Osbie Feel the "Author" of GR

[Joe Varo]

Well, for one brief moment I thought that perhaps I'd noticed something
in GR which no one else had caught.  But, before posting my little
"discovery", I thought I'd check the P-list archive.  There it was, my
little discovery, already mentioned.

But, since it has been almost two years since it was last mentioned, I
thought I'd bring it up once again.

I've appended the two posts I found in the archive to the end.

On page 536, we have a scene with Osbie Feel and Katje, and we're told
that

     He [Osbie] leads her [Katje] to a back room fitted out with
     telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks
     littered with maps, schedules, An Introduction to Modern
     Herero, corporate histories, spools or recording wire.

And eight lines later

     ...[Osbie] hands her a now mimeographed sheaf, rather fat it
     is...

Is Osbie Feel a characterization of Pynchon, or at least the "author" of
GR within GR?  That description of the "back room" sounds an awful lot
like what Pynchon's office might have looked like during the writing of
GR.

A-and is that "rather fat sheaf" a rough draft of GR?

Is Pynchon kind of slyly winking at us here?

----------- Two Posts on this idea found in archives ----------------

    Archive: pynchon-l94.txt
    Note: 190
    Subject: Re: TRP-L: Who wrote Gravity's Rainbow?
    From: Andrew Dinn
    Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 10:13:43 +0100 (BST)
                                         
Jorn Barger writes:

> Who wrote Gravity's Rainbow, *among its characters*?
> Oedipa could easily have written Lot 49, and Zoyd is very likely to
> blame for the laziness and self-pity of Vineland.  But there ain't no
> way Tyrone ever managed GR!  He just didn't *think* enough...

> Would any of its characters have been equal to the task?

This one is so obvious. It's the hidden cameraman whose use of
controlled substances seems to deny the very possibility of control,
whose address straight to camera and to Pirate is also straight to the
readers' paranoid mind, who is ready expecting Roger, Katje and The
Eagle of Tooting when they come to sign up for The Counterforce (how
do I find that dotted line?), whose mentor, Dumbo, carries a white
feather enabling him to *defy gravity*.

Osbie Feel, of course.

Andrew Dinn
-----------
there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all


    Archive: pynchon-l95-1-4.txt
    Note: 623
    Subject: Pigs might fly?
    From: Andrew Dinn
    Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 09:51:19 +0100 (BST)
      
Foax,

I was rereading the section of `Gravity's Rainbow' where Katje joins
the Counterforce this weekend - remember she watches a film with Basil
Rathbone Way Out West and the Midget from Freaks who may or may not
exist. The trail leads inexorably to Osbie Feel who, it appears, has a
tattoo of Porky Pig on his belly (that would be *my* question to the
putative elevator Pynchon). Osbie is contrasted with Pointsman who
thinks the midget is real, whereas Osbie *knows* he doesn't exist. In
the room where Katje meets Osbie there is a cork board full of pinned
notes, maps and `An Introduction to Modern Herero'. Sounds a bit like
our Prospero's cell in Manhattan Beach, no?
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Joe