The Law of Complicity: Paranoia and Virtual Trauma in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

Alec Leibsohn

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The Law of Complicity: Paranoia, Agency Panic and Post-9/11 Virtual Trauma in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City Paranoia functions in postmodern fiction as a natural response to the mediation of images and controlling ideologies in the Information Age. An ambiguous understanding of conspiracy, which induces what Timothy Melley calls “agency panic,” is at the center of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City; what starts as paranoid conjecture is partially confirmed to be factual, the level of which is left up to the reader. Why is paranoia such a popular and important theme in postmodern fiction? In the text’s unreal and possibly virtual Manhattan, paranoia is a natural and necessary response to living in 21st century, or what Melley calls the “postmodern condition.” Furthermore, the novel represents paranoia as a response to what Marc Redfield terms the “virtual trauma” of 9/11 – the way in which 9/11 as a symbol was mediated through the television screen, creating an experience both “real” and “virtual.” In the text’s Manhattan, the conspiracy is at least partially real – Chase Insteadman is a “Gnuppet” of the Arnheim administration, only aware of his role through his friendship with the hyper-paranoid Perkus Tooth. Paranoia is explored through each of these character’s role in and response to conspiracy, and they all fall somewhere on a spectrum ranging from complicity to total paranoia and the rejection of any meaning. Chase, at the beginning of the novel, occupies a space of willful acceptance, and even further, complicity; through Perkus, paranoiac and skeptic, Chase adapts a new perspective, ultimately aware of his own manipulation and complicity in the revealed conspiracy of the Arnheim administration, and furthermore, the complicity of the entirety of the text’s Manhattan. This essay is divided into three sections: analyzing first the Arnheim administration’s conspiracy and the subsequent agency panic of the characters, then the chaldron as a symbolic representation of the virtual image, and lastly the historical contextualization of post-9/11 America. Ultimately, the novel shows that either extremity of complicity or paranoia is psychologically detrimental, and one must instead occupy a space of ambiguity in order to healthily live in the 21st century; one must accept the world as simultaneously “real” and “virtual,” where information and images are always mediated and thus cannot be accepted as a singular truth.

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Part I: Agency Panic and the Arnheim Administration Timothy Melley, in his book Empire of Conspiracy, uses the term “agency panic” to describe the role of paranoia in postmodern fiction, which functions in two ways essential to my reading of the novel. Firstly is “a nervousness or uncertainty about the causes of individual action. This fear sometimes manifests itself in a belief that world is full of ‘programmed’ or ‘brainwashed’ subjects, addicts, automatons, or ‘mass produced’ persons…Many postwar narratives depict characters who feel they are acting out parts in a script, written by someone else or who believe that there most individuating trait have been somehow produced from without” (12). In Chronic City, Chase occupies the role of the actor, in this case, quite literally. Chase’s arc in the novel is a gradual realization of his grand role, with the necessary introduction of Perkus’ extreme paranoid perspective. Agency panic is essential to this realization. The secondary feature of agency panic revolves around a sense that “controlling organizations are themselves agents – rational, motivated entities with the will and means to carry out complex plans…In moments of agency panic, individuals tend to attribute to these systems the qualities of motive, agency and individuality they suspect have been depleted from themselves or others around them” (13). The primary “controlling organization” in Chronic City is Mayor Arnheim’s administration. But since the text also implicates the people in Manhattan as co-conspirators because of their complicity, I would like to extend Melley’s observations and risk the term “controlling ideology” as an amalgamation of the Arnheim administration and the imposed ideologies upon the text’s Manhattan, in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s assertion that “ideology is, strictly speaking, only a system which makes a claim to the truth — that is, which is not simply a lie but a lie experienced as truth, a lie which pretends to be taken seriously” (29). These controlling ideologies, in the world of the novel, are in fact partially involved in the suspected conspiracies; similar to the paranoids in the works of Thomas Pynchon, Perkus and Chase are justified in their convictions, and are thus not actually paranoid in the traditional sense of the word (Melley 13). The conspiracy the Arnheim administration is involved in is thematically significant; Lethem uses conspiracy and paranoia to expose systemic, sociological issues in New York City. According to Melley, postmodern fiction uses paranoia to extend these issues even further than sociological studies:

