Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (review)

This beautifully-written and provocative book offers what Jean-François Lyotard would have called a grand narrative. The book’s starting point is given on the dustjacket: “paranoia, suspicion, and control have preoccupied key Western intellectuals since the sixteenth century. Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature, and its peculiar constellation of symptoms—grandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility, delusions of persecution and conspiracy—are nearly obligatory psychological components of the modern hero.” The grand narrative John Farrell puts forward tries to explain how this came about and in the process aims to illuminate the mindset of the modern intellectual.

In Farrell’s account, for those schooled in humanism, there is a sharp contradiction at the heart of the modern condition. On the one hand, we still believe in ideals, though these come in a wide variety of guises: the good society, healthy-mindedness, openness, toleration, compassion, etc. But on the other, our intellectual training and the concepts and habits of thought we take from it teach us to be very wary of most ideals, to see them indeed as myths. Our position is made worse by the fact that there is very little we can do as individuals to give practical expression to our ideals. And so, Farrell argues, we see a kind of reflection of ourselves in literary heroes who feel that the world is unresponsive to their gifts, their witness. Our modern condition not only sharpens our appreciation of Don Quixote, it also makes us receptive to skeptical iconoclasts in the realm of thought such as Bacon and Hobbes, and to revere more-or-less paranoid, alienated authors such as Swift and Rousseau. Almost unknown to ourselves, we have become not merely skeptical but incredulous of the very possibility of value and authority: in a word, cynical. The book ends with Rousseau though Professor Farrell has already given us a flavor of how his approach might be applied to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in his last book, Freud’s Paranoid Quest (1996). In this earlier work he argues that Freud is the paradigmatic case of the modern intellectual—so intensely suspicious of everything that it cuts itself adrift from the possibility of real authority. Marx’s dictum “doubt everything” would probably get short shrift—though there are some very interesting remarks on Marx in the present book (248–50) which suggest that Farrell holds him in higher esteem than he does the founder of psychoanalysis.

The key term of the whole book is “alienation of agency.” As long as we believe that as individuals we have the means of changing the world for the better by an act of will, we can see the world in pragmatic, non-paranoid ways. When agency is shown to lie outside ourselves, grandiosity, suspicion, and hostility may get the better of us. Farrell’s tale unfolds over four parts. Part I deals with early modern Catholic responses to this dilemma. Farrell begins with a charming reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain sees himself as and strives to be a perfect Christian knight. But by allowing himself to be seduced by Bertilak’s wife he discovers his own fallibility. His decision to wear her girdle as a mark of shame, though outwardly self-abnegating, is also self-regarding, inasmuch as it serves as a constant reminder of the ideals he had set himself and failed to live up to: he alone deserves this punishment because he alone had it in him to resist Bertilak’s wife’s charms. His narcissism is punctured, in Farrell’s telling, by the decision of the knights to recuperate his plight by laughter and to adopt the garter as their shared symbol. It is a triumph, albeit a precarious one, of Christian humility through community. The reading of Don Quixote emphasizes the value of laughter in community as well, but crucially, Quixote has no share in the laughter Cervantes provokes in his reader. He merely furnishes the occasion for...