This Tablet piece categorizes some well-known authors in regard to their relationship to conspiracy theories:
America’s last great generation of fiction writers were divided on the subject of conspiracy theories into three well-defined camps. The first camp, consisting of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo and their fellows, accepted an American reality defined by pop psychology, celebrity, and the power of individual narcissism—i.e., a somewhat more sophisticated version of the official American narratives presented on the nightly news and in Time magazine—with writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison doing their part by filling in the endlessly fascinating subject of race. It was no accident that both Mailer and DeLillo were driven to write endlessly long, fictionalized biographies of Lee Harvey Oswald that concluded that Oswald acted alone, while neither Morrison nor Walker displayed the slightest interest in who shot Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. For his part, Roth wrote two overtly political American novels, which concluded respectively that Richard Nixon was bad and that Charles Lindbergh was an antisemite. For all of these writers, the official version of American history was the necessary overarching framework for social, familial, and individual microhistories—though in his more overtly Jewish books, like The Counterlife, The Ghost Writer and Operation Shylock, Roth managed to escape the official version of Jewish history and became a much more interesting writer.
The second camp of American novelists were those who saw strange shapes moving beneath the murk. These included Thomas Pynchon, of course, but also William Gaddis; realists like Robert Stone and James Ellroy; and Ralph Ellison, the author of the single greatest 20th-century American novel, Invisible Man, a book which absorbed the literary energy of his great predecessor, William Faulkner, who as a Southerner necessarily dissented from the official version of everything. On one level or another, for all of these writers, the conspiracies were real, and the official version was a lie for squares. The third camp, the absurdists, who included Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Barry Hannah, and others, tried and in most cases failed to break the deadlock through deadpan comedy.
Top image: Ralph Ellison photo portrait seated.jpg/ Wikimedia Commons
Thanks! I have never read him. I definitely have some gaps in my reading history. I don't think I could take his longer works, but I am a big fan of "The Crying of Lot 49." I would describe Pynchon's takes on conspiracy theories as pretty complex.
Did you read that long discussion by David Mims in Quillette a couple days ago about William Goldman's metafictional novel "The Princess Bride"? I had no idea it was that weird.
"The third camp, the absurdists, who included Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Barry Hannah, and others, tried and in most cases failed to break the deadlock through deadpan comedy."
Perfectly put. But they were more and less than absurdists and doing more and less than breaking a deadlock. They were telling the bifurcated truth, which is that YES, there are conspiracies afoot and YES, the people who notice them are kooks. Both are true at the same time.
I like James Ellroy. He spoke at the Library of Congress. It was rowdy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybc03Fdc8Dw
Thanks! I have never read him. I definitely have some gaps in my reading history. I don't think I could take his longer works, but I am a big fan of "The Crying of Lot 49." I would describe Pynchon's takes on conspiracy theories as pretty complex.
Probably because Pynchon seems to subscribe to non-overlapping, maybe even conflicting conspiracy theories.
It seems like he almost falls into the "deadpan comedy" group, as you can't tell what is a real conspiracy and what is fake or hallucinated.
Did you read that long discussion by David Mims in Quillette a couple days ago about William Goldman's metafictional novel "The Princess Bride"? I had no idea it was that weird.
No but I just did. How strange! I never saw the film.
You should see it. It's quite good. Iconic, in fact.
"The third camp, the absurdists, who included Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Barry Hannah, and others, tried and in most cases failed to break the deadlock through deadpan comedy."
Perfectly put. But they were more and less than absurdists and doing more and less than breaking a deadlock. They were telling the bifurcated truth, which is that YES, there are conspiracies afoot and YES, the people who notice them are kooks. Both are true at the same time.
I have Catch-22 on my bookshelf. Will get to it eventually!