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those suffering from agency panic “unearth forms of human intentionality where a strictly sociological analysis would find only institutions, mores, economic structures, and discourses” (16). Through investigating the specific controlling ideologies and the agents of conspiracy in the novel, Lethem’s realworld social critique becomes apparent. Mayor Arnheim is the larger-than-life individual that brings “human intentionality” to conspiracy, but there are a number of co-conspirators implicated: Claire Carter, Oona Lazlo, Strabo Blandiana, and a number of Manhattan’s socialites. While it is through Perkus that Chase adopts agency panic and a “paranoiac skin,” it is the Arnheim administration that does the actual manipulating and supplies the motive. In this section, I will focus on the revealed conspiracies that induce Chase and Perkus’ agency panic, and subsequently show how the social structures being manipulated symbolically represent the “cultural, economic and technological context in which Jonathan Lethem is writing” (Peacock 154). The perhaps largest conspiracy of the novel is the farce of Janice Trumbull, a story constructed by the Arnheim administration to maintain social and political control in the “conspiracy of distraction” (390). The reveal that Janice may not be floating in space and that Oona Lazlo, ghostwriter and Chase’s lover, has been penning Janice’s letters published in the New York Times, disenchants the novel for readers, and retrospectively changes much of our understanding. And yet, this reveal is neither a shock to Perkus or Chase, who seem to have subconsciously known the truth all along. Confirmation of this conspiracy comes from Claire Carter, right hand to Mayor Arnheim and pro “disenchanter,” to Perkus: “We’re aware you’re a favorite of Chase Insteadman’s. His story keeps a lot of people enthralled you know. This is a difficult time in the city” (334). Here, Claire is open about the Arnheim administration’s role in constructing Chase’s story; in terms of hidden forms of knowledge, Perkus thus confirms the truth about Chase, something he has “suspected so much, so extensively, for so long” (334). Knowing the truth is not as grand as the chase for the truth; it is only disenchanting to learn of what’s hiding in plain sight: “But it was different to have a thing confirmed. ‘I’m not so sure Chase realizes it’s a story’” (334). Through Claire Carter, one of the many conspiracies of the novel is confirmed.

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This revelation reinforces agency panic: Chase has unknowingly “been constructed by powerful external agents” (Melley 12). But what are Lethem’s intentions behind the confirmation of this construction? In his essay “Hiding in Plain Sight,” Jonathan Peacock suggests that “a media-saturated ‘reality’ culture, in which people are, like Chase Insteadman, cast in fictionalised versions of their own lives, reinvigorates a desire for reality” (154). In many ways, Perkus is aware of the concept embedded in Peacock’s statement. Chase also eventually finds his own understanding of his role, and it is not a shock, but rather an acceptance of the “truth” hiding in plain sight: I’d been forced to understand I was an actor in a script. As according to my long training, in my only avocation. And I was a less-out-of-work actor than I’d believed. Those obnoxious young producers I’d lunched with had enlisted me in the role of my lifetime, after all. I’d obviously memorized my part so well that I could lose myself inside it, forget it was a script, and live my own life…My script’s updates arrived periodically in The New York Times in the form of Janice’s letters, and all of Manhattan was my studio audience. (442) Chase’s ultimate disenchantment, gained through agency panic in response to conspiracy, shows the importance of seeing through the fictions and narratives deployed by controlling ideologies, even as the novel simultaneously argues for the continuing significance of literary fictions. While Chase is the primary one manipulated, Perkus realizes his own potential complicity in the conspiracy: “Claire Carter had destabilized him: Perkus Tooth now knew he might be a Gnuppet, though operated by whom he couldn’t say” (342). Perkus interprets Claire’s openness as evidence for a second conspiracy, one I will refer to as his “simulacraa theory”: “Perkus had been astonished that Claire Carter had let this secret be confirmed…The answer lay in plain sight: Claire Carter wanted Perkus to consider the extent to which he lived as much in a construction as Chase Insteadman” (340). His theory, hinted at by Claire Carter, begins as imagining their Manhattan as a simulated virtual reality where himself, Chase and Richard are the only “real souls still inhabiting the island” (412). The instances of unreality and virtuality then – “the gray fog, the subway-boring mechanical tiger, the chaldron sickness” (412), the

