Is Pynchon antirationalist? (part 6)

[o j m]

continued...
         As Roger escapes the security guards on his way out, he 
understands that he must go find Osbie Feel. "There's nothing back at 'The 
White Visitation' he really needs. Nothing he can't let go" (637). There is 
a double meaning couched in here: sure, as the following sentence notes, he 
can safely leave behind his possessions, but more importantly, the passage 
implies he can now leave behind that sensibility. As Roger speeds across 
the city to Osbie's apartment, he consciously leaves Them behind. He turns 
his back on the very rationality that informs "The White Visitation." This 
move, apparently, is inevitable, for Pirate awaits his arrival. "Pirate is 
at home, and apparently expecting Roger" (637). Roger arrives demanding 
answers to the questions that he knew Pointsman couldn't answer, or even 
recognize. Most basically: what the hell is going on? But then, naturally, 
Osbie and Roger tackle some more pointed and intricate issues.
         Just as Katje misinterprets "Doper's Greed", Roger misunderstands 
the messages that the Counterforce has been sending him. What sends him 
into his fury is, as mentioned above, the realization that he has been 
manipulated by The Firma realization come to through information from 
Milton Gloaming, which, like "Doper's Greed", said two things: Slothrop is 
real, and Roger, and nearly everyone he knows, has been either The Firm's 
instrument or object of manipulation. Roger thinks that The Firm sent him 
this message, an error Osbie quickly sets right. He says, "We sent him" 
(638). Still dazed by the day's revelations, Roger is confused by this 
"We." Osbie continues: "For every They there ought to be a We. In our case 
there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a 
We-system as a They-system" (638) Osbie's We-system reinterprets the events 
and data along a system (or a "delusion" as he will soon call it) that 
better accounts for the evidence. That is, Osbie's We-system, the 
Counterforce, must be predicated on a sort of new rationality, a 
rationality that reorders the world in a way that makes more sense. So, 
although words like "mad", "insane", and "delusional" are associated with 
the "drug haze" of the Counterforce, these words only make sense when 
applied from within the dominant rationality of The Firm. That is, for the 
poor secretaries guarding Pointsman, for the executives sitting around the 
boardroom table, Roger's actions simply cannot make any sense 
whatsoever--because his behavior cannot be accounted for within the story 
about the world that the They-system tells. But as I have attempted to 
show, there is a certain logic to how he acts, just as Sakall's seeming 
nonsense is in fact extremely sensible. Just a different kind of rationality. 
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