Gravity’s Rainbow Week Two

“Jeepers Slothrop,” that was a hell of a reading! Lots of phobias and ‘philias this week. Negrophobia, homophobia, paedophilia, coprophilia…and what kind of ‘philia is a sexual attraction to rockets?

– Bruce

Illustration by Roberta Binotto

Recap & Reflections

Hospital of Saint Veronica of the True Image for Colonic and Respiratory Diseases

First encounter with Dr. Kevin Spectro. Spectro is one of the “original seven owners of The Book”, which appears to be Pavlov’s “Lectures in Conditioned Reflexes” (on pg 88, there is a reference to “Dr. Horsley Gantt’s translation” of The Book, and this is indeed a real book.)

Spectro and Pointsman are discussing their experiments, and in particular Pointsman’s intended experiments on Slothrop, which troubles Spectro, not for ethical reasons, but because a sample size of one is not scientifically robust.

A bit of background: Pavlovian psychology is based on “ideas of the opposite,” clusters of brain cells making binary differentiations. Sanity is defined as the ability of the brain to maintain binaries; insanity is the “weakening of the idea of the opposite.”

According to Pavlov, when sufficiently traumatized, a subject will enter an escalating sequence of three “Transmarginal phases”:

● Equivalent phase: the subject reacts with equivalent distress to minor and major stressors.

● Paradoxical phase: the subject no longer reacts to major stressors, but reacts catastrophically to minor stressors.

● Ultraparadoxical phase: the subject reverses responses to stimuli. A positive stimulus elicits a negative response; a negative stimulus elicits a positive response (an individual, for instance, might fall in love with an abuser.)

The V2 bomb is a metaphor for this ultraparadoxical reversal. The explosion comes before the sound, response comes before stimulus. Slothrop gets an erection in response to a stimulation that has not yet happened.

Abreaction: a moment of release after reliving a traumatic past experience. Patients who achieve an abreaction are reborn: “new children, painless, egoless…tablet erased…human palimpsests.”

Pointsman imagines he can “write…words of himself’ on the children of abreaction. Pointsman imagines these patients as literal children, lusts after them, like a paedophile. He imagines himself at a bus station, receiving into his care an actual child evacuee from London. “You have waited in the places into the early morning” to bring these children home to your “spermy sheets” (pg 51). Note that the narrative point of view changes suddenly, briefly, to second person. Is he talking to himself? (Is the reader being accused?) He hasn’t done it, only imagined it: all he will “score, presently, is an octopus.”

Roger and Jessica’s hideaway

Roger and Jessica are in their hideaway, and Jessica is woken from a dream by a bomb blast. She imagines the war as a kind of country fair, with barrage balloons “fat and friendly in the daybreak” and no-one has to die. In this way, Jessica and Roger are both Innocents in the war. Roger is a “statistical cherub, who’s never quite been to hell…” (pg 57). He blandly speaks of everyone being “equal in the eyes of the rocket,” but his insouciance is unearned, he hasn’t “paid the price” in action like Pirate Prentice has.

His Poisson equation guarantees everyone an equal opportunity to die under a rocket, but he fails to connect the equation, really, to death which earns him a reproach from Dr. Paul de la Nuit, “what will you do with the sieve that you’ve laid over London. How will you use the things that grow in your network of death?” Poinstman also notes Mexico’s naivetee, “How can Mexico play, so at ease with these symbols of randomness and fright? Innocent as a child…” (pg 56).

Perhaps Mexico finally makes the connection when, later in the reading, Jessica whispers “what about the girls?” and Roger restlessly wonders about their fate as they are converted from numbers in an equation, stars on a map, to real women killed by Slothrop’s predicted bombs. (Pg.87)

These pages develop the relationship between Mexico and Pointsman, reluctant colleagues, strange bedfellows. Mexico is the “Antipointsman,” able to live in the “domain between zero and one,” the binary code of Poinstman’s Pavlovian system. There is a new generation emerging from the war, a generation that will see the “end of history” (pg 56), the end of causality, the end of the binary. A touching scene of innocence as Roger tickles Jessica that is rudely brought to an end as another rocket lands, reminding the two of death’s imminence…”try to tickle me,” says death. (pg 60)

The Kenosha Kid and the toilet.

In the previous reading, Slothrop had been reassigned for psychological testing, “some Minnesota Multiphasic shit” (pg 21). Slothrop is now at “The White Visitation” in the hands of PISCES receiving Sodium Amytal and being questioned about his pre-war life in America. In his stupor, he is playing around with all the possible meanings of “You never did the Kenosha Kid,” a word game that brackets the episode. PISCES wants Slothrop to tell them about his time before the war: his memory takes them to Roxbury, a black neighbourhood in Boston. We’ll discover later in the reading that PISCES is particularly interested in Slothrop’s attitude to blacks as they build the propaganda campaign, “Operation Blackwing” and its fictional “Schwarzkommando” (pg 75).

He’s in a black jazz club, the harmonica in his pocket is a “jive accessory,” possibly playing on two meanings of the word, jive the dance and jive meaning deceptive, as if he’s a poser: “A woman turns to look at him…her eyes tell him…what he is” (pg 62).

Slothrop is vomiting into a toilet and loses the harmonica which, of course, he decides to pursue, wriggling all the way into the toilet, and narrowly escaping an anal rape by none other than Malcolm X (because of course there are always negroes loitering around white bathrooms looking for the opportunity). The section is a satire of racial fears of the white Harvard-schooled elite to which Slothrop belongs. As he drifts through the sewers, the shit-caked walls of the pipe seem to offer cryptic texts. (It seems that every surface in GR is sedimentary, offering paranoid hints of deeper meaning: Pirate’s banana-growing soil, Slothrop’s desk, this sewer, the ice-crusted walls of “The White Visitation” if not the entire building itself.)

