Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - Combined Guides

[1], 3-7. Captain Pirate Prentice dreams of an evacuation of London. He awakens at dawn, and shoves his bed beneath the balcony to break the fall of a sleeping Teddy Bloat. He climbs to a rooftop banana garden, sees the vapor trail of a rocket launch across the Channel ("incoming mail," he thinks), and proceeds to pick bananas.

1. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” Beautiful opening lines. As classic as any, I bet. They establish here is the relationship between cause and effect, which Gravity’s Rainbow upends. Causality. Teleology. The basic rudiments of enlightenment rationality. These are meaningless now. The key: “it has happened before.” Not only the bomb dropping. But this bomb dropping. You do not hear a V-2 bomb drop. Or rather, you hear it only after it has dropped. By the time of the screaming, it is too late.

Pirate Prentice is dreaming this. He is dreaming the evacuation of London, too. He wakes up and scurries to the rooftop hothouse to pluck bananas. He sees a V-2, far in the distance, launched from somewhere in Holland. Bananas growing in Britain? It’s like a joke on the colonial project, where the normal/natural order of agriculture is upset. All things collapse into a single point.

[2], 7-16. The banana breakfast at Pirate's ("a spell, against falling objects"). A phone call informs him that the rocket he saw contained a message for him; he leaves to retrieve it. Pirate's "strange talent . . . for getting inside the fantasies of others." His proxy dealings with the Giant Adenoid.

2. Prentice has the ability to “get inside the fantasies of others.” One of those fantasies includes “The Giant Adenoid”: a kind of ‘50s/‘60s Bmovie creature. Here again, the timeline—that is, the chronology of the world’s real history—is scuttled. Characters are dreaming in a visual language that does not exist. This fantasy also includes reference to the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a 19th century Ottoman administrative unit responsible for the bureaucratic reorganization of imperial power. London—indeed all of Europe; indeed all of THE WORLD—is now undergoing such a reconstruction. It is a shift not only in the balance of power, but in the physical/theoretical understanding of reality itself. This trick of Prentice’s (his ability to occupy others’ fantasies) is important, and that it is mentioned so early is key. This is, to a large extent, how the novel itself “works,” narrative-wise: the narrator will open on a character, “zoom into” their story, shift to to another character within that story, zoom in again, etc. Point-of-view constantly shifts. It’s like a free-floating consciousness gloms onto a character or scenario and explores it. Seemingly anything can be imbued with perspective, or personality Prentice prepares his famous banana breakfast. And coffee. It’s a treat for all involved. He loses sight of the rocket, believing it to have crashed in the North Sea. He receives a phone call and is told the rocket has a message for him. We also learn more about Osbie Feel (introduced in 1.1), a recurring character who is mysterious even by the standards of Pynchon’s players. I promise not to get too hung up on stuff like references and trivia, etc., but I believe Osbie is a stand-in for Owsley Stanley, the legendary LSD chemist and Grateful Dead sound-man. In Chapter 1, we’re told that Osbie is cultivating “pharmaceutical plants” on the roof, where Prentice grows his bananas. More on this later. I am interested in Osbie not only because of a personal interest in Stanley, but because the character sees Pynchon transposing his career-long interest in the promise/collapse of the 1960s counterculture (see: The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice) back into the 1940s/wartime setting. Again, flagging seeming “anachronisms” like this is not only besides the point, but antithetical to it, as the book is explicitly preoccupied with scrambling conventional orderings of history, teleology, and so on.

[3], 17-19. Teddy Bloat to ACHTUNG office of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and (American) Lt. Tyrone Slothrop. He photographs a map above Slothrop's desk, a map of London to which stars of various colors have been affixed.

3. Teddy Bloat heads out in the “dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachey, sour-stomach middle of the day” to ACHTUNG (which is an acronym for “Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany”), another secretive government branch located in another nondescript office. Bloat is ostensibly there to see his friend, the British officer Tantivy Mucker-Maffick. Bloat notes that ACTHUNG employs a Yank called Lt. Tyrone Slothrop.

Bloat arrives to find the office empty, which is just fine by him. He snaps photographs, paying particular attention to a map above Slothrop’s desk. It’s a map of London, that seems to mark Slothrop’s sexual escapades using colour-coded star stickers. Slothrop, Bloat was once told, “does lead a rather complicated social life.”

[4], 20-29. Slothrop, trying to gain access to bomb-impact site, sees Pirate retrieve his message. We learn more about the map, about "operational paranoia," and a bit about Slothrop's New England family: "they did not prosper."

4. We meet Slothrop now. He is heading to an impact site, where a V-2 has dropped. Slothrop lurks around the site, handing out smokes, trying to get some info. No dice. Stonewalled. The British are not playing nice with the Americans… or at least with the men from ACHTUNG… or at least with Slothrop. Among the wreckage is a cylinder, which is immediately retrieved by none other than Pirate Prentice, a “mean mother.” Presumably this is the message from 1.2. Slothrop gripes, to himself, that he’ll have to submit a bunch of paperwork to figure anything out. He is jaded. But insists he used to care. Then the V-2s came. The rockets were unpredictable. They jumbled his priorities. It was impossible to track them. Why bother? He started drinking more. Smoking more. He’s smoking two cigs at once, which hang out of his mouth like a vampire’s fangs.

Slothrop, loafer that he is, is being transferred to the PWE (Political Warfare Executive). Slothrop is useful to various governmental and extra-governmental forces because of his “peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky.” Plainly: his erections seem to predict the otherwise unpredictable pattern of V-2 bombings (hence the map, clustered with names of Slothrop’s sexual conquests). In a world where the bomb jumbles the cause/effect relationship, Slothrop’s boners have an ordering effect. His excited penis (literally) comes before the bomb. We also learn about Slothrop’s family, who go all the way back to the founding of the U.S.A. They were not aristocrats; “they did not prosper —about all they did was persist.” They are links in a chain that has led to Tyrone. This is a favourite theme for Pynchon: the idea of the passedover, the Preterite of Calvinist teachings. Much more about this later, I’m sure, when we learn more about Tyrone’s ancestor, William Slothrop. But that the family is largely undistinguished, placed ever cog-like in the advancing machinery of America, is key to understanding Tyrone, our ostensible hero, who is himself moved, pawn-like, by forces (erotic, technological, metaphysical, geopolitical) that he cannot comprehend, or even be bothered to care about.

[5], 29-37. A séance: "Roland Feldspath (the spirit), Peter Sachsa (the control), Carroll Eventyr (the medium), Selena (the wife and survivor)." (Sachsa and Eventyr will become important to us later.) Milton Gloaming takes notes. Jessica Swanlake, rather bored, finally throws a dart. Pirate, also present, talks with the statistician, Roger Mexico (Jessica's lover). We learn about Operation Blackwing, PICSES, the "White Visitation." Pirate remembers his own lost love, Scorpia Mossmoon (whose husband, Clive, was in plastics). He both envies, and wishes to protect, Roger and Jessica.

5. A circle of sitters; a séance. The circle talks about systems that create their own logic, of the Invisible Hand rendered irrelevant. Nothing can do anything. “Things only happen.” Quite a crew gathered here. Pirate Prentice is about. As is Jessica Swanlake, an ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, i.e. the British Army’s women’s auxiliary) private, and her lover, the logically-minded statistician Roger Mexico. Roger is a man of science, with little truck for witchcraft and séances. To him, the whole scene is a “great swamp of paranoia.” Also introduced are Peter Sachsa and Carroll Eventyr, who will play bigger roles later in the story.

Mexico and Prentice talk. More shady-goings on are introduced: “The White Visitation,” a former mental hospital now housing PISCES, a psychological warfare operation; Operation Black Wing; The Firm, a kind-of master conspiracy that reigns above them all. Prentice observes Roger and Jessica’s romance. It reminds him of his own affair with another man’s wife. He wonders if Roger and Jessica’s tryst will be similarly doomed, and admits to himself that such a thought gives him pleasure. Heartbreak breeds cynicism, and an acquiescence to this “hard-boiled old egg of a world.”

[6], 37-42. Roger and Jessica, in car, discuss Roger's Pavlovian colleague, Ned Pointsman. Roger recalls his and Jessica's first meeting--a rocket-assisted pick-up. We learn about their (illegal) meeting-place in the stay-away zone. "They are in love. Fuck the war."

6. Roger and Jessica are rolling east in a military vehicle, he in his highcollared Burberry jacket, she in her drab wool sweater. It’s a tense-butromantic scene, as they race off together in “peevish” moods. They are en route to meet a “high-class vivisectionist,” who is Ned Pointsman, Roger’s superior, and a hardcore Pavlovian behaviourist.

Roger remembers meeting Jessica, in “what Hollywood likes to call a ‘cute meet.’” (Isn’t it a “meet cute”?) Jessica was futzing with a busted bicycle and Roger approached her in his Jaguar. He told her he was born into the war. He told her that works at “The White Visitation” (always in quotes eh…), among the superstitious and paranormaltypes. As Jessica stepped into Roger’s car, a rocket falls. The episode recounts how tired the two are of the war—how human losses have become abstracted and impersonal. They want to withdraw together, to their quiet house in the “stay-away zone,” where they have been tucking away, illegally. They are desperate to get back there. The chapter ends, “They are in love. Fuck the war.”

[7], 42-47. In bombed-out building, Roger and Pointsman (the latter's foot wedged firmly in a toilet-bowl) hunt a dog, for Pointsman's experiments (post-impact studies of saliva output, using implanted tubes). Roger and Jessica return Pointsman to St. Veronica's Hospital (of the True Image ["vera ikon"]). We hear of Kevin Spectro and The Book (by Pavlov).

7. We meet Pointsman (properly, Mr. Edward W.A. Pointsman), who is chasing a dog through the bombed-out shell of an apartment building —one of four levelled by a recent rocket strike. Pointsman, the Pavlovian, collects dogs for experiments, measuring saliva outputs. Roger and Jessica join him on his wild hunt, made all the more madcap by Pointsman’s foot being lodged through a discarded toilet seat, which he cannot (or cannot be bothered to) dislodge. Jessica shakes her head. She could be at home, cuddling (“Cuddling?” Roger responds, indignantly) with her fiancé, Jeremy Beaver. Instead, she’s stalking some random mutt with a pair of military oddballs.

We also learn of “The Book”—what book? “ask Mr. Pointsman and you’ll only get smirked at”—a mysterious volume passed between seven shadowy figures at regular intervals. Pointsman is one such figure. As is a Dr. Kevin Spectro, currently residing at the gothic Hospital of St. Veronica of the True Image for Colonic and Respiratory Diseases. Roger and Jessica drop Pointsman off at the hospital’s side door, dog-less, and drive off into the early morning, the windshield wipers brushing rhythmically. A comic interlude. Avatars of a sturdy, scientific rationalism like Pointsman (a cause-and-effect guy) and Mexico (a serious-minded statistician) are rendered absurd, ridiculous.

[8], 47-53. Spectro and Pointsman, at St. Veronica's, discuss the case of Tyrone Slothrop (who--and this is important to them--was as an infant a patient or subject of Laszlo Jamf). Pointsman envies Spectro; he lusts for human subjects. He does not want dogs any more, not even the octopus, Grigori, but "one, little, Fox!" (i.e., Slothrop.)

8. Now we are inside St. Veronica’s, just outside the “war-neurosis” ward. Pointsman is talking with Dr. Spectro, who is conducting experiments on “Foxes,” which is what he calls human beings. Mention of a senile “Pudding” (i.e. Brigadier Pudding, who will figure in to the story later, in truly disgusting fashion). Pointsman seems to envy Spectro’s operation, and his access to human subjects. Pointsman has his eye on one very special human subject: Tryone Slothrop.

We learn that Slothrop was a childhood patient of one Dr. Laszlo Jamf. Slothrop, whose erections seem to predict the precise location Vrocket falls, seems to scuttle the Pavlovian relationship of stimulus and response. But Pointsman doesn’t think so. Slothrop’s hard-ons are still reacting to something. (I.e. something other than the prerequisites for basic male sexual arousal.) Pointsman talks of Pavlov’s dogs, who would begin reacting the instant they were brought into the laboratory, as if they could sense the whole string of causes and effects, stimuli and responses, way in advance. Maybe something similar is up with Slothrop. If the V-2 rocket—whose scream is heard only after the silent blast—seems to reverse a causal relationship, then why couldn’t that inversion run all the way back? Maybe the variables are many and dense. “Suppose we considered the war itself a laboratory?” (Note that this is self-evidently true, historically: from the demented Nazi experiments on prisoners of war, to the development of rocket engines, atomic energy, etc., WWII was not only a conflict of nations and ideologies, but a proofing ground for a whole new world. The say that Guernica was a dry-run for the Luftwaffe, whose deadliness would be exhibited full-on in WWII. Maybe the whole war itself was a kind of Global Guernica, a preview of coming attractions.) Pavlovian Pointsman is practically slobbering over Slothrop, and his implications. Alas, he must settle for more dogs. And for a “gigantic, horror-movie devilfish.” This is the octopus called Grigori. He, too, will figure later, in a big way.

[9], 53-60. While Roger sleeps, Jessica gazes out the window of the stay-away zone house. We learn of Roger's map of London, dividing the city into squares, each one marked for number of rocket impacts. The frequency of such impacts obeys (as Roger has predicted) the Poisson distribution. Some oppositions emerge: science vs. love, war vs. love.

9. Back with Roger and Jessica. They are asleep in their house in the stay-away zone. Or Roger is, anyway. Jessica is awake, following nightmares. She is stroking her plush panda bear. She gets up to smoke a cigarette, and move among the remnants of a romantic scene (a post-romantic scene?) of cushy pillows arranged by the fireplace, and clothes strewn about, telltale. Jessica floats out of herself “to watch herself watching the night.” She feels safe here. And almost naive. The War—that “great struggle of good and evil the wireless reports every day”—is nowhere to be found.

Roger wakes up. Jessica wants to get somewhere safer; somewhere further away. He tells her that, statistically, there is no such place. The rocket falls in and about London are following a Poisson distribution, which predicts the occurrence of independent events. (Roger does not know about Slothrop, or his identical map of sexual conquests.) Roger is a character opposed to Pointsman, “the anti-Pointsman.” The Pavlovian, who “imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements,” can only deal in binary states, in 0s and 1. Roger, the statistician, deals in the data between the zero and the one. Roger is frustrated by everyone around him, who thinks he’s doing black magic, or possessive of some form of precognition. “It’s just an equation.” He struggles against Jessica, against Pontsman, against Prentice, the Calvinist who holds that the V-2s are meting out some form of heavenly punishment. Jessica can’t remember a time before the war. And Roger can’t either. All he remembers is that it was silly, damned silly. The War, for Roger, has a way of clarifying things, of reducing the whole of life to numbers and data and distributions. Not too far away, a rocket falls, “the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed.” Death is closing in.

[10], 60-71. Slothrop, without being told why, has been transferred from ACHTUNG to St. Veronica's, for observation. He fantasizes on various permutations and combinations of the sentence, "You never did the Kenosha Kid." Stimulated by an injection of Sodium Amytal, and asked by a PISCES interrogator about "the Negroes, in Roxbury," he fantasizes about throwing up in the men's room of the Roseland Ballroom (sounds of "Cherokee" coming up from downstairs, watched by a shoeshine boy called "Red" [Malcom Little, later Malcolm X]). The harmonica (later, a kind of Slothrop signature) falls from his shirt pocket into the toilet; he follows it--"getting into some, oh really weird shit." Segue to the adventures of the singular hero, Crouchfield (or Crutchfield), and his decreasingly singular accessories (including an Afro-Scandinavian "Pard"--cf., later, Blicero and Enzian?). Back to the Kenosha Kid.

10. OK. Here we go. When people say Pynchon is “difficult,” this is the stuff they’re probably talking about. This episode takes the form of a psychological—maybe even full-blown hallucinatory—odyssey, undertaken by Slothrop, who has been transferred to St. Veronica’s, for experimentation/observation. We begin with Slothrop working through various permutations  punctuation, grammar, etc.) on the phrase, “You never did the Kenosha Kid.” PISCES operatives are injecting Slothrop with sodium amytal, the off brand “truth serum” first synthesized and Germany, and used extensively by the U.S. military in WWII. They want to know about Slothrop’s time, pre-war in Roxbury, the vibrant black neighbourhood in Boston. And so, Slothrop’s trip through his own memories begins.

Slothrop is at the Roseland Ballroom is Roxbury. He’s very drunk, vomiting into a toilet. His harmonica—a “jive accessory” he carries everywhere, and which will, much later, come to stand-in for Slothrop himself—falls into a toilet. So? Our man follows it. It’s like that scene in the Trainspotting movie when Ewan McGregor chases a suppository into a bog. Disgusting. Full of splashing browns and yellows. Pynchon uses the word “dingleberry”—for the knotted wads of turd and pubic hair that collect in the asshole—a bunch. Probably the only National Book Award winner to ever do this? Though that’s a guess. We hear about a shoeshine boy, Red, who is presumably a young Malcolm X.

