Talk:The Crying of Lot 49

“In America there are no boundaries, only mazes. No one knows how to draw them, though they are indeed drawn, whether randomly or conspiratorially into binary systems of mutual exclusion or permissive inclusion that deflates all differences and distinction. Here no one seems sure of the border between fact and fiction, animate and inanimate, the projected and the perceived.”

-Peter Euben on Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (in The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken, Princeton University Press, 1990)

"paranoia"
A key element in the understand of The Crying of Lot 49 was pervasively 'in the air' in the 60s when CoL49 was written (according to TRP in Slow Learner)

Major historian Richard Hofstadter's defining, influential essay,'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' was published in Harper's Magazine in November 1964. [[1]]