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chocolate smell, – are symbols of the constructedness of their world leaking through. Yet at the end of the novel, Perkus simultaneously offers the reverse, a “solution” to his simulacra theory: “Why bother? The world cannot be disenchanted, this was his new motto. Reside in whatever small cave of the real you can gather around yourself and a few friends” (413). Perkus’ attachment to both these contradictory responses supports the ambiguity Lethem ultimately arrives at throughout the text. Perkus’ theory is more relevant to Lethem’s thematic intent than the theory itself; whether the text’s Manhattan is an actual virtual reality or not does not matter, rather that mediation and the internet creates a metaphorical virtual reality in our own world. His simulacra theory is thematically linked to other metaphors in the novel: the relationship between the birds and the tower Chase obsesses over, the artifice and virtuality of the chaldron, and the overall ability of the media to manipulate and mediate reality. People do not necessarily have to be interested in literal virtual reality for this experience to make sense; living in the Information Age, they are forced to engage in a multitude of virtual experiences. Lethem himself offers important insights into this idea in an interview conducted within Second Life as avatars, the real-world equivalent of Yet Another World: “Even if people don’t conceive themselves as interested in computers or virtual reality in any way, they are nonetheless engaged in all sorts of virtual experiences, by doing e-mail, by the sheer fact of working on computers, socializing on computers, joining a really simple social medium like Facebook or shopping in a store like eBay.” People who say they would never go into Second Life will buy things on eBay, which Lethem describes as an “imaginary store” where “you compete with other invisible people for objects” (Tor Interview). The text echoes Lethem’s (and Žižek’s) words: “We might as well live in a concocted environment, according to his new epiphany, since our awareness was a sort of virtual construction to begin with. No baseline reality existed to worry over” (388). Since Chronic City never clearly defines whether or not the text’s Manhattan is a simulation, this ambiguity forces readers to consider their own role in the real-world controlling ideologies and to be more aware of the virtual aspects of everyday life that mediate experience.

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Part II: The Virtual Chaldron, Capitalism and Desire Television, as a technology that mediates information and images is subjective, bias and detached from reality: a “virtual” experience. Melley offers significant insights into why paranoia and agency panic is especially significant in the context of the 21st century and technology: Conspiracy theory arises out of radical doubt about how knowledge is produced and about the authority of those who produce it. [Conspiracy theory] develops from the refusal to accept someone else’s definition of a universal social good or an officially sanctioned truth…Until we discover some magically unmediated access to reality, conspiracy theory cannot simply be pathologized in one sweeping gesture…many [suspicions] seem to be logical responses to technological and social change. (13) While television is a significant source of mediation, in terms of modern society and Chronic City, the internet is now the largest mediator of information, and more specifically, of the image. Melley’s insights can be even further extended by considering how we interact with the medium of the internet: no longer mere passive recipients of information and images, we are now producers and contributors. This creates a grey area of social control different from television: on one hand, the internet is extremely vulnerable to manipulation and control, but on the other hand, the ability to be both selective of what information we receive as well as producers of knowledge allows for a two-way exchange. Internet users are now equally complicit in creation and performance as they are an audience; culture is not necessarily passively imposed on us anymore, as we can be selective and even respond. One poignant symbol contextualizes the novel within the Information Age and the internet: the chaldron. The chaldron is a symbolic image of socioeconomic control, capitalism, agency panic and the virtual presumably tied to the real-world economic crisis of 2008. The introduction of the chaldron disrupts the “ostensible texture of everyday reality” (87) in the novel more so than any other instance of science fiction or magic realism. In one of the novel’s greatest set-pieces, Chase, Perkus, Richard and Georgina descend into an ecstatic night of virtual bidding, all centering around the interrelation of desire and money: “The object seemed to explode in our hearts with a wholeness that disproved Manhattan’s