Slothrop is assailed by waves of shit and vomit. Tendrils of “shitpaper” reach out and ensure him, octopus-like.

Slothrop emerges from the toilet and shifts, on a dime, to the character or Crouchfield (a.k.a. Crutchfield), a “westwardman” striking out against the solitary landscape. Like Slothrop, Crutchfield is a prodigious fornicator, bedding men, women, animals. He is even eyeing a rattler. With Crutchfield is Whappo, his “little pard” (a.k.a. little partner, a bit of Wild West slang) of Afro-Scandinavian stock. Crutchfield is…what? A nightmare of western expansion? Of Manifest Destiny? Of the whole grand project of colonialism? An archetypal all-American cowboy with a rattlesnake dangling from his cock? Is he a vision of domination, control, and order? In Crutchfield’s imaginary, there is only one of every type of thing: “One pure Indian. One mestiza. One criolla…” Slothrop slinks around inside this weirdo western fantasy. He emerges from it. It’s Christmastime. “The snow in this slum darkness has the appearance of soot in negative.” What is going on? Easily the most confounding and challenging section of the book. So far, anyway.

[11], 71-72. A pornographic fantasy-picture of Scorpia Mossmoon (How did They know?) produces from Pirate the semen necessary to expose the "kryptosam" message sent over in the rocket. The message: bring out operative (later identified for us as Katje Borgesius [a Dutchified contemporary Argentine writer in drag?]).

11. Whewf. Back on terra firma. Just some plain, unadorned, meat-andpotatoes writing about a guy (Pirate Prentice, back again) jacking himself off so that his semen can reveal a secret message inscribed in a V-2 rocket remnant. The catalyst here is “Kryptosam,” a chemical that changes colour in the presence of seminal fluid. (The excerpt describing Kryptosam is attributed to one Laszlo Jamf, who we know was involved in the conditioning of Poinstman’s prized fox, Tyrone Slothrop.)

Prentice, in the throes of self-pleasure, submits to some paranoia. The drawing he is provided, for…uh…stimulation…perfectly resembles former mistress Scorpia Mossmoon, arranged in a den of cozy pillows, an image plucked straight out of Prentice’s old, pre-war daydreams. How could “They” know about this fantasy, safely locked away in his conscious mind? Is it just the lucky combination of ivory and lace, a prefab fantasy? No matter. He’s about to bust. And he does! Saving enough spunk to rub on the rocket scrap, revealing its secret message: he is to retrieve an operative, presumably undercover. The passage opens up (at least) one larger curiosity. Why is Prentice, ostensibly an Allied combatant, decoding messages hurled towards him via Nazi rockets? And who are They?

[12], 72-83. The White Visitation: mental hospital converted to ostensibly military purposes. Story of the suicide of patient, Reg le Froyd ("Bert is fine," p. 73--cf. Katje, p. 106). Operation Black Wing; its purpose: to exacerbate (by radio transmissions) German racial fears of African Hereros (hence research into Slothrop's racial fears). Create fiction of "Schwarzkommando" operating in Germany (Black Power Gonna Get Your Mutti?). Old Brigadier Ernest [Hemingway?] Pudding--World War I veteran, Pointsman's boss. His curious "briefings" (cf. Mrs. Quoad's candy "surprises" in [15], below)?

12. At "The White Visitation" now. The place is creepy. Antiseptic-like. Covered in ice. We learn of Reg Le Froyd, a former inmate (back when the place was a mental hospital), who broke loose, bolted through the town, and dashed, madly, to the edge of a cliff. The local constabulary urged him not to jump. He stood there, on the precipice, tuning his ear to “The Lord of the Sea,” who he names “Bert.” He leaps. The event is known because it was one of the only local goings-on involving “The White Visitation,” whose secrecy now seem more assured.

About those operations: after the fall of Paris, a giant radio tower was installed at that cliff, overlooking the sea, “antennas aimed at the Continent.” Were the antennas broadcasting the ravings of the mad inmates, in an attempt to throw the Nazis off? Unsure! When America entered WWII, they also entered the building. And brought lots of dough with them. This led to the current scheme, called Operation Black Wing, devised by none other than General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself. The idea is to seed (mis?)information about an uprising of native Hereros, former German colonial subjects in German South West Africa (now, roughly, Nambia). Slothrop plays a role here, too. His fantasies and fears of black Americans (cf: the Roseland reverie, above) are used “to help illuminate racial problems in his own country.”

We also learn more about Brigadier Ernest Pudding (Pointsman’s superior), who is 80, a Passchendaele veteran, and altogether a creature of an Old World, and Old Wars. He yearns for the muddy days of Flanders; of the reek of death commingled with human shit (he may well feel his wish fulfilled, in a bit). As he sees it, "The White Visitation" is little more than a gaggle of outcasts scamming funding for their pet schemes, under auspices of wartime intelligence. And it’s hard to argue. The chapter opens with mention of a scrawl of German graffiti, common across battlefields in the Reich. “What have you done for the front lately? What have you done for Germany today?” The Axis messaging is clear: all energies marshalled towards Fuhrer, and Motherland. Here at "The White Visitation", the agenda seems way muddier. How can any of this stuff—the racial uprisings, the dogs, the lunatic transmissions, Mexico’s statistical charts, Slothrop’s narcotic fantasies—be operating in concert? Maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the plan is organize a kind of disharmony, to generate entropy within the system. (Entropy, i.e. the gradual decline into disorder, is one of Pynchon’s great themes, and one which is will resurface throughout Gravity’s Rainbow.)

[13], 83-92. What is known about Laszlo Jamf's experiments (during his year at Harvard) on "Infant Tyrone." Response: erection. Stimulus? And was his reflex deconditioned, perhaps, beyond zero? The mystery of Slothrop's map, which has stars (and dates) to record where he has "scored" in London. It is identical with Roger Mexico's map of rocket impacts. Moreover, Slothrop's "scores" always precede (by two to ten days) the arrival of the rocket at the same location. Jessica: "What about the girls?" Pointsman (Pavlov, cause and effect) vs. Mexico (Janet, statistician, "anarchist"). Pointsman-Pavlov-Mefistofeles, nevertheless, to Mexico-Janet-Faust: "We both have Slothrop."

13. The chapter opens with Pointsman and Pudding in dialogue. The older gent thinks it’s “shabby” to meddle with the mind of another man (the man in question being, presumably, Slothrop). Pointsman thinks otherwise. Such experiments have long been carried out at decidedly un-shabby institutions like the U.S. Army, and even Harvard. Flashback to 1920, where Dr. Laszlo Jamf is conducting experiments on the “Infant Tyrone.” Specifically, Jamf is studying infant erections. It’s a basic stimulus/response arrangement: in the presence of x, the Infant Tyrone gets an erection. (What, in this case, was x?) This conditioned reflex was eventually deprogrammed. But deprogrammed in a way the proceeded “beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero.” (Cf. the title of this quarter of GR, “Beyond The Zero.”) This is Pointsman quoting Pavlov, pretty much directly. What does “beyond the zero” mean? How can one de-condition a response beyond its nonexistence?

In any event, we learn a bit more about Slothrop. He was “discovered” in 1944 by “The White Visitation” crew, some of whom knew he was the Infant Tyrone of Jamf’s experiments. Debate about what, exactly, his powers are, and if they’re powers at all. Level-headed Mexico thinks the whole hard-on/bomb site correlations is just a statistical freak accident. Some say precognition: that he can foresee the rockets falling. Maybe it’s telepathy? Maybe he can tap into the minds of some German with access to the planned attacks. Edmund Treacle (a Freudian) believes it’s more like psychokinesis: he is using his mind (and penis) to cause the rockets to fall, probably subconsciously. (Treacle’s particular theory gets into grad school verbiage about obviating the Other; and how Slothrop is marking his conquests with gold stars, like a proud schoolchild…it’s clear Pynchon is mocking him, and a whole mode of psychological—and literary—analysis.) All they know is that Slothrop’s hard-on preceded the location of V-2 bombing sites, 100% of the time. For “The White Visitation," it’s not just about predicting enemy attacks (they seem to barely care about the War, as such). It’s about proving “the stone determinacy of everything, every soul.” There is a sequence, even if it’s reversed. It’s like unlocking some Laplacean equation for the whole mess of the universe. “You can see how important a discovery like that would be.” Amid all the confab about Slothrop’s hard-ons, and his sexual exploits, Jessica Swanlake is the only one to interject with anything like empathy, asking, “What about the girls?”

[14], 92-113. Katje Borgesius (the operative brought out by Pirate), alone with Osbie Feel and observing camera at Pirate's. He's cooking dope. Seeing him open the oven she recalls her assignment in Holland: with Captain Blicero (formerly, e.g., in Pynchon's V., Lt. Weissman) and Gottfried, at rocket-launching area. Their Hansel and Gretel game (cf. [21], below). Blicero's death-wish (the Oven)--his (switch in point of view) memories of Südwest Africa, the Herero boy he named "Enzian." Another switch (102) to Gottfried's point of view: he watches Katje's escape. Back to Katje (104): "The true war is a celebration of markets." Back to "present" (106), via reprise of Reg le Froyd (cf. 73), then Pirate's point of view. Story of Frans van der Groov (Katje's ancestor) and the killing of Dodoes in Mauritius in the 17th century. Pirate and Osbie alone (Katje has gone to the White Visitation, her version of "Bert"?). Schwarzkommando propaganda film, made by famous German director, Gerhardt von Göll. After showings, projector is taken downstairs (at "White Visitation") so that octopus, Grigori, can be shown film of Katje at Pirate's --whose filming opened this section (cf. first and last sentences, pp. 92 and 113).

14. Another monster chapter, in both form and content. Sorry if the summary runs longer. But there’s just an awful lot going down here. We are introduced to Katje Borgesius, the Dutch undercover agent whose extraction is ordered by the rocket message in 1.11. She sits at a table with Osbie Feel, who is filming her, while he is also drying out (presumably psychoactive) mushrooms in an oven, and rolling them into cigarettes. Pynchon drops an “n-word,” in the description of Katje’s cocoa-coloured dress: another nod, maybe, at how completely the “European” experience has been structured around the colonial project. Anyway. The sight of the oven sends Katje flashing back, to her recent experiences undercover on the German-side, serving as subservient (basically imprisoned) sex slave to Captain Blicero, a super-sadistic Nazi rocket scientist, and the novel’s ostensible antagonist.

The section is tricky in part because of the shifting point-of-view. We are watching Katje, then we are inside Katje’s memories, then the perspective is ceded to Blicero, then to Gottfried (another of Blicero’s captives, who is forced with Katje into some perverted Hansel & Gretel, bother/sister-play), and then, finally, back to Katje. Skim sentences, glide over one of these gear-shifts, and the storytelling descends into anarchy. As to what’s happening: the section deals primarily (and extensively) with the character of Blicero, and his particular madness. He whips and beats his captives. He wears a rubber vagina, lined with blades, and forces them to kiss it, carving up their lips and tongues. Yet even his deviancy has an ordering effect. Genders are switched around, but the binary concept of gender is still restored. He calls their lair— located at the site of rocket manufacture and launch—their “Little State.” The Hansel & Gretel game (with an oven looming in the background, an obvious portent of the concentration camps) recertifying the imaginative authority of the hand-me-down tales of the Brothers Grimm. We learn of Blicero’s time in Africa, among the Herero people. And we learn of Blicero’s Herero lover, Enzian, who is an anti- Blicero: mixed-race, non-European, a merging of opposites and affront to Blicero’s “bookish symmetries.”

In his cartoonish evil, Blicero stands not so much opposed to "The White Visitation" gang, but alongside them. The difference is that Blicero’s Little State is an authoritarian project, designed from the topdown. Over in London, the process is a bit more contested (i.e. democratic). But the aims are more-or-less the same. Like Pointsman, or Mexico, Blicero places his faith in order at all costs. Katje and Gottfried, too, can feel like stand-ins. Gottfried believes he can endure the torture: that the Allies will, in due time, sweep in and liberate him. Katje isn’t so optimistic. Such a hope is just another pleasing fairy tale. And so, she escapes.

We also get one of the classic, thesis-statement passages in the book, which I will excerpt at length (this is from Katje’s POV, by the way): “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 mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded in History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”

Comrade Tom! So…we learn about Katje’s ancestor, Frans van der Groov, who murdered a bunch of dodoes. We return to the present, to Katje and Osbie. Then Katje is off to "The White Visitation". They’re making propaganda films of the Herero insurrectionaries—whose connection to Blicero is now clear, viz-a-viz the flashback to him and Enzian. Another film is shown to Griogri, the octopus: a film of Katje that is being shot at the chapter’s opening. All done. What a rush. I feel like more happens in these twenty pages (narratively, themes-wise) than goes on most whole novels.

[15], 114-120. Slothrop, again not knowing why, has been returned from "White Visitation" to ACHTUNG and London. Disappointed, he also feels that he's being followed (he is, by Pointsman's operatives). He visits Darlene and Mrs. Quoad: "the Disgusting English Candy Drill" (cf. Pudding's "briefings," above). Sex is followed (and revived) by explosion of rocket: "the rocket's rush comes swelling."

15. Slothrop on the prowl in London, recently freed from the “The White Visitation” (a.k.a. “the nut ward”). He has a hunch that he’s being tracked. The ACHTUNG offices seem somehow rigged. Several of his casual sex partners seem to bail on their scheduled rendezvouses. One of his innumerable dates isn’t so shy: a nurse called Darlene. She runs into our man Slothrop in the slushy street, and the two retire to the home of Mrs. Quoad, an ailing landlady and (in her own words) “outright witch,” who has once plied Slothrop with a cup of wormwood tea.

A comic scene ensues. “The Disgusting English Candy Drill.” Slothrop, playing the polite American, sits for herbal tea and some prewar vintage “wine jellies.” The tea is bitter, and he chases it with the candies, which taste of mayonnaise and orange peels. He washes the last out with the tea, which is a mistake. And on it goes, as Slothrop forages through candy jars (one of which is filled with candied replicas of various wartime munitions), attempting to cleanse his palette with ever more odd and disgusting confections. “His tongue’s a hopeless holocaust.” Is it simply that the saccharine promises of the War have gone sour? Slothrop and Darlene go to bed, and do their thing. Slothrop finds himself “hunting across the zero between waking and sleep.” Rockets fall around them. Someone is watching.

[16], 120-136. Roger and Jessica. His jealousy of her fiancé, Jeremy (Beaver). The day she took her blouse off, on a dare, in the car. Jessica thinks about life with Roger: "Isn't it safer with Jeremy?" Jessica and Roger stop at church, for Advent Evensong. Great passage on the War and Christmas (now fast approaching), on the rocket as "Christmas star," on "our stories, all false, about who we are," on "the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark . . . the way home."

16. We rejoin Roger and Jessica, in flagrante delicto, in a memory of their first sexual tryst. Roger sleepwalks through life at "The White Visitation", a rationalist surrounded on all sides by “Freaks! Freeeeaks!”  The vibes are getting to Roger, who starts to feel paranoid himself. He considers a transfer behind enemy lines. But what of Jessica? “His life had been tied to the past. He’d seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history—a known past, a projectile future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave.” As an aside: I don’t think Pynchon is famous for writing lovey-dovey stuff. But I find the Roger/Jessica stuff pretty tender.

Christmastime approaches. Roger and Jessica comes across a church somewhere in Kent. Inside, the choir is military men, epaulettes outlined under white church robes. A Jamaican corporal takes the lead, singing in Latin, then German, and in an Anglican church, no less. This image sparks off a lengthy, surrealistic reflection. A great, lengthy meditation on The War, and these outcomes. “The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together.” What Roger and Jessica are witnessing in this Advent mass is something like a “folk consciousness,” a commingling of seeming contradictions. It is distinguished from the machinery of the War, which prizes “not oneness, but a complexity.” Full Pynchon Mode. This is the stuff we love him for: a single, weird image (a Jamaican- English tenor singing in a dead language, and the language of the Enemy) that catalyzes this almost nuclear explosion of protean thought, and text. Pynchon reaches out to the reader, “Come then, leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion.” Savour these flickers of faith. The book—and this passage specifically—are chance encounters, like the one the two lovers are enjoying. Life is “the path you must create by yourself, alone in the dark,” and moments like these are lamplights along the way.

[17], 136-144. Pointsman (as "you"--i.e., as if we needed it now, a second-person singular narrative) dreams of "home." Wakes to "the news about poor Spectro," killed at St. Veronica's by rocket (brought in by Slothrop's visit to Darlene, nearby, two days before the fatal impact?). With Spectro's death only Pointsman and Thomas Gwenhidwy, of the original seven owners of The Book, now survive. Pointsman meditates on various "irreversible processes," then masturbates to fantasies about getting Nobel Prize ("Stockholm"), confronting ultimate dog-prey/ minotaur. Slothrop--who, Pointsman reflects, should be on the Riviera by now--is his new "Minotaur" (the subject, or "Fox," who may at last earn him the Prize).

