Paranoid fiction
Encyclopedia
Paranoid fiction is a term sometimes used to describe works of literature
that explores the subjective
nature of reality and how it can be manipulated by forces in power. These forces can be external, such as a totalitarian
government, or they can be internal, such as a character's mental illness
or refusal to accept the harshness of the world he is in.
Unlike speculative fiction
, paranoid fiction is written in a way so as to imply that the story may only be a delusion
of the characters, instead of treating it as an alternate history or an in-fiction universe
.
, in particular, was known for his exaggerated accounts of what he portrayed as real life in his works, to enhance the absurdity of the life themes they conveyed. Similarly, George Orwell
's works, while not as exaggerated, confirmed the practice of using dystopia
n fiction to take a different outlook on highly common themes, including identity and personal desires.
The term paranoid fiction was first coined to label sensationalistic and off-beat stories as bizarre and thus outside the realm of literary fiction. Starting after World War I
, however, modernists
began exploring the stranger themes of life in art, in response to the themes of death being effectively mechanized and made impossible to toy with by the war's graphic depictions. As a result, modernist literature tended to explore the meaning and construction of reality, shifting away from the progressive, cause-and-effect structure of realist
fiction towards a more complex and disjointed depiction of reality.
After World War II
, absurdists
carried this focus one step further by placing these common themes in surreal and fantastic settings, turning what would have been otherwise mundane concepts into distinctive, stand-out ones, thus converting the paranoid fiction genre into a legitimate one.
Philip K. Dick
is most frequently viewed as the forefather of the modern paranoid fiction. His works were literally born out of paranoia and hallucination; he had sudden visions of places he'd never been to and events he'd never witnessed, possibly from temporal lobe epilepsy
or an overly active imagination. These visions were so vivid that Dick put them down on paper, never failing to classify them as only "speculative thought," and thus outside the boundary of conventional thought.
Most of Dick's works start out uneventfully in a seemingly ordinary setting, then transpose to a surrealistic
fantasy
, with the characters discovering that what they thought real was in fact a delusion. Throughout his works, Dick maintained a balance between the expected traits of the science fiction
genre they were also categorized in, and the eccentric and disturbing elements coming from his mind. A recurring theme in his works is on how reality is perceived and treated differently by people depending on their mindsets.
Another paranoid fiction author considered to have been inspired by his own madness is Howard Phillips Lovecraft
. Descended from two parents who eventually were institutionalized in an asylum
, Lovecraft suffered from frequent nightmares up to his death. Unlike in most other paranoid fiction where the artificiality of the characters' world is merely hinted at, Lovecraft made it clear that these worlds were a direct product of his characters' minds, as they gradually went insane and their imaginary seeings grew progressively more bizarre.
. However, the most popular type of paranoid fiction has proved to be one in which the universe appears on the surface to be definite and real, but upon closer inspection, to actually be deceptive and deliberately misleading. In these works, there are either questions raised as to the realness of the world the characters are living in, or a distinction made between a fantasy world and its reality.
Paranoid fiction often overlaps with many other genres, most commonly dystopia
n fiction, science fiction
, and film noir
, sharing many of its main themes and literary devices. Generally, however, paranoid fiction avoids explicitly defined themes and concrete motifs in favor of allegories
and ambiguous symbol
ism to emphasize the dreamlike and unreal nature of the characters' world. For example, a purely dystopian work typically explores the mechanisms and motives of the totalitarian state to keep its people under control, whereas one of paranoid fiction would concentrate more on the effects of the state on its inhabitants' mental and emotional well-being, and its implications on the decadent condition of society. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
can be viewed as a balance of the two, depicting the Party as crushing free will through a strictly defined language
and constant monitoring, but also through psychological torture and the distorting of people's viewpoints on what is true and what is false.
To further increase their "magic realism
," works of paranoid fiction often employ common devices and archetypes from other genres, including a detective-solving structure, plot twists, or philosophical themes, to create a surrealistic
tone and an atmosphere of fear and dread. Plots also tend to be fanciful and occasionally futuristic to emphasize their inherent absurdity and imaginativeness, but also maintain some measure of realism to comment on how apparently unrealistic stories can, in fact, be (often frighteningly) closer to real life than one might think at first glance.
Sometimes paranoid fiction will strongly imply, and occasionally admit outright, that its constructed world is a lie or an illusion. In this case, the plot will center on the main character's struggle between the physical and spiritual; i.e. the actual world they are in, versus the world they want to see and believe in. Here, the cause of the fantasy is the protagonist's internal desires, doubts, and suspicions. Such works tend to be more introspective and focused on the individual, than on a community or regime.