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ancient powers, though those towered everywhere around us. A chaldron was fundamentally a thing beyond, or beside money. Yet we’d done nothing but hurl cash at it, as if pitchforking hay into a furnace. Everything disproved everything else…I felt ill” (151). This interrogation of reality the chaldron evokes is narratively linked to the economic and political conspiracy of the Arnheim administration. One of the most important facets of the chaldron is its ability to exert economic control through desire; as witnessed in the bidding scene, “Crazy4Chaldrons” and “Chaldronlover6,” already established as economic elites, are trumped by two bidders with hidden identities, selling for 14,000 dollars. These bidders are never revealed, but it is safe to assume their connection to the Arnheim administration and the social elite. Another level of the virtual that the chaldron functions on is the way it is mediated through the internet, a collection of pixels still somehow able to evoke a physical and emotional reaction from the characters: “We never held on the item’s main page long enough to complete the chaldron’s image, so it now remained elusive, jittery, wreathed in chunky pixels as if fatigued by our strident love” (148). As revealed by Claire Carter to Perkus, the chaldron is not a physical object translated to the virtual, but rather a virtual image in itself – one that somehow half-exists within the virtual Yet Another World and the characters’ own reality, in the form of a laser projection. For a virtual item, physically unobtainable, this is large sum of money. Thus the chaldron functions particularly well as a symbol of the virtual image and desire in a capitalist system. What is further agency panic-inducing about Claire’s revelation is the level of socioeconomic control, through desire, the chaldron exerts over the city; the way this virtual item in a virtual economy actually dictates the real-world relationship between desire and the economy: A separate economy, originating within the game, had leaked out into the wider world, as players seeking to accumulate in-game wealth and sway by shortcut rather than diligence began hoarding and trading on the small number of unique and unduplicable treasure items Linus had ingeniously tucked into the corners of his world…For all the anarchy Linus loosed, he’d kept this one means of playing God: a monopoly on the local equivalent of a short supply of Holy grails…So the chaldron quickly became the supreme

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44646115 symbol of the game’s elite…The items, fundamentally imaginary though they might be, had begun trading in the “real” world for hundreds then thousands of dollars. (331)

As a bridge between the real-world and virtual economy, Claire Carter, as an extension of the Arnheim administration, owns a hidden treasury of chaldrons and is thus able to manipulate both world’s economies at will. Furthermore, through her revelation to Perkus, conspiracy is simultaneously denied and confirmed; the magic essence of the chaldron is disenchanted for him, but at the same time, Claire’s knowledge of this information only confirms the presence of conspiracy. In many ways, the function of the chaldron is something Chase already recognized earlier in the novel: “Chaldrons circulated in a zerosum system, and those not winners were certainly losers. How could we have been so naive? It was as if for a sweet instant we’d forgotten death existed, and Perkus had had to break the news” (144-145). This zero-sum game is privatized by the Arnheim administration, and, according to Žižek, is able to manipulate social reality: “the paradox of a [thing] which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked: the moment we see it 'as it really is', this [thing] dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality” (28). For Perkus, the effect of the chaldron transcends physical existence, yet it eventually “dissolves itself into nothingness,” which makes the disenchanting of such an item all the more devastating to him: “[Perkus’ schizophrenic inquiries] sprang from the certainty that a thing as splendid as the chaldron could be hidden, hogged, privatized by the mayor and other overlords. This theft in turn described the basic condition of Manhattan and the universe…the chaldron belonged not to Arnheim but to everyone” (284). It thus makes sense that, after his disenchanting conversation with Claire Carter, Perkus cuts himself off from the virtual world of popculture and the internet and turns to a natural, biological reality in Ava, something James Peacock deals with extensively in his essay (159-162). What Lethem is thematically interested in by using the chaldron as a socioeconomic symbol has to do with the relationship between the mediated image and desire within a system of capitalism. According to Žižek’s understanding of Marxism, “Capitalism is caught in a kind of loop, a vicious circle, that was clearly designated already by Marx: producing more than any other socioeconomic formation to