17. Perspective shifts now to second-person, air-dropping us into the story. “Your own form immobile, mouth-breathing, alone face-up on the narrow cot next to the wall so pictureless, chartless, mapless: so habitually blank…” It’s not just any old you, or us. It seems to be Pointsman himself, addressed by the novel head-on (all the mention of scribbled charts tracking Time / Stimulus / Secretion is a giveaway). Pointsman—i.e. you—is/are alerted to the death of Kevin Spectro, felled by a rocket. Spectro’s death makes Pointsman (along with Thomas Gwenhidway) the two remaining owners of the mysterious Book. He mulls his own odds, and how in a pervasive climate of death, we are content to call death-by-rocket-fall “chance.” He survives, while others around him are “snatched away into Death.” In the process, Pointsman feels parts of his brain darkening.

Pointsman, despairing, thinks of throwing it all away. He begins selfloathing. Why don’t women like him? He knows why. He’s creepy. One day he’ll show them all. He gets hard, and masturbates at the thought of being shipped to Stockholm to receive a Nobel Prize for his research, where women now turn to him as he passes. His win is a win for all his dead colleagues; for those collaborators who have been snatched. He dreams of a Minotaur; a half-human, half-dog hybrid. These are opposites being brought together. He recalls Spectro, who once asked: “When you’ve looked at how it really is…how can we, any of us, be separate?” (Maybe explains the second-person/third-person perspective shift that opens the chapter? I.e. a collapse, or conjoining, of You/I/He into some whole?) Then he thinks of Slothrop, who “ought to be on the Riviera by now, warm, fed, well-fucked.” He is the new beast who Pointsman stalks through the maze. Slothrop is “physiologically, historically, a monster;” the thought of him, after the war, shambling through “the world of men” fills Pointsman with ton of dread. Spectro, it is revealed, was killed by a rocket that landed right where Slothrop, days earlier, had been to bed with Darlene. Now, for Pointsman (as they say in action movies) it’s personal.

[18], 145-154. Flashback (her point of view) to Nora Dodson-Truck's discovery that Carroll Eventyr is a medium (cf. [5], above; but also NB.: "Lewis Carroll" was the pen name of the mathematician and undressed-child photographer, Charles L. Dodgson. Is this information help, or only further harm? Do you think the lost "g" is important?) Eventyr's control on the Other Side is (remember?) Peter Sachsa. We learn about other "White Visitation" freaks, including Gavin Trefoil who, by metabolizing tyrosene and thereby producing melanin (cf. "kryptosam," p. 71), can alter his skin color (cf. the Afro-Scandinavian of Slothrop's "Crouchfield" fantasy? or Enzian?). There is a brief conversation (apparently) between veteran and neophyte skin pigments. We learn of Nora's assertion of the "Zero." Of the "Angel" seen over Germany by Basher St. Blaise. Peter Sachsa (the control), recalls (or at least the transcripts of Eventyr's sessions, which Eventyr cannot remember, report that he recalls) his life before death--including "Lt. Weissmann" (Blicero) and his "Herero aide" (his lover, his "Pard": Enzian). Peter's love for Leni Pökler, wife of chemical engineer. (All this transpired before 1930, when Peter was killed by a blow to the head from a policeman during a political demonstration.)

18. There have, so far, been discussions around ideas of race, skin colour, etc., which now coalesce (to the extent that much can be said to coalesce or solidly crystallize in this book, yadda yadda yadda…). We return to some of the characters from the seance in 1.5. A flashback to the first out-of-body experience of the medium Carroll Eventyr, and learn more about "The White Visitation", where Eventyr was apparently under examination, for his ability serve as “an interface between worlds,” or conduit between the living and the dead. There’s more about the different “freaks” collected there, each of whom seems attuned, in their own differently freakish way, to “[t]urbulences in the aether, uncertainties out in the winds of karma.” One such freak is 17 year-old Gavin Trefoil, whose own mutant ability (autochromatism) ties back to that race/skin stuff. Basically, he can his skin color, from his natural albino white to “very deep, purplish black.” Trefoil has served useful in filming the Schwarzkommando propaganda films, designed to terrify the Nazis (and Captain Blicero specifically) with the threat of an African uprising. This shifting between skin pigments (and, maybe somewhat “problematically,” races) also evokes the Afro- Scandinavian “lil pard” of Slothrop’s fantasy in 1.10, as well as the character of Enzian, Blicero’s Herero love-slave, from 1.14.

We meet Eventyr’s lover, Nora Dodson-Truck, and learn of her “ideology of the Zero.” What is the Zero? Death? A place beyond it? A kind of ontological nothingness. The callous Nora (“Nora-soheartless”) seems to be absorbing it, or something from it, drawing “a little more of the Zero into herself.” What’s clear (as mud) is that “The White Visitation” seems a) generically preoccupied with measuring and weighing the supernatural and b) is specifically preoccupied with the space beyond death, and blurring the boundaries between the living and the dead, to inspect “both sides of the wallop death with the same scientific approach.” The Hereros, we learn, see the dead as still existing alongside the living. The living and the dead form “a single subculture, a psychical community.” In both sections of the chapter— the stuff about Trefoil’s “autochromatism” and the stuff about the Zero and psychical community of living and dead—we again see barriers or walls (between races, between states of existence, etc.) dissolved, but only so that dissolution can be reclaimed (or reified as György Lukács would say…I promise not to do too much “theory”!!) within an existing system of power, authority, and domination. Is my reading of this too basic?

[19], 154-167. Leni's difficult (and possibly anachronistic) growth into feminism. Her fantasy of love vs. radical politics ("AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN")--and also vs. her husband, Franz ("You're the cause-andeffect man"). Franz--once a student, incidentally, of Laszlo Jamf--meets Kurt Mondaugen (a school chum and a character in the Südwest Africa episode in Pynchon's V., also involving Weissmann [Blicero]) who guides him to a job in rocket development. Leni leaves Franz (taking their daughter, Ilse) for Peter Sachsa, who--when she arrives-is conducting a séance (he, too, being a medium) to contact the spirit of Walter Rathenau. His message (166-67): "All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic."

19. We learn more about Leni Pökler, introduced above as the lover of Peter Sachsa (who, you’ll recall, maybe, is the “control” for clairvoyant Caroll Eventyr, and who transcribed his communiques with the other side). She leaves her husband, a rocket engineer called Franz, to be with Sascha. Franz is another “cause-and-effect man” who is “swimming in his seas of fantasy, death-wish, rocket-mysticism”—an ideal figure, easily absorbed within the ideology of Nazism, the gadgetry of the War, the system. He is also, as it so happens, a former student of Laszlo Jamf.

Pökler, meanwhile, is a communist sympathizer in Germany (in the 1930s I think?), who recalls graffiti popping up in the “Red districts”: AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. No simple “hope” shit here. No “love trumps hate” inanities. Love itself can be absorbed. (Isherwood, Cabaret, etc. are good texts about how the Nazis heightened the expression of a certain strain of exaggerative Weimar eroticism.) But the graffiti is not an admission of defeatism, either. It is another iteration of “folk-consciousness,” designed to be argued and thought through. Not a simple sentiment but a text. Leni Pökler is herself involved in a lefty, sometimes-nudist set, who debates this messaging, and the tactics of opposition. She leaves cause-and-effect Franz for the mystic Sascha, who is communing with the spirit of foreign Jewish- German minister Walter Rathenau, who was assassinated by anti- Semitic terrorists during the Weimar Era. Pynchon here describes history, neatly, as “at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud.” Rathenau, who was elevated to the status of prodemocratic martyr in Germany, offers an admonition, to any who may listen: “All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic.” He warns that Death itself is “[p]erfecting its reign.” Spooky!

(N.B.: Some characters from Pynchon’s first novel, V., show up in this chapter: Kurt Mondaugen, for example. Blicero, as Lt. Weissmann, is also in V. I’m not sure what to make of this, beyond Pynchon’s tendency weave characters throughout his grand cosmos—the Cherrycokes, Pig Bodine, etc.—so I’ll just leave it be, for now, as it has been about 15 years since I first read have not read V…But! Cool that characters from V. appear in a novel about the V-2 rockets. V-2 would have been an OK name for Gravity’s Rainbow, come to think of it. But Gravity’s Rainbow is good, too.)

[20], 167-174. The PISCES Christmas party. Pointsman and Maude Chilkes in the closet. Pointsman and Gwenhidwy go to the latter's flat. Gwenhidwy to Pointsman (on what we will learn to call the "preterite"): "How they persist." East London as the "City Paranoiac": Gwenhidwy imagines (or perceives?) that the poor and outcast have been placed here to absorb the brunt of rocket attacks from the Southeast.

20. Jet back from Germany to London, present-tense (of the novel’s main action anyway, i.e. wintertime, 1944). It’s the PISCES Xmas bash. Pointsman remembers his dead colleagues/collaborators, whose souls light up the Christmas tree. He thinks of his own present: Slothrop. In Slothrop’s brain, the work of Spectro, of Jamf, even of Pavlov all persist. He’s a walking, horny remnant of “Psychology’s own childhood.” Pointsman is a bit obsessed! No doubt “moved” (again) by these obsessive thoughts, he gets a hard-on, which is attended to in a utility closet, by Maudie Chilkes, a PISCES secretary. It’s a bit of comedy: all these big-brained weirdoes getting hammered and sucked off, like anyone else at a rowdy holiday party.

Pointsman and Gwenhidwy retire to the latter’s apartment, to get hiccupy drunk and talk shop. Gwenhidwy offers his theory of the City Paranoiac, of London itself as “an intelligent creature.” He believes the downtrodden have been nested in the East End so that they may be weeded out by the rocket barrages, which target that burghs “where all the bugs live.” These victims are part of what Pynchon would call the “preterite.” Basically, these are the people who are passed over, or forgotten; those who are moved like pawns by the larger systems we have seen taking shape so far. Slothrop is an obvious example of such a character: a total dope and stooge, whose whole existence can seem like some vector through which other sinister forces move, whose sole commodity is his horniness, which is itself of tremendous interest to those, like Pointsman, seeking to exert authority over him. If, indeed, AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN, then one roving American Lothario should be no problem whatsoever. Right? We end returning to the second-person/Pointsman POV, from Chapter 17. Why are we, the reader, Pointsman? Is the attempt to conquer/control/wield master over this text comparable to his Slothropian obsession? It may be, in my particular case, as someone attempting to wrangle the book into shape via this here guide. But again, I am probably being too simple, even dopey.

[21], 174-177. Roger and Jessica have taken her nieces (whose father has been lost to the War) to a pantomime of Hansel and Gretel, interrupted by a rocket impact (cf. ending of Gravity's Rainbow?). Penelope (one of the nieces, whose name should recall Homer's Odyssey) thinks bitterly of fathers "leaving their children alone in the forest." Roger is more and more afraid of losing Jessica, and love, to the War or to Jeremy/Beaver who "is the War." "Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me."

21. Jessica and Roger, on Christmas, taking Jessica’s sister’s kids to a pantomime performance of Hansel and Gretel (cf: Katje and Gottfried’s brother-sister games in 1.14). The play is interrupted by a bomb dropping just down the street. Gretel stops to sing directly to the audience. Shades of those stories of Brits carolling in tube stations during the London bombings. She leads the audience in a ditty, “Now sing along.” (Potential spoiler: compare this to the last line of the book!)

Roger is all a tizzy. He’s swept up in the panto, unselfconscious. But he knows it will end. He knows he will lose Jessica. He knows that his reprieve from the war—“She is the deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true”—will return to her hubbo, Jeremy Beaver, who, to Roger, is the War. Roger is damned. “You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.” There’s something in my eye.

[1], 181-189. Dawn: Slothrop awakens in his room at Riviera casino (cf. Pirate's awakening at dawn in London, which began part 1?). Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and his "friend" Teddy Bloat (who photographed Slothrop's map, remember?) share a room down the hall. From the balcony they pick up three girls, then head off for a sea-side breakfast picnic (cf. part 1's banana breakfast? or the "White Visitation" sea-side party that ends Part 2?). Slothrop sees, in water, another girl (Katje, placed here by Pointsman) who is attacked by an octopus (Grigori, ditto, trained by watching films) (cf. this intrusion to the rocket Pirate sees from his roof? After all, it was bearing a message from the same Katje.) Slothrop rescues her, using crab which Bloat just "happens" to have along. Slothrop's mounting suspicion of manipulation: his "Puritan reflex . . . paranoia."

1. Ah, a respite. Recall Pointsman in 1.17, thinking that Slothrop “ought to be on the Riviera by now.” Indeed, we find Slothrop in France, on the Riviera. He’s laid out at a casino-resort, accompanied by the Englishmen Teddy Bloat and Tantivy Mucker-Maffick. The resort bears the name of Hitler’s right-hand-man. The day is bright and beautiful, in contrast to London at Christmastime. Slothrop believes he’s on some sort of indeterminate furlough: a bit of R&R, and a chance for the dextrous wooer-of-ladies to help his more hapless chums score. There is, naturellement, more afoot.

Out on the beach, a bathing beauty makes eyes at Slothrop. Bloat and Mucker-Maffick nudge his ribs, like that one Monty Python skit about pale, hopelessly English horniness: “She’s a goer! Oooh! Ooooh!” In an instant, she’s assailed by an enormous octopus—a “gigantic, horrormovie devilfish,” even? i.e. Grigori, from 1.8!—and Slothrop bounds into action. Armed with a wine bottle, he runs at the slithering beast. He rescues the distressed damsel, and notices her accent. Not German, no. Dutch. Her bracelet reads KATJE BORGESIUS, the very same Dutch double-agent from 1.14. Slothrop’s moment of heroism is short-lived. Paranoia creeps in pretty much ASAP: “voices begin to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clasp, and the light, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate…Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart.” Borgesius —either a bad spy or sympathetic to Slothrop’s role as some weird pawn—all-but confirms his suspicions. She calls him “Little Tyrone,” a reference to his previous life as medical-experimental miracle child discussed in 1.13. She squeezes her saviour’s arm and whispers: “Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet….” Respite over. Such a silly scene that ties together so much from the book’s first section: from Pirate Prentice’s 1950s B-movie dream of the Giant Adenoid (1.2) to Pointsman’s experiments with Grigori (1.8) the redeployment of the Dutch secret agent Borgesius (1.14). The pieces are moving. But why? And to what conceivable end?

[2], 189-205. His mission accomplished, Dr. Porkyevitch departs in boat, with his faithful octopus. Slothrop agrees to a midnight date with Katje, then confronts Tantivy with his suspicions of Bloat. He has his assignation with Katje, followed by a pillow and seltzer-bottle fight, then more sex. Morning: she lies "S'd against the S of himself." (198) Hearing his clothes being stolen he chases the thief and, after various adventures, finds his own room empty (even of identity cards). Tantivy, too, is gone. Paranoia is on the rise: "'Fuck you,' whispers Slothrop," to Them. He imagines the 1630 Puritan Migration as a film now run backwards. (204) Searching for Tantivy, he can only find Katje: "It's the only place I knew to come." (205)

2. Confirmation (if we needed it) that the octopus was indeed Griogri the devil-fish, ferried to the French Riviera in “a special enclosure” by Dr. Porkyevitch, a Soviet defector, who works with (for?) Pointsman, but still dreams of Russia. Back inside the casino, Slothrop, Tantivy, et al. are partying under chandeliers. Slothrop wears a tasteless handpainted necktie. (Such ties, if memory serves, also appear in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.) Slothrop goes full CAD MODE, marshalling a portion—or, perhaps, the whole—of his charm to seduce Katje, attitude in an emerald tiara and a sea-green velvet gown. Meanwhile, Slothrop confronts Tantviy, his “British ally” and ostensible friend, about the whole Grigori show. (Never noticed this before, by Slothrop has a bit of a stammer, like Porky Pig…also: Porkyevitch? Eh?! Probably nothing…) Tantivy waves away the idea that it was all staged; another case of “Slothropian paranoia.” But Tantivy seems to be catching it, too. He thinks something’s up with Teddy Bloat, who has been acting strangely for the past little while.

At midnight, Slothrop sidles up to Katje’s room. He attempts to woo her with a song. He may think she’s a plant, but he’s still giving her the fullcourt press. “Knowing what is expected of her, she waits with a vapid look till he’s done.” They sleep together. Or rather, she “take[s] his erection into her stretched fork, into a single vibration on which the night is tuning.” They fall asleep. Slothrop snores, and his belted in the head with a pillow. Stimulus and response. He is described, in that liminal state between sleep and wakefulness, as “Slothropless,” as if he has not yet materialized; like a Polaroid still developing. He snaps awake, to find a thief has made off with his clothes. He attempts to give chase: down an empty hall, over a stone terrace, and finally scurrying up a tree—which has been sawn, ensuring a long tumble down. He lands at the feet of Teddy Bloat, who fits him with the uniform of a British serviceman. Slothrop’s own room has been emptied: ID, furlough papers, everything. Tantivy, too, is gone. His “tightening rectal fear”… uh…tightens. He imagines his family history playing backwards: the first Slothrops leaving England for American, and now here Tyrone is, dressed up as an Englishman. He whispers “Fuck you,” to the nameless, faceless They, whose machinations he can barely perceive. In the course of a day, Slothrop has been stripped over everything— name, rank, and serial number—left soaking and shivering in damp British army wools. He has become “Slothropless.” But not fully! Not yet!

