<html>
I'm going to try so send this again--tried two or three times yesterday
and Sunday, but it never came through.<br><br>
This is long--much longer than I had anticipated. I apologize. A few
people called for a more specific discussion, so I am attempting to bring
my thoughts to bear more directly on Pynchon and to discuss in more
concrete terms some of the ideas I've thrown out in admittedly general
formulations. What some of you have been writing the past few days has
crystallized a few thoughts I've had about Pynchon floating in the back
of my head for a while now. There seems to be a commonly held belief that
Pynchon subscribes to a poststructuralist antirationalism. I have always
been distinctly uneasy with such a characterization of his work. Indeed,
I think the genius of his work--especially Gravity's Rainbow--is that he
manages to move beyond the antirationalism so popular in much
poststructuralism and suggest a more provocative form of resistance.
Anyway, here are those brief thoughts that somehow turned into something
akin to a paper--it was written rather rapidly, so please forgive any
verbal infelicities.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Towards
the end of Part III of <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i>, against the awesome
power of Them, a dark, liminal group begins to emerge. Osbie Feel, who
has disappeared for several hundred pages resurfaces, and with him the
Counterforce begins to take shape. Osbie is a difficult character because
it seems that he communicates in riddles--indeed, his life itself seems
to be a kind of enigma we must solve. Initially Osbie might very easily
be mistaken for a character of minor importance. However, this is hardly
the case. Despite his heavy drug use and his seeming indifference--his
doper’s apathy--Osbie is one of the clearest thinkers in the entire
novel<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Caught in
Pointsman's grip, wandering around “The White Visitation”, which has
fallen into disrepair since the end of the war, Katje finds a message
left by Osbie, a sort of call to arms. With Pointsman in London for the
day, Katje begins to see the emptiness of “The White Visitation”and she
wonders about her fate: “Was [Pointsman] forgetting her? Would she be
free? Was she, already” (533)? Shortly after posing these questions
Pynchon, through Osbie, provides Katje with an answer. She finds a reel
of film that contains footage of her taken right after her arrival in
England, footage taken, not incidentally, the day she first meets Osbie
(92-94). The first part of the film reveals to her precisely how They
used her. “Fascinated, she stares at twenty minutes of herself in
pre-Piscean fugue…. What on earth did they use it for? The answer to that
one’s in the can too. […] Clip after clip: flickering screen and cutaways
to Octopus G., staring--each with its typewritten date, showing the
improvement in the creatures conditioned reflex” (533). Immediately
following these illuminating training clips, there is a strange “screen
test” in which Osbie acts out the plot of a film he calls “Doper’s
Greed.”<br><br>
</html>