MORRIS DICKSTEIN
209
For Pynchon the paranoid imagination is a special way of rebel–
ling or dropping out, but it's also more than that. He compares it to a
hallucinogenic drug. For him it rends the veil of life's banal and
numbing surfaces,
p~tting
him in touch with something more deep
and rich, which may also unfortunately be quite unreal. Above all it
makes him feel more fully alive, with a more intense and absolute self
than the official rational culture dares allow. It's " a delirium
tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshares." It's
also analogous to the powerful sentiment of being that marks cer–
tain religious experiences: " the saint whose water can light lamps, the
clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God , the true para–
noid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening
about the central pulse of himself. . . . " It's important that
Oedipa herself does not really have such an experience , only a glim–
mering and conditional intimation of it. Her mind trembles and is
unfurrowed , but down to the end she passively receives these intima–
tions and continues
to
weigh and judge them, caught in her double
bind:
Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none . Either
Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tris–
(ero. For there either was
some
Tristero beyond the appearance
of the legacy America, or there was just America and
if
there was
just America then it seemed the only way she could continue,
and manage to
be
at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfur–
rowed, assumed full circle into
some
paranoia.
Evidently Pynchon is tempted
to
romanticize Oedipa into a figure of
rebellion, just as he briefly inflates Pierce Inverarity's "legacy" into
an allegory of America; but this is not where the book is really impres–
sive. In the final scene Oedipa, "with the courage you find you have
when there is nothing more
to
lose ," prepares to make a final gesture
to expose the Tristero secret. But she's far from a heroic figure , only
-like Yossarian, like most ofVonnegut's heroes-a modest center of
value in a world where human values have been misplaced or forgot–
ten; she's caught between two worlds, the conventional and the para–
noid, that have each gone amok in their own way . Oedipa is not sim–
ply the drifter and the bumbling amateur sleuth on loan from
V.
She
grows more real and human as the book proceeds, trying
to
make
