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Timothy Melley. Empire of Conspiracy:The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. ix + 239 pp.
Arthur Saltzman. This Mad "Instead": Governing Metaphors in Contemporary Fiction. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000. xiv+ 232pp.
The books reviewed in this essay examine authors whose formal innovations are as intriguing as the ways their fictions respond to the conditions of their production. To say that Saltzman focuses more on stylistic innovations and Melley more on socio-historical conditions risks reducing one to "form" and the other to "content/Though such a statement would be an oversimplification, it would be fair to say that Melley and Saltzman are complimentary opposites who, taken together, offer keen (if contrary) analyses of the ways in which - to paraphrase Saltzman - words render the worlds of contemporary American fiction.
Timothy Melley would likely agree with what Don DeLillo wrote in an essay on the Kennedy assassination: "paranoia in some contexts is the only intelligent response" ("American Blood" 24). Melley's Empire of Conspiracy investigates why and how paranoia has become a central metaphor of American fiction and culture during and after the Cold War period. Taking as its central literary figures DeLiIIo, Margaret At wood, Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Diane Johnson, and Thomas Pynchon, Melley's is an exemplary "cultural studies" text that grounds its readings historically, while extending analytical trajectories to post-World War Il social critics, psychologists, and filmmakers. We learn, for instance, that William Whyte's Organization Man and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man share an inability to recognize the ways in which they have been ideologically conditioned, even though Whyte advocates a Protestant work ethic while Marcuse favors socialism. (For the record, Melley aligns himself with neither.) The central thesis of Melley's book is this: the "rise of conspiracy and paranoia as major themes in late-twentieth-century American culture" articulates fears about "changing social and technological conditions" and "new conceptions of human subjectivity" (44), and reasserts "the vitality of a more familiar and comforting model of self in response" (45).
Melley calls this fear "agency panic" because these narratives express "anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control" ( 1 2). What makes his book interesting is that he does not simply plug each author into this...