Featured in The Map Is Indestructible by O.G. Rose
The Pynchon Risk
A Focus from The Conflict of Mind
As discussed in Digression(s) by O.G. Rose (as of 2025, assuming I don’t change the title), helping elaborate on “The Pynchon Risk,” Harold Bloom writes about how the protagonist of The Crying of Log 49, Oedipa, looks at a radio circuit she never thought about when she was younger, and realizes how much could have been communicated to her had she just tried to figure it out. Suddenly she has a “religious revelation,” and recognizes that “everything is connected” — that everything was “organizing” around her. And Oedipa is faced with a decision: will she try to figure out “what is behind the curtain of the world,” connecting everything, or will she leave the curtain down, realizing that to lift it could be to start an endless quest with no guarantee of ever achieving the “transcendent answer” which she seeks? But what if the answer is achievable? What if it isn’t? How can Oedipa know if she doesn’t try?
(‘The Crying of Log 49 never stops teaching you how to read it, but since the teaching is ambivalent, the reader is left in doubt about the ‘how.’’)¹
If Oedipa tries at all, she may have to try forever to actually “try”; otherwise, there could always be “a road” she could have explored (and hence there will be always room for speculation). And so Oedipa is “pinned down” (to allude to Sartre); now that the idea has entered her mind, Oedipa can never return to a world where she is “younger,” ignorant and able to live in peace (“The Historic Moment of the Loss of Givens” to “The Historic Moment of Indestructible Maps”). If she tries, she will easily know she is “leaving the curtain down,” per se, without trying to lift it — she will not be able to return to her normal life without knowing what she is ignoring (she cannot return, only (re)turn). Forever now, even if she returns to life as if nothing happened, her life has been changed (for, at the very least, “nothing happened,” and she knows it). Randomly and suddenly, she was struck by “revelation,” and forever, without warning, she has perhaps lost the peace of ignorance, all because of “a glimmer of possible truth” that tempts her to step into an endless array of threads that may never connect. Maybe the pattern adds up; maybe not. Maybe it’s best to forget about it; maybe not. Perhaps behind “the curtain” there is a “One”; perhaps, “Zero.” And if there’s a “Zero,” we never experience “nothing,” and hence always have “space” in which to imagine there might be a “One” deeper in and further down the path. Stuck. Continuing. And if there is “One” (eventually), there is no guarantee we will have the capacity to recognize It/it; as according to Montaigne ‘it is impossible for any one to fit the pieces together, who has not the whole form already contrived in his imagination,’ so it may be impossible to recognize the whole form of “One” without already having an image in mind of what “One” is like (which by definition, we cannot have, or else “The Real” would have effaced us).² Hence, before “One,” we may not see it. Stuck. Continuing. “No exit.”
To risk getting “stuck” — “The Pynchon Risk” — that’s the risk that can be taken if one is to “step into” an ideology and determine if there is a contradictory inconsistency that would “unveil” the ideology to merely be a bad notion. Why would anyone take that risk, seeing as the person easily already lives happily within some (“appearing”-ly) ideology? Why not just dismiss the ideology as false and live? We’ll never convince people to leave a false ideology, but who cares? Live.
We can just know “maps are indestructible” — isn’t that enough? Sure, but what about others, and what if others generate a deadly ideology? Then it’s valid to think the ideology must be stopped, to do of which one must “step into” the ideology and take “The Pynchon Risk” — or perhaps erase everyone who ascribes to the ideology (which will likely backfire). And so there is no guarantee of success, and even if we did somehow succeed at determining if a given ideology was actually a “Zero” instead of a “One” — lacking substance versus being substantive — there would be no guarantee that those who ascent to the ideology would acknowledge our success or even have the capacity to recognize our success: they may just interpret our discovering as an essential inconsistency (which is to be expected in any ideology, even (the) true one(s)), or “lack the eyes” to see the “Zero”). Hence, to then save the world, we seemingly must take a “Pynchon Risk” that could ruin our life with no guarantee of success, and even if success was achieved, there would be no guarantee anyone would be able to tell we succeeded. And do remember: if the ideology is actually an ideology, it is indestructible, even if it is a threat to human civilization — except perhaps by killing everyone who ascents to the ideology (which is demonic and prone to backfire) (please note the possibility of morality “rightly” protecting the apocalyptic…). “The map” is indestructible if “(in)consistent,” and every map is such. Is there any hope?
(‘[S]he will be left in limbo, which is where Pynchon has placed her, and with her the readers. There are worse places to be’ — yes?³ Or only until ‘Slothrop himself, separated from the bureaucracies that both victimized him and provided him with a context and a history, begins to disintegrate, to scatter?’⁴ ‘Slothrop is gradually reduced to his final emblem: the Fool in the Tarot deck, the only card without a number, lacking a place in the systems of the world.’⁵ Psychotic. Real?)
We have mentioned “Byron the Bulb” from Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon before in The Map Is Indestructible, which Harold Bloom included in his ‘personal catalog of the experiences that matter[ed] most — [which all of us have as] our own versions of what they used to call the Sublime.’⁶ He considered Bryon part of his ‘American Sublime’ (alongside ‘Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; Wallace Steven’s “The Auroras of Autumn”; nearly all of Hart Crane […]’), and I would say that we, faced with “indestructible maps,” should do the same (lest we lack self-defense).⁷
Byron seeks to take down an evil organization called Phoebus, and connected with the grind, he eventually gains the capacity to contact countless appliances. And then he sees:
‘Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in / homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now — the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t last long — they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it…’⁸
Is this not all of us now (Lacanian) connected to the internet? Do we not all have a lightbulb in our heads, blinking on and off? Eternal and full, yet powerless? ‘What is left,’ Bloom writes, ‘[…] is the studying of new modalities of post-Apocalyptic silence.’⁹ Jouissance? Is there any hope for us to avoid “spreading Byron” or Kafka (Discourse) in us successfully “spreading Childhood” (Rhetoric) (to allude to II.1)? Yes. There is hope in a “faithful presence” of drive — but probably not before it terrifies us.
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