Rainbow's Children: Rocket

On "Gravity's Rainbow"

This is Part Two of Rainbow’s Children. Find Part One: Harpoon here.

Gnosticism Reversed

More than one hundred twenty years passed between the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. Though the world changed drastically, it was only by degree, not in kind. That is, we still find ourselves in the fallen world of the Black Iron Prison. Alongside a technological explosion, the Prime Directive of profit extraction has wrought further war, destruction, genocide, ecological disaster, and widespread misery. To the individual, senseless acts of mass violence, but, to the Ahabian forces at the helm, progress. As Lewis Hyde writes in A Primer for Forgetting, “in Melville’s America,” (and we can expand this to Pynchon’s America,) “it’s not light flooding the mind that’s the mark of true belief; it’s money changing hands” (20).

The harpoon has evolved into the V2 rocket. Technology has proliferated exponentially, although it is still being put to the same end: profit extraction and control. Rather than Captain Ahab, a ship captain hellbent on killing a whale, we have Captain Dominus Blicero (AKA Weissman), an SS major and commander of a V2 rocket battery, who has fully embraced The Rocket as a religion, and even had a special one designed (Rocket 00000) for reasons we will get to later.

Playing the part of Ishmael, Queequeg, and the rest of the Pequod’s crew are the preterite, those who are passed over, the everyman who goes about their life without knowing of the vast schemes at play, and the Counterforce who stands in opposition to men like Blicero who would offer humanity the rather pitiful choice: “Stay behind with carbon and hydrogen, take your lunch-bucket in to the works every morning with the faceless droves who can’t wait to get in out of the sunlight—or move beyond…life, towards the inorganic. Here is no frailty, no mortality—here is Strength and the Timeless” (Pynchon 580).

That is, cling to the dwindling power of humanity, or align yourself, like Weissman, with algorithmic profit extraction, control, and the power of the market.

“Dr. Strangelove” (1964)

By the mid-twentieth century, the means and procedures by which the globalized machinations of profit extraction operated had become as unknowable to the ordinary citizen as the scuttling of the coral crabs were to Pip. Operations had been offloaded onto inorganic systems running on inhuman logic. National markets competed largely on the surface while working towards, or already in, global synthesis, making so-called states into surface level apparatus; even national politics had largely become a mere smokescreen, or faceplate, covering the gleaming lines of capital weaving together continents, running like sentient coal veins through some deep or high place, beyond the roots and reaches of country, race, morality; in some dimension completely man-made, projected beyond God’s reach, grown self-aware, self-stabilizing, reaching back down with numberless tendrils to shape our world to Its preference, making money run where it needs to run, with not a child’s understanding of ethics, a being without any notion, an algorithmic will, gnosticism reversed: a demiurge of our own creation.

The Gravity of the Rainbow

What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there’s a real conversation factor between information and lives…Don't forget the real business of the war is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals…The true war is a celebration of markets (105).

So big had this system of trade and production become by the onset of the twentieth century that it had begun to distort reality beyond human understanding. Pynchon’s narrative is distorted to match, and I will not be attempting to break it down in its totality. For a project like that, I highly suggest checking out The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon.

As Richard Poirier said in his review of Gravity’s Rainbow, “It is impossible to summarize a book of some 400,000 words in which every item enriches every other and in which the persistent paranoia of all the important characters invests any chance detail with the power of an omen.”

We can at least say that there are five major plot lines, give or take, which fit together into a jagged collage of a novel. Each is, in some way, shaped around Blicero’s Rocket 00000, whose phantom presence acts as sort of The White Whale of the novel.

Plot 1) The quest of Lt. Tyrone Slothrop to discover how his childhood conditioning experiments involving Dr. Laszlo Jampf and a plastic known as Imipolex-G are connected to the Nazi rockets.

Plot 2) An account of Major Weissman’s time before the war in Germany’s Herero colonies in southwest Africa, as well as his wartime sadistic Hansel-Gretel-Witch sexual fantasy with a young German man named Gottfried and a Dutch woman named Katje.

Plot 3) The complicated story of German chemist, Franz Pökler, who works on the rocket for Blicero, but is deeply conflicted. Though fascinated by the cutting edge of rocketry, his main hope is to be reunited with his wife and daughter who are in a concentration camp.

Plot 4) A telling of Soviet intelligence officer, Tchitcherine's exile in central Asia before the war, and his search for his half-Herero brother Enzian in The Zone following the war.

