The Paranoid Chronotope by Beckman Frida;

Author:Beckman, Frida;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

We have seen how Bakhtin builds his conception of the chronotope around Kant’s insistence on the imperative role of space and time in cognition via “elementary perceptions and representations,” and how he differs from Kant in insisting on the formative importance of a concrete and immediate reality (1981, 85n). This is how the chronotopes of literature help shape the image of man: the spatiotemporal conditions constructed are concomitant with characters’ conditions for cognition. But because the paranoid subject tends to be the only one on the everyday dimension of the chronotope who discerns another dimension—that secret and often malicious layer that truly regulates the world—he is estranged from a critical context. This subject cannot easily arrive at a truth or at least an identification of what is reasonable with the help of thinking and reasoning with others. In fact, others tend to be seen as ignorant of the true nature of things at best and part of that devious and manipulative other layer at worst.

As we will see, it does not matter that Jeremy O’Keefe, the protagonist of I Am No One, has a family and an academic job—he is still profoundly cut off from the type of social world that would help him ascertain what is true or even reasonable. Instead, he finds himself exposed to a large, indeterminable system that seems to be out to get him. The overwhelming facts and data about his past that mysteriously turn up at his doorstep (quite literally) seem to come from nowhere. As we will see, this data, which is intimately about Jeremy himself—printouts of his online activities, telephone calls, and so on—separates him from rather than brings him closer to the truth about himself. Having for the longest time refused to face or even acknowledge the dubious behavior to which the data speaks, Jeremy and the novel give up this truth and lay it in the hands of a conspiratorial external agency. This is, in effect, a concrete staging of the “radical empiricism” discussed previously, in which knowledge, as severed from subjects and debates, from social and political frameworks, from critical judgment and mutual interrogation, seems to come from nowhere. Under such conditions, knowledge comes to be associated with authority and conspiracy. Who knows the truth? Who knows what there is to know and how it all adds up? Conspiracy is nurtured when facts are “unmoored from argument, evidence, and history” not least because “conspiratorial thought presumes that agency is dominated by those with secret control over knowledge and hence secret action” (Saltman, 99). In I Am No One, this agency initially seems to take the shape of another character: Michael Ramsey. Intermittently, however, it also begins to appear as Jeremy’s unconscious, as his society’s “dirty secret,” and, progressively, as the festering guilt of a white American man. I Am No One, as we will see, invokes a sense of guilt of Kafkaesque proportions as well as prevarication regarding the truth that is interlinked with an indeterminable system that nonetheless claims to determine them both.

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