Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (review)

In Latent Destinies, his fourth book of criticism, Patrick O’Donnell takes a reading of current American culture through a study of its films and novels. Noting the proliferation of narratives and events that underscore a sense of uncertainty and conspiracy—The X-Files television drama, the ongoing obsession with the JFK assassination, the anti-government happenings at Ruby Ridge and at Waco, and the millennial rumors of technological apocalypse—he attempts to understand paranoia as a political factor. “This is the time of paranoia,” he declares so unequivocally in the opening pages of his text, and then qualifies, “paranoia as the symptomatic condition of postmodernity in contrast to the name for a personal pathological disorder” (5). In bringing together in his analysis the issues of global capitalism, identificatory notions of self/gender/ nation, and the uses and abuses of history within certain postmodern ideologies, O’Donnell provides an impressive argument that not only lays out the symptomatic manifestations of paranoia in contemporary American narrative, but also addresses any utopian claims for a “cure” to paranoia that may stand outside of history. The book’s strength rests in its author’s persuasive articulation of the unifying desires underlying paranoia within the context of postmodern dissimulation.

In setting the framework for his study, O’Donnell relies on the identity theories expounded in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. These texts are engaging and, for the most part, O’Donnell’s discussion of them is helpful in establishing the theoretical construct of his investigation. However, it is the work of Slavoj \o(z,^�)i\o(z,�)ek that most informs the book’s analysis. Latent Destinies is above all a psychoanalytical critique of the ongoing cold war culture, in which the paranoid ruminations underlying East-West relations was/is just one of the symptomatic projections of individual, communal, and national identity. The author argues persuasively that the “end” of the cold war, in Francis Fukuyama’s sense and otherwise, is itself a premature political fiction.

Instead of attempting a broad survey of paranoid-laden texts that claims representative thoroughness, O’Donnell rightly limits his focus to a few well-chosen and elucidatory narratives that allow him to articulate the postmodern paranoid condition. This investigation is divided into three major sections, each one highlighting a particular manifestation of this phenomenon, and each comprised of three illustrative examples. The first section, cleverly entitled “Head Shots,” maps out the crossroads of paranoia and history through three Kennedy assassination narratives: Don DeLillo’s novel, Libra; Oliver Stone’s film JFK; and Norman Mailer’s “true-life story,” Oswald’s Tale. Next, O’Donnell approaches paranoia in terms of the psycho-cultural processes that produce identity. Using Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows, and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless, he discusses the ways in which knowledge (of the oedipal, the alienated self, and the reproductive body/culture) induces paranoid anxiety within the fragmentation of postmodernity. The final section of the book is devoted to three felony narratives—Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs—where O’Donnell draws out the connections between criminality, homoerotic/homophobic sexuality, and cultural paranoia.

Most of the readings in Latent Destinies provide insightful analyses of the texts in question, especially as they apply to symptomatic paranoia. However, perhaps the least successful section of the book concerns The Crying of Lot 49 (which is unfortunate, given the fact that O’Donnell has edited a useful volume of essays devoted to the novel). Although O’Donnell does see Pynchon’s postponed revelation within the context of the paranoid desire to affirm or pin down revelation, he nonetheless relies too heavily here on the writings of Jean-Joseph Goux. At times O’Donnell seems too...