Plot 5) The heroic attempt of Enzian, leader of a group of exiled Hereros known as the Schwarzkommando, to locate and organize all the necessary pieces to create Rocket 00001, a sort of redeemed mirroring of Blicero’s nihilistic quintuple negative.

Rocket 00000 is death. It is the final closing of the Black Iron Prison. The inorganic triumphing over the organic, and the possibility of its launch haunts the novel. If it is allowed to leave the hug of earth, well, a launched rocket has a sealed fate, a parabolic course. What goes up must come down, after all. When the screaming that comes across the sky and starts the novel is heard, the rocket has already hit. Such is the sealed fate of the Black Iron Prison, of the inhuman will, of the course of civilization ever since profit extraction became the Prime Directive. The only thing holding it at bay is men like Enzian, and the rest of the Counterforce.

Pynchon has made a career of poking desperately at every chance we have had at escape, setting his novels in small windows* of possibility, from the founding of America, to postwar Europe, Sixties California, and the .com bubble. All periods of hope, promises of change, of redemption, but, despite all that gung-ho human spirit, included in each of these novels is that same window slamming shut again.

Pynchon is drawn to these windows despite the fact that the dice continuously land the wrong way: the window opens only to allow in an onrush of thieves, and slams shut once the communal home has been picked clean: the inevitable completion of the rocket’s arc, the rainbow crashing down. Gravity’s Rainbow ends, in fact, (spoiler alert, heh heh) with the Orpheus Theater in Los Angeles as a rocket tips into its final descent.

But that final theater is at a strange temporal and spatial remove from the rest of the novel, as if its conclusion is not totally assured, but only one possible ending waiting for us. It does, however, welcome connections to another theater which appears earlier in the text, one that is here already, and growing cancerously, threatening to encompass the world, converting much of its citizenry into spectators, and everything that had once been life into some spectacle on stage projected by an outside force:

There are spectators, watching, as spectators will do, hundreds of thousands of them, sitting around this dingy yellow amphitheater, seat after seat plunging down in rows and tiers, endless miles, down to the great arena, brown-yellow lights, food scattered on the stone slopes up higher, broken buns, peanut shells, bones, bottles half-filled…fires in small wind-refuges, set in angles where seats have been chiseled away, shallow depressions in the stone and a bed of cherry embers where old women are cooking hashes of the scavenged bits and crumbles and gristly lumps of food (679).

It is here where the preterite are slowly being assembled, those ever-growing “multitudes who are passed over by God and History" (299), to squeak out an existence and watch whatever spectacle takes the stage. As the world becomes less for us, and more for what Pynchon calls Them, the theater will expand. New seats can always be chiseled away, for those who fall through the cracks and into this bardoic waiting room from which there seems no way out, and in which one can always find a place to sit and wait for the end of history to end.

For those unwilling to join the Counterforce, only this dingy theater awaits. This is the bourgeoise life of the spectacle. In some ways, it is a privileged place, one not even offered to all. Indeed, there are even more hellish places one might end up. Against such a fate, those who accept the bargain of the theater will be given this place, safe enough, perhaps, at least for now, in which we can entertain ourselves until eventually we are extinguished by the falling bomb, whether that be a true bomb, ecological disaster, or the end of any possible usefulness we might have once provided for Them.

“It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children” (209).

If we are its children, then certainly something, some Ishmaelien meaning, can still be found in these windows, or, perhaps, even in that doomed theater in the space between the rainbow’s arc. Some the-exit-from-the-Black-Iron-Prison-is-the-friends-we-made-along-the-way type sentiment…r-r-right?...guys?

Enter Slothrop

We are first introduced to Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop in London during the Blitz in a sort of raunchily comedic scene that smoothly fades into a melancholic meditation on death, and a zoomed out view of the New England branch of the Slothrop family. They arrived with the Pilgrims and stayed on right up to the Second World War despite “the tradition, for others, [being] clear, everyone knew—mine it out, work it, take all you can till it’s gone then move on west, there’s plenty more” (28).

The Slothrops never moved west. They were left out of that great American dream. Instead they stayed put and persisted rather than prospered as the juices of New England were sucked dry. From the arrival of their pilgrim ancestors up through the Great Depression, they stayed put, and, perhaps in their puritanical understanding, they gleamed something of Melville’s weaver-god, as one of the Slothrop ancestor’s tombstones, studded deep in the New England earth, holds the following epitaph:

“Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky 
And in the midst of prosperity, know thou may’st die 
While the great Loom* of God works in darkness above, 
And our trials here below are but threads of His Love” (29).

