satire. As it usually is. Nevertheless, in the 1970s certainly, it has become easier to see how the anxiety about real conspiracies spills over into fiction and often electrifies it. We are perhaps tempted to view this as a symptom of our harrowing times. But there is a continuous line of fictional response to real conspiracies dating from at least the late seventeenth century. The material for the fiction— and for the anxiety — has always been there. Yet when it sinks into such scurrilous, sub-literary forms as the propaganda and the scandal-sheet one is reluctant to take it seriously. Con sequently, one may dismiss such popular works as Adventures of a Jesuit (1771), Naubert’s Herman of Unna (1789), Tschink’s Victim of Magical Delusions (1795), or Dubois-Fontenelle’s Effects of the Passions, or Memoirs of Floricourt (trans. 1788) with an air of modem liberal contempt for their fractiousness, without realizing their dim reflections of fact. Of course, heavy applications of sensationalism and sentimentality obscure the facts. But the material is there, or is not far away for the searching. The Jesuits, for exam ple, their order disbanded by Pope Clement xiv in 1773, had reorganized in the refuge offered by Frederick the Great within Prussia, whose kingdom became the legendary and fictional haven of all sorts of malevolent fanatics. The Inquisition, which had at times shrunk to a tame board of inquiry, was restored to full powers in Spain in 1778. As J. M. S. Tompkins concludes, the fictional exploitation of the Inquisition was not simply a matter of ram pant imagination: It was inevitable...
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Jan 1, 1986
Pierre Vanbergen + 1
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