Is Pynchon antirationalist? (part 2)

[o j m]

continued...
         The movie is a Western, and centers on the confrontation between 
two American cowboys who argue about the existence of a midget sheriff. The 
passage, though, only a few pages long, sends out the first positive note 
of the Counterforce, a note that will echo back in several permutations in 
the remainder of the book. The scene is surreal. The two cowboys, played by 
an Englishman and a German, disagree on whether a certain midget sheriff, 
which they both see, actually exists. Sakall, despite the psychological 
babble that Rathbone spews about joint hallucinations, adamantly insists 
that the midget actually exists. The entire time the midget prances around 
muttering stereotypical Old Western lines. Eventually, Sakall and Rathbone 
decide to kill the midget in order to see whether it is real. When the 
midget comes to understand the plan at hand, he scampers off screaming at 
the top of his lungs. At the sight, "Sakall laughs so hard he falls off his 
horse into the horse trough" (535). Katje replays the reel and begins to 
understand that Osbie is speaking to her, that despite the seeming 
frivolous narrative, the spliced on "Doper's Greed" is a riddle she must 
decode. She eventually comes to the following conclusion: "Osbie is looking 
straight into the camera: straight at her, none of your idle doper's 
foolery here, he's acting. There's no mistake. It is a message, in code, 
which after not too long she busts as follows. Say that Basil Rathbone 
stands for young Osbie himself. S.Z. Sakall may be Mr. Pointsman, and the 
Midget sheriff the whole dark grandiose Scheme, wrapped in one small 
package, diminished, a clear target. Pointsman argues that it's real, but 
Osbie knows better. Pointsman ends up in the stagnant trough, and the 
plot/Midget vanishes, frightened, into dust" (535).
         According to this reading of the film Rathbone emerges 
victorious--proving that the great paranoia of characters such as Pointsman 
is unfounded. Rathbone, who played Sherlock Holmes in many movies and 
represents Osbie, has pointed out the delusion (hallucination) of the 
Scheme, and Sakall winds up cold, wet, and defeated in the 
trough--defeated, perhaps Katje thinks, by a Sherlock-like rationality. 
Indeed this is an optimistic reading of the film (They can be defeated!) 
and inspires Katje to pack her bags and search out Osbie.
         However, it isn't until she speaks with Osbie that she begins to 
understand the true import of "Doper's Greed," and also when things 
actually begin to get interesting. She finds him and says, "Sherlock 
Holmes. Basil Rathbone. I was right" (536). Osbie, though, presents a 
different reading of the film. He points out that "[t]here's the Son of 
Frankenstein in it, too" (536). Meaning: Rathbone represents not only the 
rational sleuth, but also the terrible and destructive monster--the two 
sides of Enlightenment thought, according to the novel. Katje's reading 
misinterprets the film. This reversal in confirmed by Osbie when he tells 
her "the horse trough is waiting" for her (536). So let us attempt to 
reconstruct a more accurate reading of the movie. The first thing to note 
is that Katje's conjecture that the midget represents some Scheme is wrong. 
I propose that the midget represents Slothrop. Rathbone's character 
represents Pointsman, one of Them, an agent of The Firm, insisting on 
accounting for or explaining away this midget sheriff through psychology. 
The dual aspect of Basil Rathbone (rationality and destructiveness) fits a 
character like Pointsman quite well: although rational thinking produces 
such figures as Sherlock Holmes, the underside of rationality produces 
Frankenstein. Both antibiotics and The Bomb.
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