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satisfy human needs, capitalism nonetheless also produces even more needs to be satisfied; the greater the wealth, the greater the need to produce more wealth” (Tarrying With the Negative, 209). In terms of the Information Age, are we also not also complicit producers of our own desire? Linus Carter is the humble creator of Yet Another World, who showed sincere theoretical hope in the creation of a space where anything is possible. Yet, his sister, an agent of the controlling ideology, co-opted this cause for the purpose of commodification and capitalism. From that point on, the blur between the real and the virtual has risen exponentially, caught in a loop of manufactured and unfulfilled desire. In terms of the chaldron, this emerges as a paradoxical need to “hurl cash at it,” despite Chase’s recognition that “a chaldron was fundamentally a thing beyond, or beside money” (151). Thus the symbol of the chaldron is desireobjectified; chaldrons are only so ridiculously expensive because people desire them, but paradoxically people create and generate this same desire themselves, ultimately rendering it literally and symbolically unobtainable. Part III: Virtual Trauma and Complicity in Post-9/11 New York According to James Peacock, the “historical moment” is essential to understanding the “treatment of themes like reality, representation and secrecy” in Chronic City. Furthermore, he claims that an “overarching anxiety about the decline of reality” causes the characters of the novel, particularly Perkus and by extension Chase, to respond with agency panic and paranoia (149). Considering Lethem’s own comments on the novel and the current historical context of New York City, 9/11 is the historical moment that makes paranoia thematically significant and function in this way. In his interview with The Guardian, Lethem states that after the immediate reaction to 9/11 passed over, which he saw as an “intimate despair in New York City that had a value in its tangible, local quality,” the media and the controlling ideologies appropriated the trauma “for a giant political purpose elsewhere,” specifically the presidential re-election and the War on Terror: 9/11 didn’t belong to New York anymore – it was something else. It had become a symbol. In New York City, it became uncomfortable. Denial took over, and the city shifted back into an attempt to forget this event, or displace it. So the book is about not

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44646115 thinking about 9/11 – that is one of its primary subjects. I was trying to evoke this feeling that something is wrong, but it no longer has a name. Ordinary events become suffused with dread. (The Guardian Interview)

I have already established how, in the text’s Manhattan, the everyday lives of the characters have become induced with agency panic through this decline in reality, and will now contextualize these ideas within the historical context of 9/11. For the purposes of this section, I will use Marc Redfield’s term “virtual trauma” to better understand the media representation of 9/11 after the fall of the World Trade Center. Redfield uses the term virtual trauma to describe the ambiguous injury inflicted by the September 11 attacks, an event mediated through our television screens: “Virtual” intends to suggest the trembling of an event on the edge of becoming present: one that is not fully or not properly “actual”…we who watched TV were not, as a rule, traumatized in the technical, psychological sense or even in the more broadly idiomatic sense of having suffered abiding psychic damage—and if we then affirm that no real trauma can be said to have been produced in such a context, well, that, of course, is the principal connotation we now grant the adjective ‘’virtual’’: something mediated, technically produced, not properly real. For those who had the protection of distance, the September 11 attacks were not ‘‘really’’ traumatic; they were a spectacle: a famously, infuriatingly cinematic pectadle. (2) This mediation has a significant presence in the virtuality of Chronic City; in Perkus’ simulacra theory, in Yet Another World and the chaldron, and in the general unreality and virtuality of the text’s Manhattan. Furthermore, Lethem’s statement that the collective trauma of New York was appropriated elsewhere relates to the conspiratorial nature of the Arnheim administration, as established in the previous two sections of this essay. The mediated and constructed nature of Janice Trumbull’s story by the Arnheim administration is an important site of complicity and distraction. Claire Carter says to Perkus that Chase’s “story” is for the benefit of the people and Manhattan, that it is a “difficult time in the city” (334). What

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makes this place and time specifically so difficult? Perkus offers a potential source during his paranoid descent towards the end of the novel: “Something happened, Chase, there was some Since then, time’s

rupture in this city.

been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster.

