Gravity’s Rainbow Week Six

This section was full o’ hijinks and I enjoyed taking a closer look. As always, there’s layers-upon-layers of symbolism and meaning in Pynchon’s writing but I’ve tried to stick to the surface details that my li’l brain can handle. Enjoy!

– Kris

Illustration by Zak Smith – borrowed from the Internet Archive

Recap & Reflections

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“It is necessary to thread one’s way among bodies to get to where anything’s happening. What’s happening is not clear.”

We open at Raoul’s party where things are firmly in disarray. The punch (Hollandaise) has been spiked (hashed?) and seems to have given people the munchies for broccoli of all things. The place is full of characters. “An emaciated crooner with wavy hair and very red eyes” sings one of my favourite, dumbest rhymes so far “Jool-yaaahh, no one else could love you tru-lier.” Raoul de la Perlimpinpin wanders about dressed like a no-foolin’ cowpoke complete with giant Percheron horse shitting on the floor and on some of the guests. The “mean customer” is, we soon learn, Blodgett Waxwing, military prison escapee, Western film aficionado, and forger extraordinaire. He must have some real special stationery to forge papers with fingers the size of corncobs. And of course that rascal of a white slaver, Jean-Claude Gongue, is busy white-slaving in the eucalyptus grove. Slothrop holds on to some important mystery documents from Waxwing and later manages to score not only a version of Waxwing’s zoot suit with reet pleats (fun rhyming again) but a sweet keychain as well.

The ensuing chaos stemming from a convolutedly looping series of borrowings and dealings between Tamara, Italo, Waxwing, Theophile and Raoul is wonderfully ridiculous. I especially like that the summary of said dealings ends with the sentence “Something like that.” which sums up my sense of it perfectly. Tamara bursts onto the scene in the very tank Theophile had put up as collateral and attempts to blast the whole gang of debtors and creditors to kingdom come. I especially loved the visual of Raoul trying to flee by horse only to miss and fall into a tub of Jell-o. (“Aw, no…”) The tank shell turns out to be a dud which only manages to put holes in a few walls and wreck a painting of Virtue and Vice, the symbolism of which could’ve been milked to oblivion in my grade 12 English class. Slothrop gets to play the hero once more (for real this time) and manages to have a physical altercation with a female without getting a boner. After Tamara is taken away Slothrop returns the envelope to Waxwing and is given not only the coveted suit and keychain but also a special business card and instructions to head to Nice.

The scene at the end of this section recounting how Ricky Gutiérrez’s suit ended up in Europe was touching and sad. The Anglo vigilantes beating him up while police look on (and give advice to the chuds) before intervening and arresting the non-white victim is all too familiar. I’ll leave it to you to read more about the Zoot Suit Riots if you’re in the mood for learning about another depressing chapter in history. Ricky hocking his suit is something that will resurface later when Slothrop is forced to pawn it for a bit of baloney money.

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“We are obsessed with building labyrinths… To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet.”

I found this doozy of a section simultaneously long and breezy. We get a lot more detail on the origins and chemical composition of Imipolex G, the substance developed by Laszlo Jamf and used to manipulate baby Tyrone’s brain and body. Someone with the right knowledge could likely speak to the coherence or incoherence of the chemistry-speak being used here. Either way, I enjoyed the passage. Some standouts for me were the bit about nylon being “an announcement of Plasticity’s central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature” and “Plasticity’s virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness” being often “taken for Nazi graffiti”. Albert Hoffman, father of LSD (as every schoolchild knows), also gets a nod.

Slothrop’s fantasy raid on Shell Mex House with Waxwing in tow (acting as the Zoot-suit Zanies, lol) is pure, gleeful comic book violence. (Side thought: maybe Slothrop reading a *Plastic* Man comic earlier on was a bit too on-the-nose?). From the parts list, he gets a clue pointing towards that elusive Document SG-1. “S-Gerät, 11/00000”. At the Casino restaurant, last Tuesday’s London Times has been conspicuously left at the table where Slothrop happens to sit. He learns of Tantivy’s purported death, with a obit stinking of feigned glory signed by none other than that false friend, Theodore Bloat. Before heading off to Nice, he has a few last words with Hilary Bounce who’s evidently had a nice night with Michele. I can’t help but wonder if she made off with his IG Farben trinket after all.

