Is Pynchon antirationalist? (part 4)

[o j m]

continued...
	Throughout the novel Osbie is associated with drugs. The first time he is 
introduced is in the opening chapter, in which it is hinted he is growing 
various and sundry drugs on the roof of Pirate Prentice’s apartment beside 
Pirate’s bananas (5). Until the moment Katje watches “Doper’s Greed”, Osbie 
might very well be taken as a young stoner--and nothing more. This 
misunderstanding is decisively laid to rest: Osbie possesses “none of your 
idle doper’s tomfoolery here” (535). Osbie’s doper sensibility throws his 
early appearances into sharp focus. As the narrator (if there is one) 
states, Osbie and Katje first met on the day when “Osbie Feel was 
processing Amanita mushrooms,” the same day when she was unwittingly filmed 
(533). When Osbie is processing these psychedelic mushrooms, Katje begins 
hallucinating--she is transported back to the nightmare of Blicero, and we 
get the story of her ancestor, Frans van der Groov, who kills off the 
dodos. When she first starts hallucinating, seeing things a little awry, 
she asks, “Osbie, have I gone mad?” Osbie, here called “the house 
idiot-savant”, answers, “Of course, of course” (106). That is: this doper’s 
sensibility, the alternative sensibility to thinking of The Firm means a 
form of madness, in the sense that Foucault articulates the actualities of 
insanity--as deviance from a norm. When we take all this together this 
much, at least, becomes clear: in order to join the Counterforce, one must 
move from the “logical” sensibility of Rathbone to the alternative 
sensibility of Osbie
one must fall into the horse trough, laughing hard 
enough at the absurdity of the dominant sensibility that one is shaken out 
of it completely. Pynchon doesn’t reject or refute rationality here: he 
powerfully insists that what is considered “logical” is defined by Them. We 
must rethink rationality, not abandon it. To wake up in the trough is, in 
this sense, a privilege, and not a defeat (as Katje first imagines).
	This is the one hope of the Counterforce--a rival sensibility and 
rationality, rather than a critique. The Counterforce must be creative, not 
critical. If Osbie and company were to argue with the agents of The Firm, 
they would necessarily fail: the very terms of justificatory discourse in 
this sense privilege argumentative logic of The Firm. Instead, the 
Counterforce is more concerned with showing the inability of the dominant 
sensibility to account for an alternative sensibility--Osbie simply laughs 
in the face of a “thinker” like Pointsman. Perhaps the best example of this 
tension occurs, not surprisingly, right before Osbie Feel once again shows 
up. Upon realizing that Jessica has left him for good, Roger Mexico finally 
loses it, finally goes “mad”. He has, throughout the novel, felt frustrated 
with Pointsman and the rest of “The White Visitation,” thought not until 
Jessica leaves him for the Beaver does Mexico finally let loose. Putting 
together the pieces (sent, as we soon learn, from the Counterforce), Roger 
begins to understand that he has been the pawn of Pointsman throughout the 
book--Pointsman who has ties to IG Farben, who has been monitoring Slothrop 
even before the war began (621). My God, he realizes
even Jessica has been 
used by Them, or is one of Them.