Is Pynchon antirationalist? (part 1)

[o j m]

I'm going to try so send this again--tried two or three times yesterday and 
Sunday, but it never came through.

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.

         Towards the end of Part III of Gravity’s Rainbow, 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
         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.”

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