And off we go! Down through shifty, duplicitous dealings in backrooms, corridors and cafés in the classic espionage style. Slothrop manages to shake the big-t Them off his tail by disguising his pal Claude in his own “pseudo-Tahitian bathing trunks”. I think the Citroën with the keys left in was intentionally planted for our hero, but I like to believe he has a shady past as a car thief and just had a sixth sense… The image of Tyrone rolling into town in his white zoot suit, sunglasses, and Panama hat (think straw fedora) is goofy as hell and seems to be as far from camouflaged as he can get. When he reaches his hotel I love the line about the drunks lying in the hallways with “eyelids like tiny loaves brushed with a last glaze of setting sun”. It’s really evocative and made me crave a good brioche.

At the hotel, he encounters various comrades-in-arms who respond effusively to the sight of Waxwing’s card. He gets a fake id, some money, and a warning to stay away from the girls who work in the hotel (“Aw…”). He has a miserable sleep, interrupted by bugs (real or imagined?) and drunks with great names like Dumpster Villard and Murray Smile. He either dreams or willfully hallucinates a conversation with Jenny, one of his former conquests. What he really wants is to talk to Katje and Tantivy but he can’t seem to muster their voices. “What he wants lies too deep…”

He’s nearly nabbed by some American Military Police who are acting “as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne screaming ‘BANZAI!’” but is saved by a Hopper Ex Machina. He sets off as Ian Scuffling, English war correspondent, thanks to Waxwing’s cohorts.

Onto Zürich where he meets with his next contact, a Russian named Semyavin. Semyavin waxes nostalgic for a simpler time when people just wanted drugs, sex and luxury items. “Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?” (too real, too real). Slothrop spends his next stretch of time split between the three cafés he found under “Espionage, Industrial” in Semyavin’s list. A great descriptive paragraph follows detailing some of the types of people he encounters while on stakeout. And then we’re thrust into either Slothrop or Pynchon’s fever daydream of a musical, LOONIES ON LEAVE!, in which nuthouse Keepers and Nuts, respectively, are nearly indistinguishable from one another. This bit satirizes capitalist hucksters and the dopes that they fleece. By design, it’s all a bit much and I found myself agreeing with Tyrone “Think I’ll go take my nap now…”

One day, he finally manages to meet a new operative, Mario Schweitar, who offers him some L.S.D. (I’ll admit I thought the “pounds, shillings, pence” (Librae, solidi, denarii) retort was Pynchon’s own witticism and not a separate and potentially centuries-old abbreviation). Slothrop is excited to learn of Mario’s Sandoz connection and begs for any info on Imipolex G and L. Jamf. Schweitar says it’ll cost him and suggests trading in his beloved zoot suit for some quick cash. Slothrop, I mean… Ian Scuffling’s paranoia is running hot and he avoids returning to his hotel or latest haunts and ends up at the Odeon, a café with a supposedly illustrious history of influential patrons. There he makes the acquaintance of “a swarthy, curly-headed alien in a green suit”, Francisco Squalidozzi, an exiled Argentine anarchist living in Switzerland who wants to make it to Germany (the German Zone), a country whose collapse he perceives as an ideal plot from which anarchism can flourish.

Slothrop takes a job as messenger for Francisco in exchange for enough money to pay off Schweitar for his information and then some. He gets half the money up front and we next see him aboard a DC-3 plane whose description I find aspirational: “chosen for its affinity for moonlight, the kind expression on its windowed face, its darkness inside and outside.” Joke only… On the flight to Geneva, the spectral voice of real-life vanished explorer Richard Halliburton tells Slothrop, “There’s nowhere to go, Slothrop, nowhere”. Slothrop meets his Argentine contact and they make the handoff in a splaying out of all manner of paper products on a café table in which Squalidozzi’s message can be shrouded and passed along.

