AustLit

Research background

'‘Paranoid fiction’ describes literary and popular fiction that explores the nature of subjective, social and political reality, and its manipulation. In paranoid fiction, reality is always doubled. The world may appear to be definite and real but, upon closer inspection, turns out to be misleading and deceptive. Boltanski (2014) examines detective and spy novels to interrogate this doubled or paranoid reality. He argues that these works, built around conspiracies and inquiries, developed as a way of organizing reality to explain the social and political lives of individuals and groups. This work is an extract from a novel that creatively explores the alleged role of the CIA in the downfall of the Whitlam Government. It gives fictional form to historical and apocryphal narratives about the operation of clandestine groups within ASIO, faked Loans Affair documents, and activities at the US spy base Pine Gap, and investigates tensions between agency, power and social reality in ways that are informed by research into the cultural and political significance of paranoid narratives.'