*In 1984, Thomas Pynchon published an essay in The New York Times titled “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” in which he provides the historical context for a word which has come to mean roughly: one who is opposed to or scared of new technology, “but the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell. In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and ‘in a fit of insane rage’ destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged…folks would respond with the catch phrase 'Lud must have been here.’ By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname 'King (or Captain) Ludd,' and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night.”

The stocking frame, a sort of mechanized loom, had been around for a couple hundred years by that time. Thus, Ned Lud’s supposed insane fit of rage would not have been driven by a fear of new technology. Rather, “The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries.” Instead of using the new invention to simply remove the brunt of labor and improve life for everyone, it was conscripted by the Prime Directive: profit extraction, and proved an early example of automation destroying jobs. The Luddite attacks were righteous stands against the “men who did not work, only owned and hired.”

Thus, Slothrop is set up to be Pynchon’s favorite kind of hero: a sort of dumbass, but generally well-meaning, middle-class American. “Slothrop is the archetypal American. He represents many of us (not necessarily a fully oppressed Preterite, but someone who is more privileged so as to have the ability to do something like read and analyze Gravity’s Rainbow or read and analyze the world)”, the author of The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon writes. This means Slothrop is of the privileged, or let’s say privileged enough, class that is given the choice of the theater. He may well have accepted the bribe, rather unconsciously, as most people do, and returned home after the war, to get married, have some kids, buy a house in the suburbs, and enjoy the postwar prosperity of America without ever thinking to ask who is footing the bill.

Instead, he discovers himself entwined in a globe-spanning conspiracy.

It is learned that Slothrop has a map of London in his office marked with each location he has had sex, and it is in fact being covertly photographed by a member of a British intelligence agency.

This is the first hint that in this World War II novel, the lines are not so clear cut as Allies vs. Axis. Slothrop is ostensibly on the same side as Teddy Bloat, but Bloat is a member of an intelligence community who is keeping close tabs on Slothrop, and is hopelessly entangled with an international cartel composed of chemical corporations on either side of the war, intelligence agencies, and other nefarious organizations, who together make up the “war-state” (76), the Raketen-Stadt, or, simply, They who stalk the novel. Put most succinctly, They are those:

“taking and not giving back, demanding that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide (412).

Once again, we have the maniac pilot at the helm of the vessel, the demiurge, the algorithmic Prime Directive obsessed with extracting and cataloging, and They have laid their sights on poor Slothrop, for his map of sexual encounters just so happens to superimpose precisely over another map, one which shows where Germany’s rocket strikes later hit, for reasons no one seems sure of, but many are eager to find out. The fear that drives Them is the possibility that They are not as in control as They thought, that perhaps “No one can do. Things only happen” (30). This is unacceptable. There simply must be an explanation.

Whether Slothrop gets a hard-on in the location where a rocket will later fall, or rockets fall in places where Slothrop previously had a hard-on becomes a contested point that is implied to be tied to the strange nature of the V2 rockets themselves, which operate almost outside of cause-and-effect, highlighting “The illusion of control,” laughing at the idea “that A could do B” (30). Traveling at supersonic speed, the rocket arrives before the sound of its arrival. Such a reversal of the usual cause-and-effect strikes fear into nearly every character who encounters it: “Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out…a few feet of film run backwards…the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it, the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning…a ghost in the sky” (48).

Over the course of the novel, this network of intelligence agencies, chemical corporations, and military personnel become involved in the conspiracy to find Slothrop, and solve the mystery of why the rockets are falling as they do, even if that means they have to “open up his damned skull” (90). Slothrop’s almost animal paranoia keys him off that he is being pursued. He begins his escape by looking into the matter himself, and discovers that it was his own father who signed a deal to allow for experimentation on his infant son by one Dr. Laszlo Jamf, in which he was injected with Imipolex-G, a plastic also used in the V2 rockets, as part of a Pavlovian conditioning experiment that might explain his connection to the rocket strikes.*

*“Jesus Christ I’ve been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef…Does this mean Slothrop has been under their observation--m-maybe since he was born? Yaahhh…” (286), the narrator reveals in the Scooby-Doo dialogue this novel is rife with.