[3], 205-226. Slothrop reading circuit-diagrams for German rockets. Sir Stephen (Dedalus?--i.e., Joyce? cf., also, their "Noras") Dodson-Truck sees in circuit-symbols evidence of organic linguistic evolution--seeing in one symbol the "sun" (as in "Oxen of the . . . "?). Slothrop detects in Sir Stephen "obvious membership in the plot"; yet he's drawn to the old man's "love for the Word." Time passes. Bloat now gone, Slothrop studies rocket manuals, which induce erections; Sir Stephen takes notes. Wanting more information, Slothrop sets up the drunken Prince of Wales game, after which, suitably drunk, Sir Stephen confesses what he knows. Shift (217) to Carroll Eventyr, to Leni Pökler and Peter Sachsa. Peter's death (220). Sir Stephen leaves. So, finally, does Katje: "they are not, after all, to be lovers in parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently, hand in hand, down to anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?" (222)

3. Slothrop is now firmly installed at the casino, wearing a British officer’s uniform, styling his moustaches. His “seductress-and-patsy” dynamic with Katje continues. There seems to be flashes of genuine romance, including a scene of piggy play (“Oink, oink, oink” squeals Slothrop). But both are aware that they are playing roles: she the spy, he the thing being…spied upon. Tantivy vanishes, and is replaced by Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, impotent cuckolded husband of Nora Dodson- Truck, Caroll Eventyr’s lover from 1.18. Sir Stephen (as he is called) is drilling Slothrop in Germanic runes, in technical German, and in all things advanced rocketry. He spends leisure time reading Plasticman comics, and messing around with Katje. Learning about the rockets gets Slothrop stiff. It’s a condition that Katje is seems willing (or is contractually obligated) to relieve. He is being, perhaps, rewired. Instead of his erections and orgasms forecasting the rockets, now the rockets give rise to his arousal. Notable that no bombs fall here. Perhaps Slothrop’s predictive penile magic only works in active war zones? Sir Stephen has, in Slothrop’s reckoning, “obvious membership in the plot.” But, a reader may wonder, for several reasons: what plot?!

This section is given over the meditations (by Slothrop, by the author) on “They,” i.e. the nameless conspirators who he (or the author) cannot name. Slothrop gets Sir Stephen totally hammered, and presses him on his role, and his overseers. Little is clarified. “They aren’t even sadists …,” Sir Stephen slurs. “There’s just no passion at all …” By means of a confession, St. Stephen sings Slothrop a song “The Penis He Thought Was His Own.” Quick interlude to London—and the netherworld—back to the clairvoyant Eventyr, Peter Sachsa, Leni Pökler, and Stephen’s wife, Nora. We learn of Peter’s death, and the worry that Eventyr may “map onto” Sachsa, his control; identities transposed and exchanged across time, across life and death. Back to the casino. St. Stephen absconds. He tells Slothrop that his erections are of tremendous interest to “Fitzmaurice House,” i.e. the Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department. But we pretty much gleaned that by now. Agent Borgesius, too, plans her escape: “they are not, after all, to be lovers in parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently, hand in hand, down to anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?” Slothrop wakes one morning and finds her gone, a cigarette butted out beside the bed. Like St. Stephen, Katje is another functionary. He role has been filled. But what role? Slothrop shrugs, and smokes the stubbed out cig… “no point wasting smokes, with a war on.”

[4], 226-236. Pointsman's poem, "spoken" by Pavlov at 83. A meeting of the Slothrop group at "The White Visitation." Pointsman, who has been meeting with Clive Mossmoon (Scorpia's husband--remember?--he's in plastics), assures them that Brigadier Pudding will continue to support the project (i.e., to expose Slothrop to the Rocket and observe his responses). All leave, save Webley Silvernail, in whose fantasy (apparently) the lab animals sing and dance to "Pavlovia (Beguine)." Afterwards Silvernail, departing, tells them of the false "freedom" of the elite--"using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level." Pudding sneaks through the terrors (arranged by Pointsman) of D wing to his assignation with Katje (as "Domina Nocturna"-this, too, arranged by Pointsman, who has plumbed the Brigadier's fantasies for something that will keep him in line). Katje indulges Pudding's "need for pain"; her shit, which he carefully swallows, recalls to him "the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient"--his horrified memories of mass death and putrefaction in World War I.

4. Back in London. Back with Pointsman. We glimpse his poetry. Then to a meeting at “The White Visitation,” where the conspirators fret lack of funding, and the whole Slothrop project falling apart. One big obstacle is the ancient Brigadier Pudding, whose misgivings about “The White Visitation,” and the general shabbiness of messing about in the minds of men were explored in 1.12 and 1.13. But Pointsman has a plan for him, too. The meeting adjourns and Webley Silvernail, the lab assistant/janitor who early helped train Girgori to attack Katje at the casino, cleans up the mess, ferreting smoke butts, Slothrop-style from the ashtrays. He imagines all the trained lab rats and mice assembling and singing a song about freedom. And then he admonishes them: “I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom but the least free of all.” As usual, the book’s clearest indictments—the things that verge on “thesis statements”—are uttered by the lowliest among the book’s cavalcade of characters.

Now to Pudding, and that disgusting scheme of Pointsman’s, which I have been teasing, probably a bit eagerly. Under cover of darkness he sneaks through the hospital, past the beds of shellshocked veterans, to convene with Domina Nocturna, a fur-caped dominatrix, meant to symbolize death itself; and a figure Pudding claims to have seen striding the fetid battlefields and muddy trenches of the Great War. (Practically speaking: Domino Nocturna is Katje Borgesius in disguise.) She has been subjecting the Brigadier to sadistic ceremonies of worship: demeaning him, whipping his wrinkled asscheeks, and so on. Tonight will be a kind of noxious culmination, a throwback to the stinking mud of the trenches. As he clamours at her boots, she fills his mouth with her piss. And then her shit (Pointsman has been feeding her laxatives). Pudding gobbles it down gamely. Previously, the sadism of the Allied side had been heady and bureaucratic, contrasting to the more openly (and cartoonishly) perverted antics of the Nazi Captain Blicero. But Katie has learned from her time under Blicero. Pudding’s guts, where the shit now stirs and bakes, is compared to Blicero’s “Oven,” from the Hansel and Gretel game discussed in 1.14. Disgusting, weirdly poignant stuff: a Great War veteran so nostalgic for the reeks of his War that he’s reduced to gobbling down literal human turds. Shit that, we’re told, abound with potentially fatal doses of E. Coli. Is this Pointsman’s plan for Pudding? To reduce him to lowly, grovelling shiteater, and then have him poisoned? Seems to be working, if so. Oh also: when he eats the first piece of shit he imagines he’s sucking off a black guy! Icky, for a few reasons. And recalls the anxiety around race we saw in 1.5, 1.18 and elsewhere. Not really sure what to do with this stuff…yet.

(N.b.: I gotta say…it’s scenes like this—more so than all the boner business, which is considerably more playful, and juvenile—that likely led the Pulitzer committee to declare the book obscene. I don’t really buy into “obscenity” as some category of evil or anything like that. But this is certainly a mite gross.)

[5], 236-244. Spring, 1945, at "The White Visitation." Cut to Slothrop and the Riviera. The first of the "Proverbs for Paranoids." (237) In Slothrop's dream or "revery," "the late Roland Feldspath" (see 1: [5], above) meditates on the reduction of "the Rocket's terrible passage . . . to bourgeois terms." Slothrop, bothered by evidence of links between Allied and German corporations, debates conspiracy as vs. "coincidence" with Hilary Bounce (of Shell Oil, although he wears a medal from I.G. Farben). Second Proverb (241). In a German parts list (one of the many he is studying, as part of Pointsman's experiment) Slothrop finds references to an insulation device, to a "Document SG-1," to "Imipolex G." Then, after getting Bounce out of the way, he uses Bounce's hotel-room teletype to get information about these things from Shell's London office. He then heads for a nonstop party, to which he's already sent Bounce, chez Raoul de la Perlimpinpin: "He'll read the information through later."

5. Open in a kind of reverie. The dream of what? The War? In a paragraph, we move across the Front. Then to “The White Visitation.” Then back to the Casino Herman Goering. Jetting from place to place, playing catch-up. “Previous on Gravity’s Rainbow…” It’s spring of 1945. The War is almost over. But nobody (nobody?) knows that yet. Slothrop has been all but abandoned, and his paranoia is ballooning. “He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others.” He can glimpse the conspiracy against him, in his own fantasies, during which he can perceive the voice of Roland Feldspath, the weapons systems expert introduced in the seance in 1.5. Slothrop’s waking consciousness is obsessing over the connections between the Axis, the Allies and the multinational Shell Oil, which, loosed from the tedium of nationhood, can play all sides. He runs the theory by a Shell Oil man, Hilary Bounce, also residing on the Riviera.

Still working through Pointsman’s program—what else is he meant to do?—Slothrop comes across a German index of rocket parts. This manifest includes reference to an insulation device made of a special plastic called Imipolex G, which was devised by none other than Laszlo Jamf, the same doctor who conducted experiments on “Little Tyrone” in his youth (see 1.8). There is also reference to a “Document SG-1,” apparently a state secret. Slothrop dispatches Bounce to a party, then uses his (that is, Bounce’s) private teletype machine to pose as Bounce and request info on all this stuff. Slothrop then heads out to join Bounce at the party, hosted by a local fireworks magnate named Raoul “Poudre” de la Perlimpinpin. Fun fact: Podre de le Perlimpinpin is, en français, roughly translated as “snake oil salesman.” Slothrop slips out to the party, “looking sharp” (that is, absurd, in a green French suit, flowered tie, wingtips and a midnight blue, snap-brim fedora).

[6], 244-249. Raoul's party--including such things as hash in the hollandaise, inducing a rush on the broccolli. Slothrop is accosted by Blodgett Waxwing (cf. the first line of John Shade's poem in V. Nabokov's Pale Fire?), a famous forger and Western movie freak wearing a white zoot suit (which Slothrop admires). Waxwing gives Slothrop an envelope to hold for safe keeping. A "plot" is revealed (247: you figure it out). Tamara (part of the "plot") arrives in a tank, fires into party. Waxwing gives Slothrop a zoot suit, keychain, and his business card, "embossed with a chess knight and an address on Rue Rossini." (The chess knight might also recall Nabokov--or, perhaps, the card of the hired gun, Palladin, played by Richard Boone in the 1950s TV Western series, Have Gun, Will Travel.)

6. Slothrop the hepcat makes the scene. A relatively short, comic interlude at mainson de la Perlimpinpin, where many of the guests are foxtrotting, stoned on hash-spiked hollandaise sauce (sounds extremely gross and stressful, but to each their own). Whether by serendipity or the machinations of the “plot,” Slothrop meets a forger named Blodgett Waxwing, He gifts Slothrop a brand new white zoot suit, a key chain, and an envelope. Slothrop finds himself watching— and being thrust into—another plot, involving an opium shipment, a bunch of money, and a Sherman tank being smuggled into Palestine. Then that same tank rolls into the party. The cannon fires. Slothrop notices he doesn’t have an erection. “This is a datum London never got, because nobody was looking.”

Embracing heroism for the first time since his beachside battle with Grigori, Slothrop rushes the tank, dispatches the driver (a woman called Tamara) and, for all intents and purposes, saves the day, in true Errol Flynn fashion. “You are the man,” he’s told, twice. Waxwing reminds him that the octopus stunt was staged. And this was real. But how does he even know that? Waxwing gives Slothrop his business card, with an address on Rue Rossini. He tells the man he’ll soon need a friend. Our hero admires his gifted zoot suit, which had belonged to an East L.A. Mexican kid named Ricky Gutiérrez, press-ganged into the U.S. Army after getting pinched into the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, and summarily injured in action. Pynchon is everywhere attentive to the flows of racial tension and subjugation, that can carry something as beginning as a garment all the way from Los Angeles to a druggy party of swindlers and smugglers in southern France.

[7], 249-269. Begins with the information on "Imipolex G" that Slothrop has gotten (via Bounce's teletype) from London. It is a plastic developed in 1939 for I.G. Farben by, of course, Laszlo Jamf. We learn "Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer at the mercy of Nature." (249: cf. Walter Rathenau, 166; also Slothrop's Plasticman comic, 206-7?) A brief history of the development of plastics, into increasingly complex molecular chains, is paralleled by a brief history of the development of interlocking "arrangements" among the corporations that manufacture them. (250-51) Slothrop fantasizes a commando raid on Duncan Sandys' office at Shell Mex House, London; at the heart of it all he finds only machines, talking to one another. Returned from fantasy (?), he finds a new clue on the parts list: "S-Gerät, 11/00000"--apparently the serial number of a special model rocket, using Imipolex G, somehow, for insulation.

Slothrop comes upon (by chance?) a copy (forged?) of the London Times, containing an obituary, by Bloat, for Tantivy, supposedly killed in heroic action. He flees to Nice (as, we learn later, he was supposed to), going to the address on Waxwing's card. During the night he is visited by various dead and/or departed. Next day, Waxwing's agents give him new papers, a new name (Ian Scuffling), and an address in Zürich. He arrives a week later, and contacts Waxwing's representative, Semyavin. He meets (in a musical "number") various "Loonies on Leave!" (259- 60) Looking for sources of information in information-specific cafés, he meets Mario Schweitar, who tells him of Jamf's death.

Schweitar offers more information for a price, but Slothrop is broke. And seeing a strange Rolls Royce in front of his hotel, Slothrop recognizes that he cannot return, that he is also homeless. Proverb #4 (262). He pawns his zoot suit and wanders. At the Odeon Cafe (which is not information-specific) he meets an Argentine anarchist, Francesco Squalidozzi, who tells of hijacking a German U-boat (with Graciela Imago Portales) to seek asylum from Peron in, yes, Germany. Why Germany? Squalidozzi on Argentine history: "We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. . . . We cannot abide that openness; it is terror to us." Slothrop counters: "Butbut . . . that's progress." Squalidozzi: "In the openness of the German zone, our hope is limitless." The Argentines need a courier, unknown to their enemies. Slothrop offers to help, for enough money to pay Schweitar for his information.

Slothrop takes a plane to Geneva (in plane encountering Richard Halliburton [266]). He exchanges messages with Squalidozzi's contact, then returns to Zürich. Squalidozzi is nowhere to be found. We learn of the Slothrop family's role in Shay's Rebellion. (268) Slothrop goes out to stay at Jamf's tomb, where he take delivery of Schweitar's information: "In the weeks ahead . . . he may even have time to wish he hadn't read any of it."

7. Another monster chapter. And particularly relevant with regards to info that may clarify the plot(s)—i.e. the plot against Slothrop, and that of the novel itself. We learn that Imipolex G is a newfangled plastic, developed for German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, by none other than Laszlo Jamf. A long meditation on plasticity and its “central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature.” The order has been reversed. We learn the Jamf discovered Imipolex G while working at a Swiss outfit that was a “spinoff” of Sandoz labs, where, we are told in parentheticals, “as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hoffman made his important discovery.” (Dr. Hoffman is Albert Hoffman, and his important discovery is lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD: that almighty hallucinogen used in clinical settings against patients both eager and otherwise, and applied more broadly to catalyze cultural revolutions of varying seriousness, which had themselves peaked and receded about the time Pynchon was composing Gravity’s Rainbow.)

Anyway. Slothrop also finds (via the Teleptype requests he filed in 2.6) a manifest with an unfamiliar serial number (S-Gerät, 11/00000) for a special rocket that uses Imipolex G. Tracking down this rocket will be his new (potentially even self-directed?) quest. He also finds a copy of the London Times, where he learns of the death, in combat, of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick; arguably the closest thing he had to a real friend. Now he has Blodgett Waxwing. And so, off to Nice. Just like that. Can it really be so easy? (Spoiler alert: no.)

He rolls into town dressed like one those cartoon werewolves in a zoot suit, “not exactly inconspicuous.” Waxwing’s agents give Slothrop a new identity (that of Ian Scuffing, an English journalist; real Graham Greene-type) and an address in Zurich. And so, off to Zurich, where he meets another Waxwing contact, a Russian called Semyavin. There’s a musical interlude, called “Loonies On Leave!,” in which mental patients (or “nuts”) cannot be distinguished from their keepers. The dead visit Slothrop in his sleep, and he ruminates again on his Puritan ancestors, “bones and hearts alert to Nothing.” He learns that Laszlo Jamf has died, and visits his crypt.

Zurich is teeming with spies and post-war profiteers, like Francesco Squalidozzi, an anarchist from Argentina, with eyes on remaking the post-war German “Zone.” Desperate for cash, Slothrop offers to serve as a courier for Squalidozzi. He ruminates on the Colonial-era Slothrops again: naturalists and Puritans who stood opposed to the encroachments of capital. But: “Later they lost, or traded away, knowledge of which side they’d been on. Tyrone has inherited most of their bland ignorance on the subject.” Slothrop pawns his zoot suit, and pays an ex-Sandoz guy called Mario Schweitar for information on Jamf. Information that, we’re told as the chapter wraps, may be prove quite troubling, at some future juncture. Aaaaaaand….scene.

