ABSTRACTThe tail end of the 1960s saw the closing of two major sites of utopian potential and imagining: the waning of enthusiasm about deep-sea exploration and the disillusionment of radical social movements with the emerging conservatism of the 1970s. These two sites come together in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, where a drug-addled and waning counterculture finds its hopes and disillusionments bound up in the myth of a sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean. Reading this continent, Lemuria, as a heterotopia, and applying an archetypal, psychological, and spatial reading to a novel normally read as an exemplar of postmodern aesthetics and paranoid epistemologies allows for a rethinking of postmodern allegory as not necessarily disruptive of a historical continuum, but as confused, melancholy, and fundamentally lost.