Gravity’s Rainbow Week Five

It’s been a very long time since I last read this book any my memory was fuzzy, but this week I remembered. Oh boy did I remember. And then, with decades of maturity behind of me, I was all like, huh. 

– Johanna

Illustration by Zak Smith – borrowed from the Internet Archive

Recap & Reflections

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As Part 2 began last week, the great “fuck with Slothrop” routine was just getting started, and the aftermath of his tangle with Grigor the Octopus is reverberating through the Casino. Like so many in Pointsman’s path, Grigor’s handler Porkyevitch is fretting about his usefulness (can anyone remind me what the Bukharin conspiracy is? p. 192)

Slothrop and Tantivy are carousing, and Slothrop is wearing a really killer Hawaiian tie with naked hula dancers on it. Katje is playing cool and Slothrop decides to ratchet up the carouse, to better get her attention. Can you imagine having a personalized drinking song that everyone knows? I’m a little jealous.

But Slothrop can’t shake the weirdness of the octopus battle, and Tantivy gives him a little bit of assurance that he’s not batty – he notes that Teddy Bloat has been acting a little weird, and that he warned Tantivy about Katje. Armed with this info, Slothrop decides to still meet Katje up in her room – a “keep your enemies closer” sort of thing, I imagine. Plus, she’s so hot.

Katje’s wardrobe is just amazing. I love the descriptions of her clothes. And Slothrop is impressed too, until he gets a whiff of something operative about the whole thing.  From here, Slothrop is experiencing everything from (some would say and they might be wrong) a paranoiac’s view of things. They, capital “T” are messing with everything, and he’s seeing planted and adulterated situations everywhere. He just doesn’t know why. Why would They plant a seltzer bottle in the room just so Katje could spray him with it like some Catskills comedy trope? And has he been lured here to participate in the world’s best pillow fight just so his pants (and papers) can be stolen? (p. 201). I love how he just rolls with everything, chasing (a gremlin?) up a tree, wrapped in a sheet, only to tumble into a croquet game, where (coincidentally?) Bloat is there, and ready to help him into a spare British uniform, which he will stay in for the duration of this section.

The dissonance Slothrop is feeling is best articulated, and foreshadowed, in this passage “Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room is really being used for something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical…but…but…(p. 205).”

Slothrop is feeling the “rainbow edges of what is almost on him” – the Forbidden Wing (p.205, 212). He is adrift, alone, the promised help long gone, with his papers.  He is bereft, and returns to Katje.

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Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck “just materialized one day, out on the beach in a black suit” (p.209) which reminds me a lot of how the octopus arrived.  D-T and Katje have a relationship, that much is clear.  I love how Slothrop considers They may have chosen Dodson-Truck to “seduce his brain” while he reads Plasticman comics. (p. 210).

Slothrop knows Katje is doing her job as seductress, and we get a memory of them playing roulette, which leads Slothrop to consider that the game of chance is something They have control over.  We are briefly given allowed a glimpse of Slothrop’s hazy memory of the abuse he suffered as a baby (“Back in a room, early in Slothrop’s life, a room forbidden to him now, is something very bad” p. 211) and he sees kinship in Katje.

There’s something important in Katje’s declaration of their positions within the rocket’s trajectory/parabola/Rainbow (p. 212) – let’s remember that!

Slothrop is “raising” a moustache. He knows he is being observed. He’s feeling out Dodson-Truck, and conceives of a drinking game to get him sloshed and talking.  Under the gaze of the Angels, D-T drunkenly spills it. He’s spying on Slothrop and Katje, and has some of his own stuff going on. Poor guy.

We transition to Eventyr & Sascha, grilled by Sammy Hilbert-Spaess on the content of Caroll’s conversations with Peter. Eventyr wonders about the connection he has with Peter vis a vis the connection Nora may have with Leni, and Peter recalls his last moments with Leni.

Sir Stephen is gone and Katje is pissed. Slothrop has “sabotaged the whole thing , with your clever little collegiate drinking game” (p. 224). They have angry sex.  There is more talk of the arc of the rocket “as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts” (p. 226).  She disappears.

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Is this a poem written by Pavlov? By Pointsman? Or just another Pynchon song?

Things are in disarray at “The White Visitation” – people are afraid the funding has been yanked, Slothrop has kertwanged their plans, Clive Mossmoon (Scorpia’s husband? Father?) is sniffing around and someone’s lying about it, Pudding is nowhere to be found, and Pointsman is just trying to hold the whole thing together. I love the contrast of the chaos here with Slothrop’s weird calm.

Webley Silvernail gives us a view of the labs, as he gathers his film equipment (remember, they only have the one projector!) and the lab mice and rats chat in der Brooklyn accents. Webley sees the lab animals grow to human size and dance in some Busby Burkeley-esque choreography.  V2 indeed.

Pudding makes his visitation to the Night Mistress (surely Katje). I am sure each chamber he visits has some meaning (1. Hypodermic kit 2. Coffee tin w “Savarin/Severin” 3. File drawer w Kraftt-Ebbing’s likely Psycopathia Sexualis 4. Human Skull 5. Malacca Cane 6. A corpse / or just a coat? and then finally the 7th chamber – Domina Nocturna).

It is no big surprise (like Blicero before him) that old powerful men have a penchant for sexual degradation. And discuss!

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“You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures” (p. 240).  Slothrop is so powerful in his own way. They’ve even made him into an adjective – “Slothropian.”  Ronald Feldspath, deceased, is an expert on control systems and is seemingly attracted to Slothrop in a way he doesn’t even understand (“Is this the one?” p. 241). He has a death mission to complete.

And here is where I fail you all as a guide, my friends. I can’t make heads or parabolic tails of this section at all. Slothrop has been given some understanding of the Control that the rocket brings through Feldspath. Slothrop is tweaked to the idea that Germans are using Dutch Shell headquarters to launch their rockets. He has been force-fed secret files to analyze at the Casino, and he is being followed.  Halp.