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
that explores the subjective
Subjectivity
Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...
nature of reality and how it can be manipulated by forces in power. These forces can be external, such as a totalitarian
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
government, or they can be internal, such as a character's mental illness
Mental illness
A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Such a disorder may consist of a combination of affective, behavioural,...
or refusal to accept the harshness of the world he is in.
Unlike speculative fiction
Speculative fiction
Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as...
, paranoid fiction is written in a way so as to imply that the story may only be a delusion
Delusion
A delusion is a false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence. Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological...
of the characters, instead of treating it as an alternate history or an in-fiction universe
Fictional universe
A fictional universe is a self-consistent fictional setting with elements that differ from the real world. It may also be called an imagined, constructed or fictional realm ....
.
History of paranoid fiction
The elements of paranoid fiction can be seen in works dating as far back as the first half of the 20th century. Franz KafkaFranz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, in particular, was known for his exaggerated accounts of what he portrayed as real life in his works, to enhance the absurdity of the life themes they conveyed. Similarly, George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's works, while not as exaggerated, confirmed the practice of using dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n fiction to take a different outlook on highly common themes, including identity and personal desires.
The term paranoid fiction was first coined to label sensationalistic and off-beat stories as bizarre and thus outside the realm of literary fiction. Starting after World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, however, modernists
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
began exploring the stranger themes of life in art, in response to the themes of death being effectively mechanized and made impossible to toy with by the war's graphic depictions. As a result, modernist literature tended to explore the meaning and construction of reality, shifting away from the progressive, cause-and-effect structure of realist
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
fiction towards a more complex and disjointed depiction of reality.
After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, absurdists
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
carried this focus one step further by placing these common themes in surreal and fantastic settings, turning what would have been otherwise mundane concepts into distinctive, stand-out ones, thus converting the paranoid fiction genre into a legitimate one.
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...
is most frequently viewed as the forefather of the modern paranoid fiction. His works were literally born out of paranoia and hallucination; he had sudden visions of places he'd never been to and events he'd never witnessed, possibly from temporal lobe epilepsy
Temporal lobe epilepsy
Temporal lobe epilepsy a.k.a. Psychomotor epilepsy, is a form of focal epilepsy, a chronic neurological condition characterized by recurrent seizures. Over 40 types of epilepsies are known. They fall into two main categories: partial-onset epilepsies and generalized-onset epilepsies...
or an overly active imagination. These visions were so vivid that Dick put them down on paper, never failing to classify them as only "speculative thought," and thus outside the boundary of conventional thought.
Most of Dick's works start out uneventfully in a seemingly ordinary setting, then transpose to a surrealistic
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
, with the characters discovering that what they thought real was in fact a delusion. Throughout his works, Dick maintained a balance between the expected traits of the science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
genre they were also categorized in, and the eccentric and disturbing elements coming from his mind. A recurring theme in his works is on how reality is perceived and treated differently by people depending on their mindsets.
Another paranoid fiction author considered to have been inspired by his own madness is Howard Phillips Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
. Descended from two parents who eventually were institutionalized in an asylum
Psychiatric hospital
Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental hospitals, are hospitals specializing in the treatment of serious mental disorders. Psychiatric hospitals vary widely in their size and grading. Some hospitals may specialise only in short-term or outpatient therapy for low-risk patients...
, Lovecraft suffered from frequent nightmares up to his death. Unlike in most other paranoid fiction where the artificiality of the characters' world is merely hinted at, Lovecraft made it clear that these worlds were a direct product of his characters' minds, as they gradually went insane and their imaginary seeings grew progressively more bizarre.
Characteristics of paranoid fiction
At its most basic, paranoid fiction refers specifically to works about speculations and possible conspiracies by people in power, told by an unreliable narratorUnreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
. However, the most popular type of paranoid fiction has proved to be one in which the universe appears on the surface to be definite and real, but upon closer inspection, to actually be deceptive and deliberately misleading. In these works, there are either questions raised as to the realness of the world the characters are living in, or a distinction made between a fantasy world and its reality.