This entire thread is largely dropped, however. It is worth quoting Andrew from The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon, at length on this topic:

This initial journey is meant to display…the archetypal American’s own inciting moment where they begin to question the world around them... If you began realizing that your own lust and desire had deep subconscious connections to war and violence, wouldn’t you want to explore that further? And when you began this exploration, if you learned that throughout the entirety of your childhood, you were conditioned (see: propagandized) to elicit this, quote-unquote, sexual response to mass death, would you not want to see why certain groups would want you to have positive feelings toward heinous acts? If you discovered that your father and ‘family’ (family being those who ‘raised’ America) played a major part in this propaganda, would it not terrify you? leading you to question if your family was in on it, or if they just had your best interest at heart at the expense of all else, or if they had been propagandized as well?

The importance of the quest is not so much the answers, which may or may not even exist. It is the very act of questioning his upbringing that allows Slothrop to escape from said programming, and avoid his fate in the theater. Much of the rest of his story involves his going AWOL in The Zone. It is sporadic, and unstructured for it takes place in the exact sort of blank page environ of the open window, a sort of liminal postwar continental Europe from which any future seems possible.

Michael S. Judge, whose Gravity’s Rainbow episodes of Death is Just Around the Corner helped this reader break open the tough outer shell of this novel, traces the temporal layering Pynchon is doing here, writing about the revolutionary sixties in the United States by writing about postwar Europe. Slothrop’s adventures in such a place lead to all kinds of pulpy adventures straight out of primary-colored comic books and spy thrillers, but, rather than coalesce into concrete answers, he breaks apart, seemingly disappearing into The Zone, and from the text.

IG Farben: Black Iron Prison Inc.

In exchange for allowing the experimental conditioning, the cost of Slothrop’s future education was to be covered entirely by Jamf’s employer, IG Farben, a very real corporation who would go on to become the engine of the Nazi war machine, a German chemical corporation at the very “center of the network of international cartels which control a bewildering array of products from oil to rubber to dyes to nitrogen to explosives to aluminum to nickel to synthetic silks" (Sasuly 8-9) .

Farben, wouldn’t you know, is simply the German word for colors. IG Farben got its start from producing coal-tar dyes. Originally considered a waste product created in the production of steel, it was found that earth’s excrement held within its molecules a sort of synthetic rainbow. In a move opposite of water vapor crystallizing a rainbow out of sunlight, IG Farben manipulated the rainbow out of death-transfigured, synthesizing its God out of “death converted into more death” (167).

The corporation has been described as an octopus, and its tentacles do seem to find their way across the world. John Foster Dulles, brother of Allen Dulles, eventual CIA chief, who would go on to represent such reprehensible entities as the United Fruit Company, “structured deals that funneled U.S. investments to German companies like IG Farben” (Ferner) after World War One. Their American partner company, American IG Chemical Corp, had deep ties with coal and oil. Sitting on their board were both Walter Teagle, the chief of Standard Oil, and Henry Ford’s son, Edsel Ford (American IG, 2023).

In an article in the New York Times, published in 1977, journalist Robert Sherril writes that “by the end of the 1920's IG had developed a solid partnership with Standard Oil,” a relationship that worked greatly to Hitler’s advantage in the Second World War. His tanks, planes, and war machines required the fuel additive tetraethyl lead, a substance even IG Farben was unable to produce, but the Nazis were supplied “the secrets for the tetraethyl process and, while IG was still building the plant to produce it, Standard [Oil] supplied the additive itself. All this with the approval of the United States War Department.”

During the war, IG Auschwitz was founded near the concentration camp from which inmates were used as slave labor to build the plant they would later be worked to death in under unimaginably brutal conditions. Not only that, but it was an IG-owned company, Degesh, who manufactured the Zyklon B gas that the SS began using in its extermination program, so that IG Farben was profiting off the very substance produced by its slave labor used to commit genocide…

We can pretend “these corporation executives who eagerly participated in…‘the most extraordinary crime in civilized history’ were punished and that the IG empire…was pulled apart by the victors and smashed into so many pieces that it could never be reassembled” (Sherril), but it was not so. Instead, this “little chemical cartel…[had become] the model for the very structure of nations” (349).

Something new had formed, without boundary, without name, something to transcend the usual notion of nation or state, or even the idea that a war might have two distinct sides. An ethereal, tendriled thing, operating in the shadows, the “terrible structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise” (165): This Rocket-Cartel was to become the “city of the future where every soul is known, and there is noplace left to hide” (566).

