GR Osbie and the Counterforce

[jbor]

Apparently back in the day Andrew Dinn had a similar sort of theory about
Osbie Feel, and a soft spot for the Counterforce as well:

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/info.html#feel

I think that the actual depiction of "the Counterforce" and its recruits in
the novel somewhat undercuts its mooted status as a, or the, reliable
alternative. Tchitcherine's realisation about "the dialectical ballet of
force, counterforce, collision and new order" (704) needs to be taken into
account, as it certainly is taken into account in the text. Similarly, there
is that important passage at 712-3 which shouldn't be overlooked, and which
details the hypocrisy of the Counterforce ("schizoid", "double-minded in the
massive presence of money") and spells out the novel's main theme about how
"[t]he Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem
is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their
mission in the world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it
go on."

There are other moments of authorial self-projection in the novel which
contradict the notion that Osbie = Pynchon (not that that proves the thesis
wrong, only that it is not a definitive or singular identification within
the text).

I'm also not convinced that pragmatism or neo-pragmatism, or neo-Peirceian
fallibilism ("my epistemological system might be proved wrong at some point
in the future but we'll all conform to its practical ramifications for the
time being anyway"), hold the key to Pynchon's work.

On another issue, one way of ensuring that posts do get through to the list
(and that they are readable in the list archives) is to send them as plain
text rather than HTML. HTML emails gobble up many more kbs than do plain
text ones, and the sender's formatting is invariably lost or garbled when
the messages are sent as HTML.

best