Back to Zürich where he finds Schweitar once more and pays him half his fee, then gets the location of Jamf’s grave, the site where they agree to finish up their dealings. Squalidozzi is nowhere to be found. After days camping out in Jamf’s crypt without so much as a measly haunting he receives a big fat envelope from Mario’s delivery boy and goes back to the crypt to light a fire and start poring over the Information: “not as much as he wanted but more than he hoped”.

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“When everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us… something will.”

It’s Whitsun, or Pentecost, May 20th, 1945 (Easter having fallen on April 1st that year). The Nazis signed their unconditional surrender less than two weeks before. Pointsman, feeling “a certain obligation to go relax”, takes a seaside holiday with some of his White Visitation besties Roger, Jessica, and Katje as well as a Shell Mex House rep, Dennis Joint, whose prerogative is to take PISCES under the umbrella of SPOG (Special Projectiles Operations Group). Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it? Slothrop has been out of Pointsman’s sight for almost a month after he made the mistake of letting the Secret Service take over the surveillance work in place of PISCES for the purpose of balancing the budget, the surveillance bill being “the most excruciating thorn in the crown of funding problems” Pointsman has to bear.

We learn that, with some funds freed up, Pointsman assembled SEZ WHO (Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical Observations) the Anglo-American crack team of Harvey Speed and Floyd Perdoo who investigate some of Slothrop’s supposed sexcapades (“Don Giovanni’s map of Europe”) 2,065 of them to be precise. After a cute li’l canteloupe (sp?) diversion it’s revealed that Harvey and Floyd have come up short: “No Jenny. No Sally W. No Cybele. No Angela. No Catherine. No Lucy. No Gretchen.” They even tracked down dear old Mrs. Quoad, pusher of candied horrors, who has no recollection of the nurse Darlene. Pointsman fears Slothrop’s starred map may have referred to “sexual fantasies instead of real events” but reasons that PISCES is concerned only with a “clinical version of truth” and, fantasy or not, the correlation still holds water.

Shell Mex House is losing its collective mind now that Slothrop is running wild knowing “everything it’s possible to know” about the A4/V-2 as well as everything Great Britain knows about it. There’s serious concern that he’s fallen into Soviet hands, especially now that the uneasy alliance between the USSR and Europe has lost its use. More about PISCES’ disintegration is revealed, notably Brigadier Pudding (name conjuring what he’s been munching on, yech) seems to have lapsed on his penicillin intake. I think it’s sweet that mama bird Katje seems worried about him.

Then we get the vignette of Pointsman and co. near a seaside fair of sorts. The details are pointed and unique as ever. I especially laughed at “The donkeys hee-haw and shit, the children walk in it and their parents scream.” Dennis Joint is making goo-goo eyes at Katje, Roger and Jessica do the opposite, and Pointsman, initially trying to play it cool and “wait for the others to betray themselves” seems to be losing touch with reality. There’s a callback to Part 2’s opening quote from Merian C. Cooper in the bit about Mitchell Prettyplace and his 18-volume study of King Kong for which he even interviewed the King Kong Kultists (womp, womp) whose members have seen the movie at least 100 times and passed an 8-hour entrance exam. Maybe a bit of a poke at people who read into media a bit too much? There’s a connection being made between the fictional “black scapeape” and its mutant offspring, the Schwarzkommando. It seems some version of the Schwarzkommando was not just a fabrication of Operation Black Wing’s psy-op but a living, breathing group of Herero rocket troops sweeping across the Zone. News of this has melted ax-wielding Edwin Treacle’s mind who we find chasing a blue-skinned Gavin Trefoil through some decorative trees while screaming “Giant ape? I’ll show you a giant ape all right!”

Meanwhile Pointsman’s insane mutterings continue to freak out his pals who “begin to edge away, in definite alarm”. The voice he hears tells him that Roger Mexico is key to his operation and that Jessica is the only thing standing in the way. SPOG, by way of Dennis Joint, could be called upon to dispatch Jessica once and for all and then Roger, in his despair, would find work is “the best ointment for the burns.” The voice tries to convince him that he can be both hero and villain in this situation, Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu, Yang and Yin…

“Oh ha, ha,” he sez instead “Talking to myself here.”