After the war, Sherril writes “Eisenhower…recommended dynamiting some IG plants, scattering stock control of other IG industries to the four winds, and squeezing the last dollar of reparations from the giant. None of this was done.” Instead, General Motors, who played such a vital part in the Nazi war machine that it is said Hitler would not have invaded Poland without their assistance, “was paid $32 million by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants” (Dobbs). While a handful of IG executives did serve light terms, even these were commuted. IG itself was split into three separate corporations, but allowed to retain everything, and even re-employed their former executives after their short prison stints, so that by 1977 “each of IG's successor companies [was] larger than IG was in its heyday” (Sherril).

After the war, Nazi scientists were vacuumed up by the United States in what is now known as Operation Paperclip. Their horrible crimes were papered over in exchange for intellectual service to their new regime. Some were even given esteemed places within government agencies such as NASA, including the inspiration for Captain Blicero, Werner von Braun, who was a chief engineer of both the Nazi V2 rocket system and the American Apollo series that reached the moon.

Fascism was not defeated; it was subsumed.

“If you’re wondering where [they’ve gone], look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. [They are] almost surely there. Look high, not low” (749).

In the words of Philip K. Dick, The Empire never ended. It merely changed names, as it has done throughout history, concentrating capital and the machinations of extraction and control to the point that “a market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control” (30).

This nameless thing that emerged out of the war, this synthetic demiurge, this mad god that has manifested around the Prime Directive of profit extraction is not controlled, not even by Them. They simply fill, albeit voluntarily and even gleefully, necessary offices in the earthly nodes It, for now, requires.

A gathering of elite from the corporate Nazi crowd receive just such a warning quite early on in the novel when they meet for a séance meant to contact Walter Rathenau, the man who had so brilliantly operated the German economy through the first World War. He had seen the postwar state, one in which not ideology, but business would be the rightful authority of a rational structure (165). While they succeed in reaching him, it seems in death he had been transformed, telling the crowd that “problems you may be having, even those of global implication, seem to many of us here only trivial side-trips” (165), but eventually he does offer them a vision of this nameless thing They have put in motion:

You don’t have to listen. You think you’d rather hear about what you call ‘life’: the growing, organic Kartell. But it’s only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion…as you all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata—epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator (167).

Ghost Feather

In the Zone, Slothrop sees this. He pieces together a sort of demonic version of Pip’s vision. Like Pip, he is exposed to terrible inner workings beyond his comprehension, but rather than the weaver-god beneath the sea, he sees himself enmeshed in the inhuman mechanisms of der Raketen-Stadt, the Rocket City. Slothrop’s research brings him face-to-face with the demiurge as he exposes and is exposed to the whiteness of It, the totality of forces working towards profit extraction, creating an insurmountable evil: “a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul” (566). He sees that same

Whiteness without heat, and…feels a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember—never has he been as close as now to the true momentum of his time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture to the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the white moment, the vain and blind tugging at his sleeves it’s important…please…look at us…but it’s already too late…the blood of his eyes has begun to touch the whiteness back to ivory, to brushings of gold and a network of edges to the broken rock…and the hands that lifted him away set him back (312).

Whiteness in Gravity’s Rainbow plays a similar role as it does in Moby-Dick, and it is embodied most fully by Weissman, whose name means white man in German, and his SS codename, Dominus Blicero, is an old German name for Death, who was seen as “white: bleaching and blankness” (322). Weissman is in love with the rocket for its bleaching powers. “Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature” (324). Beyond Ahab’s desire to punch through the whiteness in order to glimpse its secrets, Blicero wants to own it, to control it, to apply it to all that is alive and colorful, to freeze the world into a single knowable image, so that nothing is outside of his control.

This is not only one man’s desire, but the structural logic of this System built on death. Petroleum and coal are products of mass death. Building a global economic system with these at its heart recreates this structure; as above, so below. This is the anti-life goal of the inorganic, that nameless thing that wants to freeze squirming life, lock it into place, imprison it in eternity. Blicero and Jamf’s conditioning is meant to install an unconscious allegiance to this end, and such conditioning must also be threaded throughout the spectacle projected in the theater.