[8], 269-278. May: A "White Visitation" picnic by the sea (cf. opening of part 2?). Pointsman thinks about the disappearance of Slothrop, lost by British Intelligence a month ago, in Zürich. He thinks, as well, about his major blunder: authorizing Harvey Speed and Floyd Perdoo to investigate Slothrop's sexual adventures in London, the ones recorded on the map (this operation being known, acronimically, as SEZ WHO). Unfortunately there is no evidence that any of his "scores"-- not even Darlene (though there is a "Mrs. Quoad")--actually existed. The War over, Pointsman must confront efforts to dissolve PISCES (as well as more general tendencies to dissolve the stark polarities sustained by the War). He has begun to feel "the solitude of a Führer." Back to the sea-side, we get our first allusion to the Rossini vs. Beethoven controversy--which, we're told (presumably, here, by the narrator), will later erupt in Berlin. Pointsman, facing his various dissolutions, begins to act "a bit mental"--he's hearing a Voice. We learn, as those at "The White Visitation" have recently learned, that there really is a "Schwarzkommando" operating in Germany, just as in the "fiction" created by Operation Blackwing. All this following a digression on King Kong. (Here, as with the Rocket [and Slothrop], the order of cause and effect seems to be getting reversed or confused: can fantasy produce reality?) Edwin Treacle has contended, to his consternated colleagues, "that their feelings about blackness were tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about putrefaction and death." (276) Pointsman, hallucinating, sees need to get Jessica out of the way, in order to secure control of Roger for his continuation of the War into the Post-War. "'Yang and Yin,' whispers the Voice, 'Yang and Yin. . . . '" (a Pavlovian breakdown?--a dissolution of "ideas of the opposite"?).

8. Back with Pointsman, in and around “The White Visitation.” It’s late May or early June, 1945, the occasion of the Whitsun, which is what the British call Pentecost. He’s marking the occasion with a seaside picnic, joined by Roger Mexico, Jessica Swanlake, and Katje Borgesisus, who is apparently still uh, “feeding” Bridgadier Pudding nightly. (Pudding himself as fallen extremely ill, likely a consequence of consuming so much human shit.) V-E day has come and gone. The War is over in these parts. So. What now? Pointsman admits to feeling a little “megalo” (i.e. megalomaniacal), comparing himself to the Fürher in solitude, in his last days. He is troubled. Slothrop has slipped through his fingers, having shaken off British intelligence spooks somewhere in Zurich. Pointsman puts together a budget and hires two underlings (Harvey Speed and Floyd Perdoo) to confirm Slothrop’s sexual adventures, which are many (including 1003 scores in Spain). Their operation is named the Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical Observations (SEZ WHO). They come up way short when it comes to the names of London women, from the map introduced in 1.3. No Jenny. No Sally W. No Catherine. No Darlene. Etc. (They do meet Mrs. Quoad, from the British candy test incident in 1.15.) Pointsman is confronted with another troubling possibility: that the V-2 rockets did not actually fall where Slothrop had had sex. Perhaps the wonky relationship between cause (boner) and effect (rocket) has been, by now, not only reversed, but totally obliterated? Or perhaps it was only where Slothrop imagined he’d had sex?

Elsewhere, other fantasies seem to be materializing. Reports have filtered in that an African unit, like the Schwarzkommando propaganda described in 1.14 and 1.18, are actually sweeping through Europe. Pointsman is going, by his own estimation, “a bit mental.” He is hallucinating. He’s losing control. Katje is terrified of him. More terrified than she ever was of maniacal Captain Blicero, with his prosthetic vagina wrought of leather and razor blades. Pointsman starts hearing a Voice. He’s not so different from the schizophrenics and “loonies” residing in “The White Visitation.” The voice tells him that Roger Mexico, with his sturdy and rational mind, is the key. And that Pointsman must cleave Roger from Jessica, whose love is an obstacle to Mexico’s total instrumentalization in the new plot to find and recover Tyrone Slothrop. The Voice imagines a new role for Pointsman. That of “synthesis”… “Protagonist and antagonist in one.” Everyone around Pointsman getting very edgy now. The Voice coos. “Yang and Yin.” Has Pointsman’s script been flipped? Effect preceding cause? Is he abandoning his own maniacal quest to discover a totalizing, mechanical account of all reality? Or is his quest perhaps becoming just maniacal… but in a different way?

[1], 281-295. Early morning (cf. dawn openings of parts 1 and 2?): Slothrop arrives at Nordhausen. He recalls meeting his first African (Enzian), and Major Duane Marvy. The "plot" [which will thicken, then, strangely, thin]: Schweitar's information on Imipolex G (see 2: [7], above) points to Franz Pökler (see 1: [18] and [19], above), who came to the Mittelwerke, an underground rocket factory at Nordhausen, in 1944. The Shell file on Jamf points to Lyle Bland of Boston, to Hugo Stinnes (a German financier), and to a banknote contract with the Slothrop Paper Company. All this recalls to Slothrop a smell ("the breath of the Forbidden Wing" [presumably Imipolex G, involved in Jamf's experiments on "Infant Tyrone"]); it also produces an erection. Bland ("Uncle Lyle") apparently sold his interest in the "Schwarzknabe enterprise" (next to this entry are the initials, "T.S.") to Grössli Chemical (later Psychochemie AG). From all this Slothrop concludes that his father Broderick ("B.S.") "sold" him to Bland, for Jamf's experiments, in return for money for Slothrop's education; and Slothrop's apparently been under surveillance ever since.

Slothrop--travelling in the Zone as a British journalist, Ian Scuffling--also recalls Marvy, on top of a moving railroad car, warning him about "niggers" in the next car, Southwest African rocket troops (the Scwarzkommando), who have now joined together, heading for Nordhausen. He then recalls Oberst Enzian appearing, and throwing Marvy off the train.

Cut back to "present," Nordhausen, morning. Slothrop meets Geli Tripping (say it out loud), an apprentice witch, part of the "harem" ("a girl in every rocket-town in the Zone") of Soviet officer, Vaslav Tchitcherine. After sex he begins worrying the Russian is about to appear, but the noise he hears is only Geli's owl, Wernher. It turns out she knows about the 00000 rocket, and the "Schwarzgerät." Proverb #5 (292). She claims the Schwarzgerät is for sale, in Swinemünde. Despite misgivings, Slothrop stays the night.

1. As the section’s epigraph reads: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” The War has ended and Slothrop has slipped into “the Zone”: the postwar continental landscape being redrawn along the lines of the Potsdam Agreement. And along various other lines, too: “Already vines are beginning to grow back over dragon’s teeth, fallen Stukas, burned tanks.” We find Slothrop still in Graham Green mode, playing the down-’n'-out British journalist Ian Scuffing, with his distinguished moustaches. Following the dossier on Jamf provided in 2.7, he is en route to Nordhausen, smack in central Germany. The dossier reveals that, as an infant, Slothrop’s father essentially sold him Jamf, as part of a multinational corporate chemical company consolidation scheme. (An intermediary here is Lyle Bland, a Bostonian involved in disrupting Weimar-era inflation with his own private currency, the Notgeld; the printing of that currency was subcontracted to the Slothrop family biz, the Slothrop Paper Company.)  Reading this, Slothrop is assailed by a familiar smell—“the breath of the Forbidden Wing”—which, naturally, produces an erection.

En route to Nordhausen, he meets Major Duane Marvy of U.S. Army Ordinance, who is bounced (literally tossed) off the top of a freight car by Oberst Enzian, the Herero leader of the African Schwarzkommandos. Both will figure more, later, as adversary and (sort-of) ally, respectively. He also meets Geli Tripping, a “long-legged sorceress” who shores up the harem of Vaslav Tchitcherine, a Soviet also operating in the Zone. Tripping hips Slothrop to the news that basically everyone in the Zone is scrambling for the rocket (that is, the 00000 rocket, from 2.7) which, it is believed, is set to be auctioned on the black market. Despite whatever misgivings he may have about sleeping with a literal witch in the contract of a menacing Soviet sort, Slothrop does the deed, dirty dog that he is.

[2], 295-314. Next morning, Slothrop, in a pair of Tchitcherine's boots (a gift from Geli), heads for the Mittelwerke. The entrance-arch is a parabola, designed by Etzel (cf. the unsuccessful American automobile?) Ölsh, a disciple of Albert Speer. Inside, joined by forty-four Stollen, are two parallel, S-shaped tunnels (a tribute both to the SS and to the double integral sign--but cf. 198). We are treated to a meditation on the importance of the double integral and Brenschluss (301). We learn Slothrop's reasons (cf. 2: [8], above) for editing and falsifying information, changing names, on his London map (302). Moving deeper into the tunnel Slothrop hears our first rocket limericks (305-7), sung at a drunken Russian-American party, which he soon joins. It turns out to be a going away party for Major Marvy who, when he sees Slothrop, takes off after him, with his men: "Marvy's Mothers." Taking cover in one of the Stollen, Slothrop meets Professor (of mathematics) Glimpf, with whom he achieves a crazy silent-movie escape, via railroad. They proceed to the castle-laboratory of Glimpf's former colleague, the mad scientist, Zwitter.

2. Morning again; “a Sunday-funnies dawn”—great phrase, whatever it means. A shoeless Slothrop has been fitted by Geli into a pair of Tchitcherine’s big boots. He’s a motley assemblage of post-War Allied power: an American in British guise, dressed in a Russian’s boots. The Americans and Russians are scrambling for leftover Nazi rockets, arming themselves for the new conflict that is already taking shape. It’s “interregnum,” we’re told. A period in-between periods. Slothrop heads to Mittelwerke: the underground rocket manufacturing base, which ran on slave labour from the nearby Dora concentration camp. (“Fun” fact: it is said more people died there making V-2s then were ever killed by their use in combat.) The underground base has been turned into a something like a tourist attraction, with its slavish Nazi architecture, and its displays of futuristic astronauts (“Space-Jockeys”), imagining a future of extraterrestrial conquest, in helmets made to resemble oversized human skulls.

Lengthy meditations on the architectural fascinations of Etzel Ölsch, a student of Albert Speer. And on the symbolic use of the doubleintegral, or ∫∫. The symbol is, apparently, used in mathematical calculations of Brenschluss: the point at which the rocket exhausts its fuel and is subject only to external forces (i.e. gravity). It also, of course, resembles the Nazi SS, and the proto-Germanic Eihwaz rune ᛇ, meaning “yew,” and taken as a symbol for death. It also, more romantically, reminds Slothrop of “the shape of lovers curled asleep” (he and Katje, for instance). Indeed, the ᛇ rune was sometimes mythically associated with the spinal column Dense stuff! Plot-wise, Slothrop once again runs afoul of Major Marvy, who pursues him through the underground. There’s a zany escape (via underground railroad), which sees Slothrop rescued by a mathematics professor named Glimpf, and led to the underground lair of an (ex?-) Nazi mad scientist called Zwitter.

[3], 314-329. We now meet the Schwarzkommando, and learn about the history of the Zone Hereros, the "Erdschweinhöhle." We learn about the Empty Ones, "Revolutionaries of the Zero . . . [whose] program is racial suicide," and about the true (Marx notwithstanding) function of colonies (317). Enzian and Joseph Ombindi--the leader of the Empty One faction, and Enzian's main rival for power among the Zone Hereros--discuss suicide. "Sold on Suicide," song (320). Then we learn about various portions of Enzian's personal history: about his Russian sailor father, about the death of his mother (fleeing the Herero massacre), about his becoming the protoge and lover of Weissmann/Blicero. Responding to a radio call for help, from another band of Zone Hereros, he heads for Hamburg. We learn that Tchitcherine is his half brother.

3. With the Schwarzkommando now. Living in the abandoned mine shifts near Nordhausen, they are consolidating into an emigre (or expat) community, the Zone-Herero. The Germans call them “Erdschweinhöhle,” the pigs of the caves. We learn more about Enzian, whose father was European, and whose half-brother (by the same father, a Russian sailor) is Tchitcherine. Enzian (and Pynchon?) reflect on African colonies, as “the outhouses of the European soul”: repositories for the sin and violence and inequity that is a residual, or run-off, of so-called “Western civilization.” (These descriptions, for whatever it might be worth, remind me a bit of Céline’s African adventures in Journey To The End of Night.) The Schwarzkommando are also called “Revolutionaries of the Zero,” and theirs is a pursuit consistent with the various threads of “rocket mysticism” present so far in the novel.  And their goal is their own death. “The program is racial suicide.” It is a “tribal death,” which they can enact themselves, instead of merely disappearing due to declining birthrates. Bleak!

They worship the rocket as an instrument of death; its arc part of a “movement toward stillness.” If the engineers of the rocket saw it as part of a new phase—inaugurating, as German rocket scientist Walter Dornberger describes it, humanity’s move into the space age—then the Zone-Herero (and Pynchon?) Conceive of it is a final phase—the end of humanity, either literally (i.e. by actual extinction via rocket) or figuratively/spiritually (i.e. via the subservience of the human spirit and character to the logic of the machine). Enzian discusses this with Joseph Ombidini, another Zone-Herero and leader of a group called “The Empty Ones.” Another song, “Sold On Suicide,” in which the singer enumerates the very many things they despise about life, the idea being that the list grows so long and never-ending that the actual act of suicide is perpetually postponed. We learn more about Enzian's role as protege and lover of the nasty German colonialist-cum-rocketnutso Dominius Blicero, a.k.a. Weissmann (this relationship is mentioned earlier, in 1.14). Over the radio, he has another group of Zone-Herero (these ones in Hamburg) requesting help. And so, he heads to the surface to help them. As he does, he mulls his purpose: stalking the lands of his peoples’ colonial oppressors. He mulls his fate: “have we been passed over, or have we been chosen for something even more terrible?” Is he Elect or Preterite? A classically Pynchonian question.

[4], 329-336. Slothrop and Geli are on the top of the Brocken, awaiting sunrise. We learn about Slothrop's Antinomian-witch ancestor, Amy Sprue, hanged at Salem (329). Slothrop and Geli, as the sun rises, watch their gigantic shadows in the clouds. Since Marvy is still after him, Slothrop heads for Berlin (by Geli's arrangement), in a balloon, with one Schnorp--who's flying in custard pies to sell on the black market. They are pursued by Marvy and his Mothers in a plane. More rocket limericks (334-5). The balloon, after a custard-pie battle, escapes.

4. “Just before dawn.” So many chapters open at dawn, or just before it. Maybe the figurative “new dawn” looms on some perpetually receding horizon? (We’re in an interregnum, after all.) Slothrop and the witch Geli Tripping have scaled to the tip of the Brocken, the highest point of the Harz mountain range in northern Germany (er, “The Zone”…) and “the very plexus of German evil.” The two of them are getting pretty snuggly, and cutesy-poo. Slothrop, ever the epitome of all-Americana, is no stranger to witches. An ancestor of his, Amy Sprue, was sentenced to death “for witchery.” (Pynchon’ s own family tree is hung with similar heretics: his ancestor, William Pynchon, has the distinction of not only founding Springfield, Mass. but also of authoring the first book ever banned—and burned—in the so-called New World.) Slothrop and Geli watch their shadows swell over the cloud line. They look enormous; “Impossibly out of scale.” The night before, Slothrop and Geli stumbled upon a group of Hereros, and learn of their hatred for Tchitcherine. Not a political hate or a one borne of the War, but what Geli calls “old-time, pure, personal hate,” i.e. the haters Enzian holds for his half-brother, for reasons that are not yet crystal.

Slothrop the stooge is dispatched on another mission, by another scheming force, whose point person is a comely woman—always the thin end of the wedge, for ol’ Slothrop. Geli sends Slothrop to Berlin, ostensibly to escape the increasingly fanatical pursuit of Major Marvy and his mad band, called “Marvy’s Mothers.” Geli arranges his transit via a hot air balloonist called Schnorp, who is running a bootleg shipment of custard pies to the occupied capital city. Like something out of Loony Tunes or The Three Stooges, Marvy appears in a small plane, in pursuit of his quarry. A pie fight, of all things, ensues. They lose the airborne Americans, and float on to Berlin, the sun setting, “a peach on a china plate.”