Whatever the cause, ever since we’ve been living in a place that’s a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches” (389). The “other disaster” he mentions here is extremely telling, and the reader is meant to immediately associate this with 9/11. As he finally sees it himself, Chase describes Perkus’ view of the Manhattan socialites as complicit in the “conspiracy of distraction” (390). One aspect of the novel, which makes Chase such an interesting unreliable narrator, is that the main cast and settings all come from a place of comfort and privilege. Perkus is the only true bohemian, outside of Chase’s upper-class circles, thus able to guide Chase to an awareness of his own complicity. Even further, they boarder on self-obsession, a potent theme in the genre of the “New York City Novel.” According to David Simpson, writing about the nonpresence of 9/11 in the “9/11 novel,” states that these novels “avoid the pornography of death by not describing death, but in so doing they raise questions about whether this decision is the result of a moralaesthetic decorum or a critical testimony to the utter self-centeredness of the people in their books” (221). This idea is even further heightened in the unreality of Chronic City, where the traumatic event of 9/11 is literally never stated by name, and is intentionally ambiguous as to whether or not the event even happened in the text’s version of Manhattan. What this leads to is a complicity in “not thinking about 9/11”; it takes Chase being guided by Perkus via agency panic to realize his own complicity and the complicity of the city as a whole: By recent measures the city was orderly, flush with money, a little boring, even. This was, if you trust the complacent testimony of the millions…There was Perkus’ point, proved: The slumbering millions who never pierced the veil of dream. I was one of them, a born sucker, but at least I was here listening to his dire facts…The only conspiracy was the conspiracy of distraction. The conspirers, ourselves. If I didn’t grasp this law

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44646115 of complicity I should go back to the beginning and start again. When he said this, I thought of Susan Eldred’s office, my first sight of his antithetical eye. (390)

Chase is aware of his own complicity, after piercing the “veil of the dream,” after paranoia, the beautiful “flower in the brain” (126), has blossomed. But he now realizes this extends to something much larger than just himself. Peacock offers concise commentary on this complicity, which extends beyond the “monolithic” Arnheim administration: “Although [Manhattan] is full of fakes and simulations, it is not simply a mass of texts to be collated and analysed for signs of a singular nefarious design: it is a complex, living system of interconnected lives carrying on beyond the private obsessions of individuals, but also intricately affecting them” (162). But what does one do after becoming aware of the constructs, controlling ideologies, organizations and “conspiracies” that are able to manipulate both the individual and the collective? The novel offers the perspective of ambiguity as the best approach, specifically contained in the contrast between the characters’ respective fates at the end of the novel; Chase lives with this new-found perspective, while Perkus dies with his paranoia. “Many things helplessly produce their own opposites” (Chronic City 367). These opposites are vastly apparent to Perkus, whose “antithetical eye” is a physical representation of this ability: “…everything revealing its opposite, everything incommensurate, irreconcilable, and unbereaved” (199). Is “the opposite,” truth? Not necessarily. The novel offers that truth lies only in ambiguity; “things” and people can occupy two states at once: “Chase Insteadman was his friend. Chase Insteadman was an actor and the ultimate fake. A cog in the city’s fiction…Chaldrons were real and fake, as Marlon Brando was alive and dead” (337). In relation to 9/11 and virtual trauma, the mediation of images through technology is a site that requires an ambiguous approach in order to counteract complicity. In letter “To My Italian Friends” written in the wake of 9/11, Lethem states this call to action: “So don’t ask how the world has changed – ask how I have changed. The answer is: I’ve changed slightly. I read my newspapers with increased horror and distrust, I regard the leaders of nations and movements with increased revulsion, I suffer increased shame at my own paralyzed inaction” (228). But at the same time, “not thinking about 9/11” is not necessarily an option; avoiding the news completely because of paranoia will lead to the