Funny that Slotrop can identify the individual shit of his classmates, but the Negro shit, “that all looks alike” (pg 65).

The section perfectly captures dream logic. Slothrop drifts into the open sea, but finds himself seemingly on dry land in a post-apocalyptic, bombed out land, roofs missing from masonry ruins, the denizens of which (or “contacts”) Slothrop knows. Yet, despite smoke rising from fires and birds flying in the sky, the whole scene still seems to be under water (“The light is thick and water green”) as waves high above cause debris from the streets to rise and fall.

“Here now is Crutchfield,” and we momentarily enter a perverse spaghetti western featuring this “White Cocksman” who has fucked nearly every man, woman and beast of “terre mauvais”, and is considering finishing it all off with the only thing he hasn’t fucked, a rattlesnake. But still, despite us now being in a desert, the dream logic lingers, and we hear a harmonica in the background accompanying a song: “Down this toilet they say you are a flushing…” (pg 68).

Finally Slothrop’s journey down the sewer ends, on a snowy Roxbury hillside, and Godot-like, he expects to meet The Kenosha Kid, “the connection he’s travelled all this way to see,” but the Kid is a no-show, and a sinister “Never” is there to confess to his role in the disappearance.

Incoming Mail

Pirate is alone with his “mail,” the contents of the graphite cylinder delivered to him by rocket that morning. The note is written in an invisible ink that only becomes clear in the presence of semen. To encourage him to produce the required activating agent, Pirate is provided with a drawing of his former lover, Scorpia Mossmoon. There is something special about this drawing that hits Pirate right where it counts, almost as if “They” have access to his most private fantasies (English boys, conveniently, are “conditioned to get a hardon in the presence of certain fetishes…”). But how do the Germans know this about Pirate? How does Pirate know what the message means?

A rocket, “the third today,” explodes in the distance tying Jessica and Mexico to Pirate. The rockets are like drum beats punctuating each episode.

“The White Visitation”

The quotation marks that always surround the name suggesting the secretive nature of the former mental hospital. That it is a “Visitation” suggests its ghost-like presence. In this chapter, we meet its various denizens, Myron Grunton (BBC announcer and wartime propagandist), The Dog Vanya (housed in the ARF wing…haha, geddit?), Dr. Geza (Rosie) Rozsavolgyi (a Transylvanian immigrant who affects the mannerisms of a fey Dracula and is rumoured to have been seen “crawling headfirst down the north facade.“ (pg 83). The Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit is there to provide a more humane if not religious take on the goings on in “The White Visitation.” Brigadier Ernest Pudding is in charge of this lot. He is nearly senile, utterly incompetent, and has a fondness for serving foods with “surprise” in the title.

Just a thought here: “victims” of these “surprises” react with horror while, for instance, Roger Mexico barely reacts to a bomb blast. Is all of London in an “equivalence phase?”

We witness Le Froyd, a patient at the WV before its conversion to a military research lab, jumping to his death from the nearby cliff claiming to hear the “Lord of the sea” (or Bert to you). How many “Lords of this and that” have we got in this novel? At least one other, the Lord of the Night (pg 49). Something to track, perhaps.

We learn of Myron Grunton and his propaganda scheme, Operation Black Wing, to invent the “Schwarzkommando” using the real presence of “Heroros” in Germany as its seed (Genocidal Germans colonists, just decades before the war, wiped out 80% of the Herero population, so the possibilities for a feared revenge here are compelling). Slothrop’s fantasies help to fill out some of the racist propaganda.

Slothrop’s Origin Story

Pudding and Pointsman are debating the ethics of using Slothrop as a test subject, “meddling with another man’s mind.” We learn that Slothrop is already soiled goods having been subject to meddling as an infant by Dr. Lazlo Jampf, a visiting lecturer to Harvard while Slothrop was a baby. Jampf applies Pavlovian experimentation to human subjects, but needs a better, cheaper, reflex to study than salivation, so of course he chooses infant erections. Infant Tyrone Slothrop is conditioned to go erect in the presence of “stimulus x”: we don’t know yet what that is, but it seems proper protocols have not been followed to “extinguish” the reflex, so that it carries on into Slothrop’s adulthood and is somehow related to the rockets. “The White Visitation” scientists have their theories: Mexico thinks it’s a statistical oddity; Rollo Groast thinks it’s precognition; Edwin Treacle thinks Slothrop is guiding the missiles in through psychokinesis. Pointsman, it turns out, doesn’t particularly care about the rockets. He uses the mysterious correlation as “a sop” (pg 92) to get Mexico on board with his experiments. He’s more interested in Slothrop as a “psychopathological deviant,” an “obsessive” and a “latent paranoic.” A human, not a dog, who might be the ideal experimental subject to continue on with Pavlov’s work to prove that all mental illness is caused by a “point of pathological inertia” in the brain that leads to “confusion of the ideas of the opposite.”

Whatever it is that makes Slothrop special, he’s in for a world of pain as Drs Rosie and Pointsman plot their experiments.

In a way, Pynchon is doing a bit of house keeping in this chapter, tying up loose ends. Yes, Slothrop’s and Mexico’s maps are identical; yes, Slothrop’s missile kink has a cause and effect origin story; yes, there is a correlation between the Ultraparadoxical phase and Slothrop’s abilities. We also learn what The Book refers to: Pavlov’s “Lectures in Conditioned Reflexes.”

Maybe a question for our resident physicist, Ben, I’m curious about the fact that Pynchon never brings in quantum physics, especially in reference to Mexico’s work: “The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely and strike off at some other angle.” It just seems like low hanging fruit. And who the heck is the “black man” with the “magic face” down from London, skating on a pond, who generates such fear and respect in the children that skate alongside him….