Plotting Communities: Pelevin’s Meta-paranoid Fiction

This chapter analyzes the literature of Viktor Pelevin, one the most prominent Russian exponents of conspiracy fiction. Focusing on the novel Mafusail’s Lamp (ML) (2016) and on the novella “The Art of Light Touches” (TALT) (2019) it examines them as ‘meta-paranoid’ narratives that both perform and scrutinize a conspiratorial ‘reading’ of (the world as) text. I explore this meta-paranoid reading for signs, connections, and intentions through scholarly work on (over-)interpretation and conspiracy theory. I argue that ML and “TALT” do not only interpellate their readership as conspiracy theorists but also expose a series of paradoxes at the heart of the reading practice they solicit. Blurring distinctions between reading and writing, these works frustrate efforts to untangle the (literary or conspiratorial) ‘plot.’ Initially, this desire for a plot cements notions of a collective self, specifically of an imagined Russian community eternally threatened by the nefarious scheming of its Western enemies. However, the chapter demonstrates how Pelevin’s meta-paranoid fiction ultimately reveals how conspiratorial reading inhibits the possibility of any self—individual or collective—not influenced by clandestine designs. Epistemologically, this insight also undermines the potential for an autonomous interpretive position outside the fabrics of meaning and power that one seeks to read.