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same symbolic fate as Perkus. The “war-free” (or rather the 9-11/War on Terror-free) editions of the newspaper are not a solution but only an act of complicity, willful acceptance and distraction. Chase and Janice’s story is one of the many “stories” that fuels complicity, replacing important events with fake human-interest pieces. Perkus attests that these distractions are what makes the citizens of Manhattan complicit in fooling themselves; thus truth and meaning can only come from a place of ambiguity, requiring some level of distrust, but not total rejection. Conclusion: A View You Can Live With The validity of the many conspiracies and patterns Perkus has uncovered is an ambiguous question left open at the end of the novel. Chronic City is filled with contradictory moments, ambiguous clues and a constant blur between what is real and what is “virtual.” The reality of the novel, like the reality of the internet, is too contradictory and unstable to create any objective truth. Chase’s perspective at the end of the novel embraces this very ambiguity, a perspective I believe Lethem agrees with: “The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness…So retreat. Live in a Manhattan of your devising, a bricolage of the right bagel and right whitefish, even if from rival shops…I was sick with ignorance, and my own complicity” (449). In many ways, this echoes of Perkus’ own observations: “Alan Watts said you mustn’t concern yourself with information outside your immediate village. People, like dogs, make demimondes for the purpose of sensory sanity. Nobody – that’s no body – really believes in the news from beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood or pocket universe. Manhattan is one of those, you know, a pocket universe” (386). Thus Lethem places significant importance in these “caves of the real,” “pocket universes” and “Potemkin villages,” where the local and tangible “truth” juxtaposed against a national narrative creates only ambiguity. Chronic City also concludes with ambiguity as to whether or not the text’s Manhattan is a virtual simulacrum itself. Chase is the primary observer of this ambiguity; Lethem leaves readers with his perspective, an in-between state that resists closure or didactic meaning:

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44646115 The birds were there, still satisfyingly continuous in their asymmetries and divergences, as if I’d been abiding with them through all these weeks and days. But I noticed something else as well. The Dorffl Tower had shifted a little to the right, shaving another margin from my window’s view. I don’t know how this can be possible, but then again there are so many things that escape me. It’s still a view I can live with. I only hope it doesn’t get smaller. (467)

Chase can accept his place in the city as long as the view doesn’t get smaller – as long as he is not complicit in the controlling ideology, he can accept the ambiguity of reality. This is in response to Mayor Arnheim’s comment on Chase’s apartment view of the tower at the end of their conversation, almost as if threatening to change the virtual city. This ambiguity extends to the rest of the novel: from Chase’s perspective, Perkus is both murdered by conspirators, and simultaneously, may have simply died of hiccups and internal hemorrhaging; the tiger is both a mechanical tool of the Arnheim administration, and simultaneously, a mythical entity; Manhattan, like the chaldron, is simultaneously real and virtual. The ultimate, overarching ambiguity that Chase accepts is that the text’s Manhattan is governed by controlling ideologies, but at the same time, is not. Thus neither extremity of paranoia or complicity is a healthy way to live in the 21st century, especially in the context of a traumatic event such as 9/11. While Perkus is broken by his paranoia, a character like Oona Lazlo joins the controlling ideology because of her complicity. So what is the solution? One possibility is the two-way exchange of the internet; instead of being a passive recipient, one can generate information – and perhaps more importantly art – for a wide audience, like Biller does with his virtual treasures. The ultimate message that Chronic City conveys, through Chase’s final perspective, is that being either wholly complicit or paranoid only leads to further personal trauma after the initial collective trauma; one must find a perspective that values ambiguity and rejects objective truth.

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44646115 Works Cited

Lethem, Jonathan. Chronic City. Manhattan: Doubleday, 2009. Vintage Contemporaries. Print. ———. "To My Italian Friends." The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. New York: Doubleday, 2011. 227-28. Print. ———. "Jonathan Lethem on Chronic City." Interview by Richard Lea. The Guardian. 30 Mar. 2010. Web. ———. "Novelist Jonathan Lethem Goes Virtual." Interview by Mitch Wagner. Tor. 19 Mar. 2010. Web. Melley, Timothy. “Introduction: The Culture of Paranoia.” Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000. 1-45. Web. Peacock, James. "‘Hiding in Plain Sight’: Reality and Secrecy in You Don't Love Me Yet and Chronic City." Jonathan Lethem. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. 136-56. Web. Redfield, Marc. "Introduction: Spectral Life and the Rhetoric of Terror." The Rhetoric Of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. 1-10. Web. Simpson, David. "Telling It Like It Isn't." Literature After 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2008. 209-22. Web. Žižek, Slavoj. “Sum: The Loop of Enjoyment.” Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 200-38. Web. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London; New York: Verso, 1989. 28-30. Web.

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