Paranoid fiction often overlaps with many other genres, most commonly dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n fiction, science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
, and film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
, sharing many of its main themes and literary devices. Generally, however, paranoid fiction avoids explicitly defined themes and concrete motifs in favor of allegories
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
and ambiguous symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ism to emphasize the dreamlike and unreal nature of the characters' world. For example, a purely dystopian work typically explores the mechanisms and motives of the totalitarian state to keep its people under control, whereas one of paranoid fiction would concentrate more on the effects of the state on its inhabitants' mental and emotional well-being, and its implications on the decadent condition of society. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...
can be viewed as a balance of the two, depicting the Party as crushing free will through a strictly defined language
Newspeak
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it refers to the deliberately impoverished language promoted by the state. Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained...
and constant monitoring, but also through psychological torture and the distorting of people's viewpoints on what is true and what is false.
To further increase their "magic realism
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
," works of paranoid fiction often employ common devices and archetypes from other genres, including a detective-solving structure, plot twists, or philosophical themes, to create a surrealistic
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
tone and an atmosphere of fear and dread. Plots also tend to be fanciful and occasionally futuristic to emphasize their inherent absurdity and imaginativeness, but also maintain some measure of realism to comment on how apparently unrealistic stories can, in fact, be (often frighteningly) closer to real life than one might think at first glance.
Sometimes paranoid fiction will strongly imply, and occasionally admit outright, that its constructed world is a lie or an illusion. In this case, the plot will center on the main character's struggle between the physical and spiritual; i.e. the actual world they are in, versus the world they want to see and believe in. Here, the cause of the fantasy is the protagonist's internal desires, doubts, and suspicions. Such works tend to be more introspective and focused on the individual, than on a community or regime.
Authors of paranoid fiction
- William S. BurroughsWilliam S. BurroughsWilliam Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
- Philip K. DickPhilip K. DickPhilip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...
- H. P. LovecraftH. P. LovecraftHoward Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
- Thomas PynchonThomas PynchonThomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
- Stephen R. DonaldsonStephen R. DonaldsonStephen Reeder Donaldson is an American fantasy, science fiction and mystery novelist, most famous for his Thomas Covenant series...
- Robert Anton WilsonRobert Anton WilsonRobert Anton Wilson , known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic...
- Trevor ShaneTrevor ShaneTrevor Shane is an American author of contemporary thriller, suspense, speculative fiction, dystopian, drama and genre fiction. His debut novel Children of Paranoia was published in September 2011 by Dutton Books. It is the first book in a trilogy set to be published by Dutton Books.-References:...
Films considered to be paranoid fiction
- Blade RunnerBlade RunnerBlade Runner is a 1982 American science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. The screenplay, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, is loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K...
- Fight ClubFight Club (film)Fight Club is a 1999 American film based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. The film was directed by David Fincher and stars Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. Norton plays the unnamed protagonist, an "everyman" who is discontented with his white-collar job...
- The GameThe Game (film)The Game is a 1997 neo-noir psychological thriller film directed by David Fincher, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, and produced by Polygram. It tells the story of an investment banker who is given a mysterious gift: participation in a game that integrates in strange ways with his life...
- Jacob's LadderJacob's Ladder (film)Jacob's Ladder is a 1990 American psychological thriller/horror film directed by Adrian Lyne, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin.-Plot:Jacob Singer is a U.S. soldier deployed in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War...
- The MatrixThe MatrixThe Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-action film written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving...
- American PsychoAmerican Psycho (film)American Psycho is a 2000 cult thriller film directed by Mary Harron based on Bret Easton Ellis's novel of the same name. Though predominantly a psycho thriller, the film also blends elements of horror, satire, and black comedy...
- Although not explicitly stated, it is somewhat hinted at. - Shutter Island
- Vanilla skyVanilla SkyVanilla Sky is a 2001 American psychological thriller film directed, co-produced and co-written by Cameron Crowe. The film is an English-language remake of the 1997 Spanish movie Abre los ojos , the screenplay for which was written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil...
- Melvin goes to dinnerMelvin Goes to DinnerMelvin Goes to Dinner is a 2003 American film adaptation of Michael Blieden's stage play Phyro-Giants!, directed by Bob Odenkirk. Blieden wrote the screenplay from his stage play, and he also stars in the film , along with Stephanie Courtney, Matt Price and Annabelle Gurwitch.-Plot:Melvin is a...
- PrimerPrimer (film)Primer is a 2004 American science fiction drama film about the accidental discovery of a means of time travel. The film was written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth and was completed on a budget of $7,000...
- The IslandThe Island (2005 film)The Island is a 2005 American science fiction/thriller film directed by Michael Bay and starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. It was released on July 22, 2005 in the United States, and was nominated for three awards including the Teen Choice Award....
- The Prisoner
- Taxi Driver (film)