[5], 336-359. "The Zone is in full summer." Cut to Tchitcherine, who "is more metal than anything else." He has two missions in the Zone. Official: to recover rockets and hardware for the Soviets. Private: to annihilate Enzian (his half brother) and the Schwarzkommando. We then cut to his past in Kirghiz ("the town looked like a Wild West movie"), where his assignment was to enforce the NTA (New Turkic Alphabet) on the unlettered natives (cf. this linguistic imperialism to the organic theories of language propounded by Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck [inverted "Turk"?] 2: [3], above?). We learn about Galina, "the schoolmarm," and about Dzaqyp Qulan, the "native" schoolteacher, whose father was killed in the Kirghiz massacre of 1916 (cf. Fran van der Groov and the Dodoes, 1: [14], above? the Herero massacre, 1: [14], above? the attitude toward Indians implied by all the Western lingo here? Vietnam?). We learn, too, about Tchitcherine's horse, Snake, from the United States. There are various rumors (this flashback, like many in the book, is shifting into the present tense) about the reasons for Tchitcherine's banishment to Central Asia: an alliance with a "Soviet Courtesan"; an acquaintance with Wimpe, a German salesman for IG, with a special interest in "opium alkaloids and their many variations." Cut from this to the Chinese swamper, Chu Piang, with whom Tchitcherine smokes opium. Then we hear Wimpe discourse on Morphine research, on Laszlo Jamf (348). Or has Tchitcherine (as he thinks) been banished to Kirghiz (and Chekovian longing for return to the city) because of Enzian? We learn how Tchitcherine's sailor-father fled the horror of loading coal in a Southwest African port ("a conspiracy of carbon . . . he could smell Death in it") to the "honest blackness" of Enzian's mother (351). We then learn, in chaotic detail, about factional infighting at the NTA plenary session, and about the similarity of its committees to Soviet "Committees on molecular structure." (355) Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan ride into a village in time to hear a singing duel (cf. 387?)--and to hear an old aqyn (wandering singer) sing (we're into the Oral Tradition here, no writing) about seeing the "Kirghiz Light/In a place where words are unknown." Following his instructions the Russian and his sidekick travel to It, but Tchitcherine's "heart was never ready." "But in the Zone . . . the Rocket is waiting. He will be drawn the same way again."

5. The skinny on Tchitcherine. (I can’t help but pronounce his name in the same way Gavin Rossdale sings “Glycerine” in the 1994 postgrunge hit by his band, Bush.) Tchitcherine is a “mad scavenger…more metal than anything else.” His battle wounds are sewn together with gold wirework, like some gilded cyborg. He has two missions inside The Zone. First (like basically everyone else) he is collecting Nazi rocket parts, and Nazi rocket secrets. But his sub-program is personal, and more sinister. He’s fixing to kill his half-brother, Enzian, who was sired by his father, a Russian sailor who took a Herero lover, while enjoying shore leave in the southwest of Africa (see 2.3). Mostly, this chapter is given over to Tchitcherine’s backstory, which threads together some of the novel’s emerging themes, with the author’s own gold wirework.

Like: previously, Tchitcherine was a Stalinist functionary, working in Kirghiz, in Central Asia (somewhere astride modern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). He smoked opium and hash with a “comical Chinese swamper” named Chiu Piang. His official work was overseeing the latinization of the Turkic alphabet, a colonial project that rhymes, naturally, with the German conquests of the Herero lands. This connection is made more explicit in Tchitcherine’s relationship with a schoolteacher named Džaqyp Qulan, whose father is a martyr, killed in the 1916 Kirghiz revolt against Russian rule. So far, the novel has only talked around the genocide of European Jews in World War II: be it in the references to the Herero genocide (discussed in detail in V., Pynchon’s debut novel), the “cowboys-and-Indians” imagery of 1.10 (and its own resonances with race relations in pre-Civil Rights America). Death is a kind of ambient energy; a background radiation given full, literal, material expression by the rocket. We learn of Tchitcherine’s dealings with another IG Farben wheeler-dealer salesman, named Wimpe, also a colleague of Laszlo Jamf, and also present at the seance in 1.18. He is described as a “jinni of the West” (akin to a “genie), who deals primarily in psychoactive drugs  A chemical consortium, of sorts, is emerging, connecting America, England, Germany and Russia, binding Slothrop to Jamf and Wimpe and Tchitcherine. As Wimpe puts it himself, in a menacing, Bond villainish discourse, “[o]ur little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure of nations.” At his post in Central Asia, Tchitcherine hears of a radiant “Kirghiz Light” (Russian bomb tests maybe?). He chases it, but cannot apprehend it. We are told that a similar quest drives him now, in The Zone. OK!

[6], 359-371. Slothrop lies sick (he drank the water!) in a Berlin basement. He recalls his second encounter with Enzian; the Schwarzkommando were dredging for pieces of rocket. He sees their symbol. Their disappointment at the serial number on what they dredge up reveals that they, too, are looking for the 00000 rocket. Enzian tells him the Herero mantra (since the massacre): "'Mba-kayere . . . 'I am passed over.'" Back in the basement, Slothrop considers his own quest: "The Schwarzgerät is no Grail, Ace." (364) He "will meet," we're told, Greta Erdmann, a former movie actress. "This is how they meet," we're told. Then we're told of Slothrop's meeting with Emil ("Säure" ["acid"]) Bummer, notorious cat burglar and doper, whose girls give Slothrop a Wagnerian opera costume (cape, helmet), transforming him into "Raketemensch" (Rocketman). They all proceed to the Chicago Bar, a dopers' hangout, decorated with photos of John Dillinger. A song, "The Doper's Dream" (369), is sung by Seaman Bodine (known as "Pig" Bodine in V.). Slothrop, now as Rocketman, is asked to go to Potsdam (where the Allied conference to work out the division of Germany is now taking place) to retrieve six kilos of hashish Bodine has buried there. For one of the kilos, and a million counterfeit marks printed by Bummer, he agrees. (NB. We're still waiting to find out just how Slothrop meets Greta Erdmann.)

6. Slothrop wakes up in a basement in Berlin. His brain and ass are aflame. Food poisoning, courtesy the mucky water he slurped out of a public fountain. In his fever, he flashes back to a conversation with Enzian. The Zone-Herero are dredging pieces of rockets, eagerly looking (as Slothrop is, in his own way) for that serial number: 00000. (Does this mean that the 00000 has already been fired? And that the Zone-Herero know this?) Enzian teaches Slothrop a kind of Herero catchphrase: Mba-kayere, which translates into “I am passed over.” See: the reflections on the “preterite” or “passed-over” in 1.4, 1.20, 3.3, and elsewhere. Enzian knows that various forces are conspiring to liquidate his people (again). What about Slothrop? What are the plans for him? Enzian can’t say. “All anyone knows about you is that you keep showing up.” (One of my favourite lines in the book, incidentally.)

Back in the present, Slothrop meets a crew (a sick crew? As in V.? Perhaps?) of burglars and dopers, lead by a drug dealer called Emil “Säure” Bummer (acid in Deutsch…“Acid Bummer”? Like a bad trip? Maybe?) who have liberated Wagnerian costumes from a nearby opera house. Our hero snaps the wings from a helmet, slaps on a cape, and styles himself as Rocketman: a kind of comic book superhero. Enter Seaman Bodine (another V. holdover), an American who enlists Rocketman to dig up a bunch of hash buried at Potsdam, where the Allied head honchos are mulling what do with Germany. Beyond the usual abundance of incident, this chapter is notable for some tricky things Pynchon does with the timeline. Early on, we’re told that Slothrop “is soon to be known” as Rocketman. We’re also told he’ll meet a German movie actress named Greta Erdman. (They don’t meet, not yet.) The author seems—seems!—to be building in some slippages and condensations in time and place, which will become much more relevant a little later on.

[7], 371-383. Next morning, Bummer explains that the hash is buried across from Potsdam, "in Neubabelsberg, the old movie capital of Germany." Slothrop learns of the death of "his president," Roosevelt. (373) At mention of Schwarzgerät, Bummer suggests that Slothrop talk to "Der Springer." Now alone, with papers identifying him as "Max Schlepzig," Slothrop heads for Potsdam. His boots (Tchitcherine's, given to him by Geli) lead to interrogation by Russians, but they finally let him pass (it turns out, though, that they've been in touch with Tchitcherine). He arrives at his destination, only to discover that during the Conference it's serving as Truman's residence. Digging up the hash beneath a balcony, he is suddenly staring face-to-face at Mickey Rooney (who, we're assured, will repress all memory of the encounter). Then, leaving, he is captured: "You were followed all the way."

7. And now, into the fray. Attired in his Rocketman costume, and armed with Bodine’s map, Slothrop—or do we just call him Rocketman now?— heads to Potsdam, to retrieve the hash. A wrinkle: the villas at Potsdam are under heavy security, as the new leaders of the free world (including Harry Truman, who Slothrop has just learned has succeeded FDR) set about carving it up. The sort of set-up that speaks to the author’s interest in the down-and-outers, I think. While Churchill, Truman and Stalin shift the balance of global power, a rejected G.I. in a stolen opera costume is on the periphery (of the building, of history) burrowing for hash like some mad gofer.  Slothrop and Säure talk about rockets, the latter being interested in adding all the desirable bits and bobs to his extensive black market menu. Slothrop mentions the Schwarzgerät, that component he alights upon in a manifest circa 2.7, and his host gets a little clammy, referring our hero to a man called Der Springer, “the knight who leaps perpetually…across the chessboard of the Zone.” (Der Springer = “The Jumper,” naturlich.)

Anyway. Back to the heist. His advance on the Potsdam village is halted by Russian sentries, who demand he remove his boots, which are, you’ll recall from 3.2, Tchitcherine’s boots. Slothrop senses that Tchitcherine himself is nearby: “he can hear all the man’s metal parts jingling with glee.” In time, Slothrop arrives at the Potsdam Conference, which “is lit up like a Hollywood premiere.” He slips in surprisingly easily, perhaps mistaken for (in his cap and whatnot) for a magician, or some entertainer there to dazzle the visiting dignitaries. He digs up the hash, which has been buried right near Truman’s quarters, with his hands. About to make of scot free, he meets none other than Mickey Rooney, the actor, who “wherever he may go, will repress the fact that he ever saw Slothrop.” Another case where, for a big star like Rooney, Slothrop’s presence barely even registers. On his way out, hash in hand, Rocketman is captured and a familiar needle stings into his arm. (The sodium amytal, as in 1.10, perhaps?)

[8], 383-390. Cut to the hijacked U-boat of the Argentine anarchists (see 2: [7], above, Squalidozzi--remember?). We learn the story behind Squalidozzi's disappearance from Zürich. He was pursued by British Military Intelligence (Slothrop's Rolls Royce). He came upon a group of zoot-suited gangsters, Blodgett Waxwing's people, watching a Bob Steele Western in an abandoned harmonica factory, and meets Gerhardt von Göll ("Der Springer"), a German filmmaker (who made the Schwarzkommando film for Operation Blackwing--see 1: [14], above). He now offers to make a film of Martin Fierro, an epic whose gaucho hero is regarded by the anarchists as a saint. This has now become the major project of the U-boat anarchists, but there is a problem: will they shoot only part one, or will they also do part two, in which the hero sells out? There is a fantasy of a scene from the (as yet unmade) film: Fierro's withdrawal from General Roca's attempt to exterminate the pampa Indians (cf. all the other genocidal massacres thus far: Dodoes, Hereros, Central Asian "natives"?). We learn about von Göll's connections with IG Farben, with Laszlo Jamf, about his best known film, the "immortal Alpdrücken." His interest in Martin Fierro stems mainly from the chance it offers to shoot a scene of a singing duel (387--cf. 3: [5], above?). The plan, then: to get to the Lüneberg Heath, meet von Göll (who will arrive separately), and shoot the movie there. The U-boat fires a torpedo at the U.S.S. John E. Badass (Seaman Bodine's ship); but it misses, apparently because Bodine has added Oneirine ("Laszlo Jamf's celebrated intoxicant") to the coffee.

8. An odd chapter that seems a bit like a detour. But then they all seem like detours, until such a time as they all click in together. Right? We’re on a hijacked U-boat, nicked by Francesco Squalidozzi’s crew, from 2.7. We learn that Squalidozzi himself was chased out of Zurich, and through “what was left of Germany” by British intelligence agents in a sinister Rolls Royce. Pursued to Bavaria, Squalidozzi met Gerhardt von Göll, the film director responsible for the Schwarzkommando propaganda films in 1.14 and 1.18, and who is also the mysterious “Der Springer” of the previous episode, 3.7.

The two plot to collaborate on a film production of Martín Fierro, an Argentine epic poem, about a hard-luck gaucho horseman, who is a hero to Squalidozzi’s anarchist set. It is also a story that prominently figures a historical genocide, of indigenous Argentinians, which Pynchon describes (flashing forward…the film has not been made yet). So: Squalidozzi and the U-boat gang are off to meet von Göll, north in Low Saxony. En route, the sub runs afoul of the U.S.S. John E. Badass, which is Bodine’s ship. The U-boat fires a torpedo. It misses. Bodine had apparently spiked the evening coffee with Oneirine, another chemical concoction courtesy Laszlo Jamf, which apparently permits “time-modulation” (what next?). The description of the drug leads to a druggy graf, with perspective shifting, again, to the second-person, as in 1.17. “[W]hat will drive you out of your soup-kettle? Has it already happened?” The questions seem addressed to Squalidozzi et al., but also to the reader. (He does this at the conclusion of Mason & Dixon, too, to considerable emotional effect.)

[9], 390-392. Tchitcherine (it was he who captured Slothrop at Potsdam) has released him, after taking some hash for himself--which he is now smoking with a companion, getting more and more stoned. He put Slothrop, whom he likes, through a Sodium Amytal session: "Black runs all through the transcript." He finds Slothrop's lone pursuit of the 00000 rocket curious, and plans to have him followed.

9. Tchitcherine is chilling in a jeep by a canal in Berlin—the Landwehrkanal, probably? (I have myself been to Berlin, you see…)— with his driver/sidekick(/Lil Pard?), a Kazakh doper called Džabajev. They talk about Slothrop, who they have just apprehended, and who Tchitcherine confesses to liking, were they not on opposite ends of the same goal (i.e. rocket recovery). They talk about the transcript from Slothrop’s latest sodium amytal reverie, which is riven with the prefix schwarz-. “Black runs all through the transcript.” The same could be said about Gravity’s Rainbow, with its own obsessions with blackness (as a racial category), with shit, with the inky pitch of Death, and whatnot, etc., etc.

One thing bugs Tchitcherine about Slothrop: who is he working for? Is he looking for the 00000 rocket (we know that he is)? Is he driven by some hidden, psychological need, “driven by his Blackphenomenon”? All Tchitcherine, or anyone, knows about him is that he keeps showing up. A great graf, courtesy Tchitcherine, on Slothrop’s freedom: “He’s more useful running around the Zone thinking he’s free, but he’d be better off locked up somewhere. He doesn’t even know what freedom is, much less what it’s worth. So I get to fix the price, which doesn’t matter to begin with.” His sidekick snaps back, “Pretty authoritarian…”

[10], 392-397. Coming off Sodium Amytal, Slothrop dreams of being little and worried about little birds in a storm, being reassured by his father: "Don't worry, son" (cf. Slothrop's reassurance of Ludwig, worried about his lost lemming Ursula, 553-4, below? cf. the quite different attitude of Pointsman toward his "foxes," or of the Germans toward their horses and cows--337, above?). Slothrop leaves the white room in which he has been interrogated (after noting that some of the hash has been taken) to find himself in an abandoned movie set, where he meets (at last--see 3: [6], above) Margherita (Greta) Erdmann, the movie actress, who is looking for her lost daughter, Bianca. They come to the set of von Göll's Alpdrücken, in which she (as victim) played opposite Max Schlepzig (as torturer), and during the filming of which, she believes, Bianca was conceived. Slothrop is bothered by the coincidence (?) of names--his papers identify him, after all, as "Max Schlepzig" (and the handwriting on the pass, Greta claims, is that of the "real" Max). Anyway, Slothrop and Greta act out the scene from Alpdrücken (on the set of Alpdrücken), Slothrop as "Schlepzig," Greta as "Greta": bondage, whipping, sex. The transition from Greta's stocking to her bare thigh leads the narrator (apparently) to a meditation on "singular points" (396).

10. Slothrop fades in. He’s on a cot, in a blank white cube. People are speaking Russian all around him. Using all his strength, he checks on his recovered brick of hash. He dozes again, and dreams of his youth, back in Berkshire County, holding his father’s hand, as a flock of snow buntings are imperilled by the snow.