It is very organic, earthly things that bring Slothrop back from his vision of whiteness: the blood of his eyes bring him back to broken rock. In this way, sometimes in a pig suit, other times dressed as a comic book hero, Slothrop manages to escape one encounter with Them after another, all the time “changing, sure, changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half-conscious as picking his nose” (623). He has lost even the attainable felicities Melville lists as places in which to invest meaning in one’s life when society at large offers nothing else: he has never had a wife and was taken away from any chance of finding someone by the war; every lover he does find is quickly targeted by a heartbreaking rocket; he has no bed and is found sleeping in a nest of grass; the table, in wartime, offers few pleasures (unless one likes bananas, like really likes bananas)…

“Inherent Vice” (2014)

…the saddle is an anachronism even by World War II, muchmore by the 1970s from which Pynchon is writing. There is nowhere to ride: the world has been enclosed. The fire-side, or the home, the hearth, even if it was not a thousand miles away, had long been pilfered, juiced dry by the wringing hands of profiteering, leaving only “flooded quarries and logged-off hillsides…like signed confessions across all that thatchy-brown, moldering witch-country” (28), which leaves the final felicity: country, “the one ghost-feather his fingers always brush by is America. Poor asshole, he can’t let her go. She’s whispered love me too often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with come-hitherings, incredible promises” (623).

These whisperings are the offerings of the theater, and its false promise of refuge even within the Black Iron Prison. People can survive the death of God. Yes, Hell is on earth, sure the apocalypse is always-already happening somewhere, and there are people living in conditions many would consider unsustainable to human life. This is not abstract. There are pockets, burning trash heaps, places you can physically go: the engine rooms of modernity, where all the pressures of this reality must be injected into the earth in order to maintain Its vitality, and people are both drawn in by this force, and pulverized by it, but that doesn’t have to be you. You have been given a ticket. Now come in here, and enjoy the show.

Gottfried is not given such a choice. Weisemann’s Rocket 00000 has been specially created with a special schwarzgerät (black device), a womb of Imipolex-G into which Gottfried is inserted before launch. “His bare limbs in their metal bondage writhe among the fuel, oxidizer, live-steam lines, thrust frame, compressed air battery, exhaust elbow, decomposer, tanks, vents, valves” (751). Gottfried has become a part of the rocket, as do all those who are sacrificed to the machinery of mass death. In a mirrored image, those in the theater, like Slothrop is supposed to be, have a part of the rocket inserted in themselves, as baby Slothrop does through Jamf’s conditioning: “The Man has a branch office in each of our brains” (712).

These two images must meet, which is what appears to be happening in the final pages. Just as Gottfried’s rocket is about to launch, we transition to the Los Angeles theater, and its manager, Richard M. Zhlubb, a stand in for Nixon, president at the time of Gravity’s Rainbow’s writing and publication. That Nixon’s stand-in presides over a theater implies the United States is that theater, its citizens largely spectators watching a production of the world rather than the world itself. As the rocket launches, we are given a series of images of familiar heroes failing to save the day, from Superman to the Lone Ranger, each arriving too late. No one is coming to save those in the theater. If there is any hope, they must save themselves.

And what exactly happens to Slothrop in the end? It is difficult to say. It seems he eventually does pluck that final ghost feather, America, if only because he was forced to do so by conditions, and in doing so, like Orpheus after being torn apart by the Furies, he seems to scatter across The Zone. He has freed himself from the theater, seen through the propaganda of the United States, but lost his identity in the process. His guidance can only take anyone so far. Parts of his story can still be used to any end. Profit can be extracted even from the imagery of revolutionaries.

Rejecting the theater is only the first step, not a final victory. Slothrop does ultimately accept the challenge, and takes his stand by siding with the organic over the inorganic:

“If others have seen him or his fire, they haven’t tried to approach. He’s letting hair and beard grow… he likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain…Any number of directions he ought to be moving in, but he’d rather stay right here for now” (623).

And so he does. He stays until he becomes a crossroad, a crossroad at which we still stand, frozen: “After a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural” (626).

Next Time

A happy ending, believe it or not. The Gnostic Pulp trilogy makes a massive time jump into the distant future with Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home. Skipping over where we are now, for there are too many directions in which things might go from Slothrop’s crossroad, we eventually arrive in a time beyond the reach of the Black Iron Prison, in Dick’s Palm Tree Garden, which is the spiritually redeemed and ontologically genuine world.

What is sure is that our present way of life is not endlessly sustainable. Whether it is brought down by the Counterforce, or collapses in on itself, there must eventually come an afterwards.

I’ll see ya there.