ABSTRACT
In a little-noticed aside in The Paranoid Style, Richard Hofstadter refers to Harold Lasswell as "one of the first in the country" to have turned "to the study of the emotional and symbolic side of political life". His identification of conspiracy theories with a dangerous insanity was rarely challenged, when literary scholars began to analyze a wave of popular conspiracy narratives that had attracted large audiences and garnered positive reviews. Pynchon's heroine may be taken as exemplary for the clarity with which she faces the essential epistemological dilemma of paranoid narrative and possibly of the Cold War as a whole. The bipolarity that structures Cold War conspiracy fictions forced even narratives heavily focused on the United States to imagine its participation in a global system. The institutionalized secrecy of the national security state, and the predominance of psychological warfare in a conflict that relegated armed combat to the global South, introduced an ever widening gap between available and necessary knowledge.