He comes too again, apparently free (such as it is). He leaves the white room and find he’s on a film set. It’s here he meets Margherita “Greta” Erdmannn, the fading German film starlet, as foretold in 3.6. She’s searching for her daughter, Bianca. They’re on the set of a film, Alpdrücken, where Bianca was conceived. In the film (a Gerhardt von Göll joint, incidentally…or not?), Greta is assaulted and whipped by Grand Inquisitor played by the actor Max Schlepzig—the same name on the fake passport given to Slothrop by Säure Bummer. The coincidence freaks them both out. “What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences…” So: what can they do? They embrace their roles, Slothrop as Grand Inquisitor, and Greta as his victim. On the set of film, they reenact Greta’s whipping. And she comes. And so does he. And as he does, she cries the name of her missing daughter…

[11], 397-433. (This long chapter, consisting mostly of one long recollection, narrated in the past tense, tells the story of Franz Pökler--see 1: [18] and [19], 3: [1], above. cf. the story of Franz's loss of Leni and Ilse to the story of Roger and Jessica?) It was his arousal from seeing Alpdrücken that inspired the conception of Franz and Leni's daughter, Ilse (cf. Ilse, therefore, to Margherita's daughter, Bianca, conceived during the shooting of Alpdrucken?). "That's how it happened," he reflects. "A Film. . . . Isn't that what they made of my child, a film?" (398) Franz is now (in "present") at the ruin of an amusement park-city, Zwölfkinder (cf. Disneyland?), waiting for Ilse's annual summertime return. He recalls his fear of the political demonstrations (the street) to which he lost Leni; he recalls an argument they had over the meaning of the Rocket, which he has come in his way (and out of his fear) to worship (400). He turned to the Rocket, in earnest, to pull himself together after Leni left him. He recalls the "electromysticism" of Kurt Mondaugen (see 1: [19], above). His memories of early rocket days also include Weissmann (Blicero) and Enzian. He moved to Peenemünde (where rockets were tested) in 1937, but he couldn't quite forget his old Berlin self; he was torn between "personal identity and impersonal salvation." (406) We learn of the connection linking the Rocket, film, and calculus (407). Then, one summer, "Ilse" appeared at his cubicle, for a visit, reporting that she and Leni were living at an SS "reeducation" camp. Pökler dreamed about the history of Friedrich August Kekulé, father of organic chemistry (410-13), and about Kekulé's dream: a serpent with its tail in its mouth. We learn how this dream was misused by the System, as the foundation for understanding the benzine ring. All this is lectured on by "Pökler's old prof," Laszlo Jamf. Ilse's fantasy was to live on the moon. Then one evening, returning from work, Pökler found her gone. He was crushed: "Victim in a Vacuum," song (414-15). Mondaugen advised that he wait, rather than rebel; and Pökler agreed.

As war approached Pökler became more enmeshed in the life of the Rocket (his life is often recalled, indeed, in terms appropriate to the rocket's flight). "It is the grim phoenix," we are told, "which creates its own holocaust . . . delibeate resurrection. . . the planet of National Socialism." (415) The next summer, again apparently arranged by Weissmann, there was another visit from "Ilse" (as before, he could not be certain it was she). This time he was granted a two-week furlough; they went to Zwölfkinder, whose exhibits recapitulate many motifs from earlier portions of Gravity's Rainbow. Pökler fantasized incest and escape (420-21), but instead accepted "Ilse" as his daughter: "It was the real moment of conception, in which, years too late, he became her father." (421) Then, the two weeks over, she disappeared again. And "so it has gone for the six years since," his need of her used by Weissmann (cf. Pointsman/Pudding/Katje, 2:[4], above?) to keep Pökler in line. He compares her regularly repeated appearances to the regular repetition of frames in film: she is "the moving image of a daughter." (422)

He was transferred, in 1944, to Nordhausen, where he dreamed about a light bulb (426-27: cf. "The Story of Byron the Bulb," 4: [3], below?). He became increasingly aware of the concentration camp, Dora, next to Nordhausen. Which, he learned, was where "Ilse" was imprisoned. Then Weissmann, whom Pökler had not seen since leaving Peenemünde (though he had heard rumors of a break with Enzian), appeared to get Pökler to work on modifications for a special rocket, the 00000. His job was to produce an insulated plastic fairing, to contain something called a "Schwarzgerät." He never saw Weissmann again; but his reward for this special work (apparently) was a letter from Weissmann, promising that "Ilse" would be freed, that she would meet him at Zwölfkinder (which is why he is there "now," waiting for her). With defeat approaching, and the Mittelwerke being evacuated, he finally got into Dora, next door. He was appalled at what he saw: endless stacks of bodies, the others near death, emaciated, starving. Onto the finger of "a woman lying, a random woman," he slipped his gold wedding ring.

11. And speaking of missing daughters…! This (very) long chapter, which could almost be its own standalone short story, opens on Franz Pökler, the rocket engineer “cause-and-effect man” from back in 1.18- 1.19. Pynchon cuts to Pökler’s story using some downright cinematic editing rhythms. Slothrop and Greta’s S&M-ish tryst on the abandoned Alpdrücken set, and Greta’s pining for her daughter leads to Pökler remembering how aroused he got watching the film Alpdrücken, with his frenzy leading to the sex (with his wife, Leni) that led to his own daughter, Ilse. A feeling of editing by imagistic and emotional association, like the book was a movie. Of course, people used to go on about how the chapter-separating boxes in early editions of Gravity’s Rainbow, you know…these guys: □□□□□□□□□□□□…were meant to represent the sprockets in film reels. These were changed in subsequent editions, a case of author/publisher either rebuffing the theory, or else covering their tracks. Anyway. Pretty tricky stuff!

Pökler is remembering this as he waits for his daughter  at Zwölfkinder, a decommissioned amusement park/community called Zwölfkinder, which is staffed and operated entirely by children (or was, before the war). I’m going to use my rusty German to parse some of this out, so bear with me: wolfskinder, or “wolf children,” was a name given for German children in East Prussia, orphaned by the Red Army advances towards the end of WWII. “Zwölf” is the German word for 12, which is about the age of all the kids here, i.e. adolescents. So: Zwölfkinder is a kind of pun, meaning “Feral Twelve Year Olds,” which pretty much describes the operation. My best guess. Take it or leave it, folks! In any event, Zwölfkinder is a kind of Germanic Disneyland, where a feeling of arrested adolescence is made literal by virtue of all the inhabitants being actual adolescents. Pökler has come here every summer for the past few years to reunite with his daughter. This furlough, away from his work on the A4 and V-2 rockets, is all-but mandated by his sadistic supervisor, who is none other than good ol’ (bad ol’?) Weissmann a.k.a Blicero, the Nazi rocket fanatic and sex pervert.

Part of this sadism involves (potentially) swapping Ilse out for some lookalike double, who plays the role of Pökler’s doting daughter. (He even fantasizes about having sex with her, a fantasy of pedophilic incest whose grossness is mitigated, if only slightly, by the character not actually being his daughter.) Weissmann does this as a way of controlling Pökler, by exploiting his love for his daughter, and his desire to play the role of loving father. In reality, Ilse (like Pökler’s wife, Leni) is likely imprisoned at the Dora concentration camp, which comes to increasingly occupy Pökler’s thoughts after he is transferred from the Peenemünde rocket base to Nordhausen, which abuts Dora. (This is, I believe, the first time Pynchon acknowledges the Holocaust head-on; not merely alluding to it with references to other historical genocides, be it of the dodoes, the indigenous Americans, the Herero, or the victims of the Kirghiz revolt.)

We learn a bit more about the 00000 rocket, and the schwarzgerät, those twinned objects of Slothrop’s fascination. Weissmann’s tasks Pökler with creating a form of plastic insulation, an enclosure for the schwarzgerät. While working on the rockets, Pökler’s ability to think “non-fanatically” is assailed by a certain swelling strain of rocketmysticism. Franz, as his wife Lent put it, “was an extension of the rocket.” Ilse (the real Ilse) is also swayed. She wants to live on the moon some day. For these characters, the rocket is not—or not yet—the symbol of death and humanity’s commitment to its own genocide (which is what it represents to Enzian, and arguably Weissmann). It is a next phase of human evolution, opening of a conquest of the cosmos. The chapter ends with the war ending, the Allies enclosing on Pökler’s facility in Nordhausen. He escapes through Dora, bearing horrifying witness to genocide. “The doors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out…” The chapter ends with Pökler holding the bony hand of one such victim, and he slides his wedding ring onto her finger. It is an act of transference, as he presumably believes his wife, Leni, the anti-Nazi intellectual agitator, has died in Dora. And Ilse, too. Though again, the chapter begins with him waiting for her—or her double—at Zwölfkinder, a vain attempt to recapture his own arrested feelings of pre-War innocence. Cut it. Print it. That’s a wrap.

[12], 433-447. Slothrop and Margherita Erdmann have come to Berlin. Slothrop, awake alone at night, begins to lose touch with his quest, to flirt with "anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything [cf. The Waste Land, lines 301-302?], a condition not many of us can bear for long. . . . Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't, actually, rather have that reason . . . ." (434) Leaving Margherita asleep, he takes five kilos of the hashish liberated from Potsdam (keeping the depleted sixth kilo for himself) to the Chicago Bar (see 3: [6], above), then to Säure Bummer's cellar. It is abandoned, but he finds a white knight (symbol of Der Springer), made out of plastic (guess which kind?), with a message from Säure. He finally, at dawn, finds Bummer, and delivers the hash. His task accomplished, Slothrop retires to a mattress with Trudi, for an episode of polymorphous perversity--he "does not feel obliged to have a hardon"--and, finally, nasal sex! (439) We learn about the ongoing debate about the relative merits of Beethoven (supported by Gustav) and Rossini (supported by Säure (439ff.). They have just learned of the death of Anton Webern, shot (by "accident"?) by an American soldier, in Vienna. Säure and Gustav engage ("jointly"?) in a grass-tasting ritual (442). Slothrop, as Military Police break down the door, escapes; he returns to Margherita, who, frightened and angered by his absence, proceeds to cry all day. As time passes, she is consoled, really, only by whippings, self-abasements, in which Slothrop, despite misgivings, participates: "Whatever it is with her, he's catching it." He dreams of a woman fucked by a multitude of animals; in death (witnessed by "Old Squalidozzi, ploughman of the deep") she becomes a figure of abundant fertility. (446-7)

12. “Back to Berlin,” where Slothrop and Greta Erdmann are hunkered inside a wooden house on the river Spree. This chapter feels like a bit of a comedown, following the dense and intensely sad Pökler section. And that melancholy seeps into the text, too. (I’m not imagining it!!) Drifting through the ramshackle capital with the latest in a long line of female consorts, Slothrop begins to lose faith. Why is he here? What is he doing? “Slothrop and the S-Gerät and the Jamf/Imipolex mystery have grown to be strangers.” His usual paranoia is disentangling, or dissolving, into something new, an “anti-paranoia,” a sense that nothing is connected to anything. “Either They have put him here for a reason, or he’s just here.” (As a reader, this proposition seems equally horrifying. Imagine getting 430-odd pages into the book and being forced to reckon with the possibility that all this seemingly deeply entwined and intentionally plotted stuff is just…happening? What a ripoff!)

A little down, Slothrop heads back to Bummer, with the many kilos of hash. At his HQ, he finds a two-inch Knight chess piece, which is made out of plastic, which the author leads us to believe is a special type of plastic (i.e. Imipolex-G?). The chess piece, of course, is the calling card of Der Springer, who, as outlined in 3.7, jumps about The Zone like a knight on a chessboard. It was left for Slothrop, along with a map. Meaning, or at least the illusion back it, is creeping back in. Slothrop follows the map and is reunited with Bummer and the gang. Some chatter about Beethoven (soundtrack artist of fascist fantasies) vs. Rosini (a decadent do-nothing). A tryst between Trudi, one of Bummer’s entourage, and Slothrop, in which Slothrop gets an erection with…his nose? It grows long and erect. Like Pinocchio? Slothrop heads back to the American sector and finds Greta, howling. She has missed him. Or she just hates being alone. The resume their S&M routine without too much trouble. It is another retreat, an enclosure of bliss (of a kind), away from the War, or the post-War, as it was with Franz Pökler and his maybe-daughter Ilse at Zwölfkinder, as it was for Roger and Jessica in their house in the stay-away zone in 1.6. Slothrop dreams of a woman who is set upon by a number of animals. He dreams of Squalidozzi, “ploughman of the deep.” These dreams haunt him, as he sits by the river, fishing.

[13], 448-456. Cut to the Toiletship ("a triumph of the German mania for subdividing") Rücksichstlos (determined? relentless?) in the Kiel Canal. Horst Achtfaden, lately stationed at Peenemünde, has been imprisoned in the Chief's Head by the Schwarzkommando. Recalling his work on the rocket, he assures himself his guilt is limited: he was only a small part of a large operation (cf. the self-defense of Adolph Eichmann and others?). The Schwarzkommando (cf. the location of their interrogation to what Treacle says on page 276?) want to know about the Schwarzgerät, but he claims total ignorance; though he did work on the 00000 rocket he dealt only with weight control. Nevertheless he finally tells them the name of a friend who worked on guidance and might know, thus betraying Klaus Närrisch.

13. All aboard the…uh…Toiletship! Yes, folks, the Toiletship: a kind of roving, seafaring latrine, that is to the German navy as the restroom is to the family home. This floating toilet has been commandeered by the Schwarzkommando, and its master/commander, a former rocket engineer called Horst Achtfaden, has been imprisoned in the Chiefs’ Head. So interred, he has time to reflect—or rather, not reflect—on his role in whole machinery of the War. He runs through all the usual excuses. “It demanded this, we didn’t.” Rifle manufactures are more to blame. Hell, typewrite manufacturers have more blood on their hands. Etc. What did Hannah Arendt call it? “The banality of evil?” (At the risk of psychoanalyzing: one cannot get the sense that Pynchon, a former Boeing aeronautics employee, himself engaged at some minorseeming level with the smooth functioning of the so-called “military industrial complex,” is running himself, however satirically, through his own guilt-gauntlet, here.)

Enzian’s gang grills him about the whereabouts of (increasingly coveted, it seems) Schwarzgerät. He maintains (or feigns) ignorance. He worked only in weight control, a cog in the machine. “The S-Gerät people were all strangers to me.” Everyone worked with codenames and alibis, with none (save for Weissmann) seemingly aware of the warp and weft of the whole operation. Typical excuse. But also typical of a system devised precisely to permit this sort of plausible deniability. Like the firing squad executioners who are told that there’s a fake bullet in one of their guns. Threatened with being stuffed down a toilet (within a toilet? within a toilet?!…is it possible the whole structure of the ship is fantasy of Achtfaden, who is under the influence of sodium amatyl?!) Achtfaden gives up the name of an engineer who did work on the device: Klaus Närrisch. So much for honour among thieves.

[14], 457-468. Slothrop, still as Rocketman, and Greta are heading for Swinemünde--he to find the Schwarzgerät, she to find her daughter, Bianca, who's supposed to be with "a yachtful of refugees." They come to Bad Karma (can you find it on a map?). Margherita flees at the sight of a woman in black, one whom Slothrop "could have ignored, passed over." (458) Some time after Greta's reappearance, her flight remaining unexplained, they watch the arrival of the yacht, Anubis (cf. the jackal-headed Egyptian dead god, worshipped to placate tomb-ravaging jackals?). Greta goes on board but Slothrop, hesitating, falls in the water. To keep from sinking he slips out of his Rocketman outfit (cf. the ending of Melville's White-Jacket?). He finally gets aboard, though, helped through a porthole by Stefania Procalowska, the wife of the yacht's owner, Antonio. She tells Slothrop about the scene in Alpdrücken, cut from the release print, during the filming of which Bianca was conceived: the gang-rape of Margherita by a horde of blackhooded "jackal men" (461). She also mentions "Karel," and Margherita's husband, Miklos Thanatz ("Thanatz" being the Egyptian god of intelligence or learning--but cf., also, "thanatos"?). During the war, Stefania continues, Margherita and Thanatz had a touring sado-masochist pornography show, which entertained SS troops at concentration camps and rocket sites.

Her story over, Stefania gives Slothrop some evening clothes, which "fit perfectly." He proceeds to the bar, where the assembled company sings "Welcome Aboard!" (462-3) In the midst of what seems to be an ongoing orgy, Slothrop catches sight of Bianca, who is eleven or twelve, "a knockout." A woman tells how Margherita, meeting Wimpe in Berlin (see 3: [5], above), discovered her now favorite drug, Oneirine (developed--remember?--by Laszlo Jamf; see 3: [8], above--and NB.: "oneiric" means "of or relating to dreams"). Slothrop then meets Thanatz, who describes witnessing the "Max Weber charisma" of the rocket, which "the State bureaucracy could never routinize." (464) Thanatz also remembers a boy he saw at "the Heath" (which he visited with Margherita and the S/M show): "Gottfried. God's peace, which I trust he's found." (465; see 1: [14], above.) He begins to describe Blicero's breakdown and the "last day" (465), but he's interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, who go into their own S/M act. The crowd is so smitten with this act that they form a circle of sorts, held together by some pretty complex (covalent?) sexual bonding (467; cf. Kekulé's benzine ring, 410-13, above?). Everybody comes, except for a "jap liaison man" who just watches. As the orgy continues, the Anubis--a golden jackal under its bowsprit--heads toward Swinemünde.

14.  Slothrop is back with Greta. The two set by barge out for Swinemünde, the Baltic seaport. He, in Rocketman costume, is following Geil Tripping’s lead on the Schwarzgerät. Meanwhile his latest squeeze is (you’ll recall) looking for her daughter, Bianca. Coming upon the shore of a canal-side spa, a woman in black gives Greta the creeps, and she flees. “When she materializes it is a shy fade-in…” (Pynchon’s language becoming more and more cinematic). At the quay, they spy an enormous yacht called Anubis, full of well-to-do types. Some recognize Greta (she is a famous film star, after all) and she gracefully boards the ship. Slothrop tries, too, but someone yanks up the ladder, and he tumbles, like a hapless cartoon, into the water. His heavy Rocketman getup weighing him down, Slothrop struggles free of it, and slips into a porthole conveniently opened by Stefania Porcalowska, whose husband, Antoni, owns the mega-yacht Anubis.

