Empire of the Paranoid: Lectures on the Intellectual History of American Literature

March 20, 2019

One of the reasons I aspired to study American literature was Ken Kesey's 1960s counterculture novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962). The tragicomedy woven from the friendship between McMurphy—a rowdy but righteous man confined to a psychiatric hospital—and Chief Bromden—a taciturn but insightful Native American—was translated into Japanese in 1974. In 1978, it was staged by the Shiki Theatre Company led by Keita Asari, gaining a reputation with a cast featuring Takeshi Kaga and Sakae Takita. Beyond the friendship between different ethnicities, America itself during the Vietnam War era might have been an infinitely managed psychiatric hospital. The awareness that one must thoroughly resist oppression lacking a just cause left a powerful impression on me when I was around twenty years old. This year marks the 100th anniversary of J.D. Salinger's birth, and a similar structure underlies his "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951). The possibility that an outsider deviating from social norms can demonstrate civic resistance is perhaps the very charm of American literature.

Richard Hofstadter, a Columbia University professor who led the history of political thought in North America from the 1950s to the 1960s, called this mentality "anti-intellectualism" and explored the "paranoid style" as an inseparable tendency. Both terms sound negative in Japan, but is that really the case?

Anti-intellectualism is likely widely known, as it has been applied to recent criticisms of the government in the United States and Japan. However, what Hofstadter proved was that anti-intellectualism is not merely a preference for the economy or respect for the military, but above all, it has formed an intellectual history that constitutes the mainstream of American literature as anti-authoritarianism. As the flip side of this, conspiracy delusions at the national and international level—the "paranoid style"—have at times expanded to include witch hunts, the Red Scare, and even tales of alien abduction by UFOs. This book aims to illustrate, through specific literary works and films, that a narratological creativity unique to America is hidden there, bringing to light an intellectual history that has previously been obscured.

Empire of the Paranoid: Lectures on the Intellectual History of American Literature

Takayuki Tatsumi

Taishukan Shoten

258 pages, 2,200 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.