Escaping The Enemy Within

As part of the research for my upcoming Anthropology of Religion assignment - reviewing, analysing and criticising the article of our choice from our textbook - I have been reading a book by Gerald Alper called The Paranoia of Everyday Life: Escaping the Enemy Within. This is to complement the bizarre, nevertheless interesting article I'll be examining by a fellow anthropological psycho-analytic, Ronald C. Johnson called "Parallels between Recollections of Repressed Childhood Sex Abuse, Kidnappings by Space Aliens, and the 1692 Salem Witch Trials." As odd a subject as it seems for study I've becoming increasingly interested in the narrative structure of paranoia lately, partly because of a revelation about the stories of Lovecraft, and my own quirky psychological realization--no, I'm not saying I'm crazy, but merely becoming fascinated with psychology and modern literature.

I was particular intrigued after reading Frye's The Great Code with his concept of the demonic parody, or aspect, that is, the dark vision. As far as I can tell, Frye's concept is the most helpful, succint idea for elucidating in ironically positive terms the structure or intent of things like paranoid visions in stories. His concept has helped me realize in my study of Lovecraft, in conjunction with McLuhan's theories, every paranoid vision in every Lovecraft story is just that: A demonic parody of the traditional dream vision, which brings us back to the albeit modern realm of metaphor and allegory. But as a demonic parody of the dream vision, the standard being Chaucer and his Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, or Spencer's Faerie Queene, at least for me, everything is reversed, this deus ex machina scenario is: --infernal rather than celestial, nightmare rather than dream, fracturing instead of completing, and trauma not catharsis. To what is the vision of Lovecraft pointing us to: the dark side of technology, which cannot be revealed except in an infernal, paranoid vision as light shone on darkness only shows light--showing us the sinister, dark conspiracy of ideas or influences lurking in the shadows. Paranoia, in modern literature, as an artificial structure or mode of narrative is precisely and necessarily traumatic to take us out of ourselves, or beside our minds as the very word suggests, because if we see for ourselves, and therefore become aware and master these things in our minds with a language or narrative of understanding, we become no longer unconsciously enslaved or entrapped in the mass hypnosis of the world.

The point as Alper's title aptly suggests is escaping the enemy within...