Stefania fills Slothrop in on Greta’s backstory. She and her husband, Miklos Thanatz, used to run some mom-and-mom S&M show (which we get a taste of later in the chapter), entertaining Nazi troops, concentration camp staff, and those working at the rocket launch sites. (“Rocket sites? The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.”) Bianca was conceived during a scene in Alpdrücken, where Greta is raped by a gang of “jackal men” (in Egyptian myth, Anubis is a jackal-headed God entrusted with preparing the dead for the afterlife). Slothrop slides into a set of fancy-pants “evening clothes,” which “fit perfectly.” He then makes his way to the ship’s topside, where he’s greeted with a song, and an orgy of decadence, as well as regular, non-figurative orgy stuff (i.e. sex). It reminds Slothrop of the big bash at Raoul de la Perlimpinpin’s, back in 2.6. Bianca is there, too. Slothrop marks her as “a knockout,” pegging her age at “11 or 12.” (And if you think that’s a bit gross, well…buckle up…) We learn more about Greta, her dealings with Wimpe (frontman of a global chemical cartel introduced in 3.5), and her passion for Oneirine, the Jamf concoction mentioned in 2.8. Such connections—if they are connections, and not just more…stuff happening—are, of course, notable only to the reader, and not to Slothrop. Not yet, anyway.

[15],468-472. Slothrop dreams about Llandudno, "where Lewis Carroll wrote that Alice in Wonderland." Bianca appears at his bedside, ready and willing. After sex, she asks him to escape with her: "I'm a child, I know how to hide. I can hide you too." (470) Slothrop agrees; but as he leaves (in "a bureaucracy of departure") "coming back is something he's already forgotten about." (470-71) Her look "has already broken Slothrop's seeing heart," but he does leave.

15. Okay so Slothrop wakes up after the big Anubis orgy. He’s having Lewis Carroll dreams. A White Rabbit has been speaking to him. Bianca has stowed away in his cabin. The two have sex, which is basically repulsive because she has been identified, by Slothrop himself, as an adolescent. (Some readers have done the math and figured Bianca to be 16 or 17, which a) doesn’t matter much, age-of-consent-wise; and b) is sort of irrelevant, as Slothrop believes her to be 11 or 12, as explained in 3.14.) What is of interest is less the act (which is despicable) but what it means. So: I’ll have a go.

One of the big knocks against the author is that he doesn’t trade in characters, so much as types. You can bat this around yourselves. But I think it’s true that is characters primarily exist to represent larger ideas —even if that is not all they are. For the bulk of the book’s third section, Slothrop has seemed very much his own man. He has wriggled free (it seems) from Pointsman’s clutches, and is following his own path (it seems), through The Zone, to recover the Schwarzgerät, uncover the mystery of the 00000 rocket, and make sense of his own peculiar relationship, via the tinkering of Laszlo Jamf, to them both. His Rocketman guise stands as (to paraphrase Nicolas Cage’s character in the film Wild At Heart) “a symbol of his individuality and belief in personal freedom.” Boarding he Anubis, he shed that costume. He was fitted with formalwear, which fit him to the T. He slips in seamlessly among a class of decadent orgy-goers, down to committing a consummating act of pedophilia. Slothrop, the Ivey-educated white Yankee of Mayflower stock, has become one of Them. He is succumbing to the perversion and decadence of the class of power brokers who he had previously slithered around (as in the Potsdam mission of 3.7). To wit: as Slothrop has sex with Bianca he imagines him to be living inside his own penis. “He is enclosed.” This imagery will make a bit more sense later. But for now, suffice to say that Slothrop sees himself trapped by the thing has seemed totally beyond his control, and which has stirred up so much trouble for him, and the U.S. and British Armies, and everyone at “The White Visitation”: his accursed penis. Slothrop seems at least vaguely aware of the cardinal sin he has committed, and how falling in with this whole fucked-up scene is precisely what They want for him. He hightails it out of there.

[16], 473-482. Climbing a ladder, Slothrop meets the "jap liaison man," Ensign Morituri (which doesn't mean much in Japanese, but cf. Longfellow's poem, "Morituri Salutamus"?: "'O Caesar, we who are about to die [Morituri]/Salute you!' was the gladiators' cry/In the arena, standing face to face/With death and with the Roman populace"). He tells "Ensign Morituri's Story" (474-9), which is, however, narrated in the third person. After failing to make it in Hollywood, Margherita returned to Germany. She was becoming convinced that she was part Jewish. She ended up in Bad Karma, with one Sigmund, for the mud cure--this famous mud being "hot and greasy with traces of radium." (475) Morituri, also visiting Bad Karma, learned from Sigmund of Margherita's strange absences; curious, he took to following her. One night he discovered she had been murdering Jewish children ("Little piece of Jewish shit. Don't try to run away from me."), burying them in the mud. Morituri rescued the last victim, but he did not report Margherita to the police. Next day, Margherita and Sigmund left Bad Karma.

His story over, Morituri tells of his longing to return to his home and family, when the Pacific war is over, "never to leave Hiroshima again" (480; cf. 693, below). Slothrop decides he has to get back to Bianca; but he learns she's disappeared, and Margherita has locked herself in the head. After finding a piece of Bianca's frock in the engine room (cf. 3: [22], below?), Slothrop confronts Margherita. And then, listening to her story (which is given to us, in a different form, in the chapter that follows), he is overcome by nausea (cf. the beginning of the Sodium Amytal fantasy in 1: [10], above?).

16. Scurrying up a ladder, Slothrop spots a Japanese gentleman, earlier noted in 3.14. He introduces himself as Ensign Morituri, of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Slothrop is, mysteriously, drawling (like Southern Gentry? Like the aristocracy? Like Them?). Morituri takes Slothrop aside and tells him a tale which fleshes out more of Greta Erdmann’s increasingly bizarre and sinister backstory. (Pynchon brackets the section with the header “ENSIGN MORITURI’S STORY,” even though it is a story he only really observes, and is retelling. NB: This chapter subheading reminds me of Mellville in Moby-Dick, who titles another story of a story being told as “The Town-Ho’s Story.”)

Erdmann had tried to make in Hollywood. She flopped, returned to Germany, and became suicidal. She becomes convinced that she is part Jewish, which spikes her paranoia (this being Germany circa about the mid-1930s, i.e. when things “were very bad”). She retired to the spa/sanatorium community Bad Karma (“bad” being the German for “bath” or “spa,” but the English connotations are obvious). There, she was to be observed by a especial in hysterics, named Sigmund (presumed to be Freud, naturally). But this Sigmund’s treatments don’t involve the talking cure, but a kind of radium-rich mud, into which patients are submerged. Morituri is also at Bad Karma at the time, which is how he knows all this. One evening he follows Erdmann out at night. Dressed in funerary blacks, a veil cloaking her face (not unlike the creepy stranger of 3.14) she snatches local Jewish children and drowning them in the mud baths. In a strange voice, “all actressy and false,” Erdmann proclaims herself Shekkinah (the Hebrew light of creation), and Israel, and God Himself (or Herself). She says her home is “the form of Light” (like the mysterious “Kirghiz Light” of 3.5, maybe). Morituri intervenes and saves this one boy, “the only known act of heroism in his career.” He tells Slothop he yearns to return to his home, in Hiroshima (we are in the interregnum between V-E Day and the atomic bombings, remember). For his part, Slothrop, rattled by Ensign Morituri’s Story, heads into the depths of the Anubis. Bianca has vanished. And Greta has secluded herself in a toilet. Slothrop attempts entry, but she, again, hysterical, and wary of Slothrop specifically. “But you’re one of Them.”

[17], 482-488. We begin with episodes from Greta's (here, "Gretel's") film career. For instance in Sandwüste von Neumexiko (cf. Roger?) she rode a colt named "Snake" (see 3: [5], above; small world). We move gradually to her memories of her visit, with Thanatz, to "the Heath." "Something was being planned, it involved the boy Gottfried." She left the firing battery with Blicero, who called her (natch) "Katje," for a building she agreed to call the "Castle," where she watched a meeting at a distance, including something gray, plastic--which, she was told, was for the "F- Gerät . . . or some letter." Dressed in an outfit of Imipolex, open at the crotch, and tied down, she submitted to one Drohne, wearing "a gigantic Imipolex penis over his own." She awoke much later, outside, naked and alone. The battery was abandoned, but something had happened there.

17. “It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be.” So it is said of Greta Erdmann, whose name, we now learn, may actually be “Gretel.” (Like the Gretel of the Brothers Grimm? Or the Gretel of Weismann’s game in 1.14?  Or the Gretel of the Hansel & Gretel “panto” Roger and Jessica attend in 1.21? Gretels abound, in any event.) A meditation on her career, and how she—as an actress, sure, but also as a person—could be shaped to the whims of whomever was doing the shaping. Compare this to Greta’s daughter, Bianca, a teenage (if that) plaything in a den of pervs. Compare also to Slothrop, whose own story concerns his desire to de-pawn himself; to be more than a stooge in schemes he can only faintly apprehend, but which he also seems to see everywhere. Pynchon seems to nudge us, the reader, into a similar, all-structuring paranoia. For example: this section reveals that, in the German cowboy movie Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko, Greta acted opposite “an American horse named Snake,” which is (randomly, or not) the name of Tchitcherine’s horse, as explained in 3.5. Are such things mere happenstance? (Recall the journey of Ricky Gutiérrez’s zoot suit from 2.6.) Obviously, these details are deliberate, i.e. on the part of our author, who is conscientiously “enplotting” them. But to what end? Are we—like Slothrop—supposed to be seduced into believing that all this stuff clicks together? Or is it just…stuff? Digressing, a bit! Sorry!

Anyway. We learn that, while in Berlin with Slothrop, Greta snuck out one night and spoke with a corpse, who told her the dead “live very far beneath the  black mud” (see: Ensign Morituri’s story, re: Greta and mud, in the previous section). (Also—and I know I’m digressing again, and this is trivia, okay okay, but just skip ahead if you’re bored by it, jesus…—Gravity’s Rainbow was translated into German by the Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek, whose alleged masterwork Die Kinder Den Toten, or Children of the Dead, is narrated entirely by corpses dissolving in mud. Also: I say “alleged masterwork” only because I have seen it described as such, i.e. as a masterwork, but have not myself read it, because it has not yet been translated into English, and because mein Deutsch ist nicht so gut.) Also in her travels to the rocket sites, Greta takes note of Gottfried, “the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero,” introduced in 1.14. She sees something of her own daughter in him. She tells Slothrop that “something” was being planned, involving Gottfried and a weird, resin-y smell. She spies a “meeting of nobles” in a base Blicero calls “The Castle.” There, she sees a gray, plastic device, which she believes is called the F-Gerät. Slothrop insists that it is his coveted S-Gerät. “All right, S,” Greta agrees. Just like that. At The Castle, Greta was dressed in a costume of form-fitting erotic plastic. She describes as a luxurious abyss, producing a void, a sense of nothingness. “This is Imipolex,” she is told, “the material of the future.”

[18], 488-491. As a storm batters the Anubis, Slothrop searches for Bianca. He is beginning to suspect that the "Schwarzgerät" is not a clue, but bait, manipulated by "Them." And he is changing: "He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him." (490) Thinking he sees Bianca going overboard, he lunges--and goes overboard himself.

18. Back on the Anubis. A storm rages. The sky is weirdly bright, when it should be night. “In the Zone, in these days, there is endless simulation.” The partygoers, the ship’s “screaming Fascist cargo,” stagger around, pushed hither and yon by some invisible confluence of evil and horniness. Slothrop sets out in search of Bianca. Reflecting on Greta’s story—about the S-Gerät, about the newfangled used of Jamf’s Imipolex—he begins to lose faith. He’s not the searcher. He’s the sucker. He’s being baited. And these ideas were planted in his head back at the Casino Hermann Goering. “Looks like there are sub- Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn’t.” They are shaping his very wants and desires, before Slothrop himself can even recognize them as such. Diabolical!

Here, Pynchon (beautifully, I think) described the acute of feeling of possibility being foreclosed; of the mind and heart and soul protectively drawing permitters around their own expansion. “But nowadays, some kind of space he cannot go against has opened behind Slothrop, bridges that might have led back are down now for good. He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him. He feels obligations less immediately. There is, in fact, a general loss of emotion, a numbness he ought to be alarmed at, but can’t quite…Can’t…” And so it trails off. (I love this bit.) Slothrop thinks he sees Bianca slip off the deck and into the water. He lunges into the water, soundlessly, in pursuit.

[19], 492-505. Slothrop is rescued by Frau Gnahb and her son, Otto, in a fishing smack. They are heading for Swinemünde. Arrived there, Slothrop uses his white chess knight (see 3: [12], above) to make contact with Der Springer, Gerhardt von Göll, the film-director-turned-black-marketeer from whom he hopes to obtain (or at least learn about) the "Schwarzgerät." Von Göll, Slothrop, and Otto are then joined by Klaus Närrisch (see 3: [13], above), who is now working for von Göll. Der Springer, after discussing the relationship of "elite and preterite," sings "Bright Days (Fox-Trot)" (495). They board Frau Gnahb's boat--together with musicians, chorus girls, vodka, and a troupe of performing chimpanzees--for an expedition up the coast. As they depart, Frau Gnahb sings her "Sea Chanty" (497-8). They are heading for Peenemünde. Närrisch and von Göll, in a pastiche of soap opera dialogue, discuss Tchitcherine (499-500)--who, they think, may be at Peenemünde himself. They are met, at the dock, by Russian soldiers, led by Major Zhdaev, who take von Göll away with them. Amid a growing chaos of Russians, musicians, chorus girls, and drunken chimpanzees (they got into the vodka), Slothrop, Närrisch, Otto, and Otto's girl (Hilde) go ashore, to rescue von Göll. Otto explains the Mother Conspiracy, and the Mother of the Year contest. (505)

19. CUT TO — Tyrone Slothrop has been pulled from the water, rescued by fishing boat captain called Frau Gnahb. She and her son, “The Silent Otto,” are, as luck would have it, also en route to Swinemünde. As luck —or fate, or some paranoid plot—would also have it, she’s acquainted with Der Springer, that king of the black market who, Slothrop believes, will have a line on the S-Gerät. The ship docks in Swinemünde, and Slothrop slithers back into his tux, which has shrunken and wrinkled. He looks like an idiot again, in other words. Armed with the knight chess piece acquired in 3.12 (I feel like I’m describing a desktop role-playing game or something…) Slothrop comes across Der Springer, and learns that his real name is Gerhardt Von Göll. (But we already knew that, from back in 3.8.) They link up with Klaus Närrisch, who (as Horst Achtfaden claimed in 3.13) may indeed have some decent intel re: the S-Gerät. Von Göll casually chases off some looming junk-mongers with a U.S. Army pistol, then raves about the relationship between the Elite and preterite: “we move through a cosmic design of darkness and light, and in all humility, I am one of the very few who can comprehend it in toto.” Must be nice!

There’s a song (a fox-tot about the boon in black market activity), sung for the benefit of those preterite Swinemünde locals, who appear as zombies, or ghosts. The gang—Slothrop, Von Göll, Närrisch, Otto— return to the boat, which is now heading for Peenemünde, the former Mecca of Nazi rocket testing. (We learn that Tchitcherine, too, may be at Peenemünde.) Frau Gnahb’s cargo consists of chorus girls, chimpanzees, and an actual boatload of vodka, Predictably, zaniness ensues. The waters are rocky. Everyone—including the chimps—gets drunk on the vodka. They arrive at Peenemünde to find it occupied by Soviet troops, led by a Major Zhadaev. They are in the process of assembling their own rocket. They detain Von Göll. The assault is broken up with the drunk chimps, who begin emitting long plumes of yellow vomit. Chaos ensues. And Slothrop and some others slip ashore, to man a rescue of Von Göll. Otto begins prattling on and on about something called “the Mother Conspiracy,” a yearly meet-up where all German mothers get together and collude on domineering tactics.

[20], 505-518. The makeshift rescue party prepares to attack the Soviet Assembly Building (a "holy center"). Slothrop, we learn, "has begun to thin, to scatter," in accordance with Mondaugen's Law: "Personal density . . . is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth." "And likewise groweth his Preterition sure." (509) He and Närrisch disarm a gay Soviet sergeant. Then they rescue von Göll who, being under Sodium Amytal, has to be dragged or carried. They meet, and change clothes with, Zhdaev and Tchitcherine. Frau Gnahb being late for the planned rendezvous, Närrisch falls back to hold off the pursuing Russians. When Frau Gnahb arrives they leave, but without Närrisch (Slothrop tries to go back for him, but he's forced into the boat).

We cut--via a brief evocation of the death of John Dillinger (516; cf. 368, above)--to Närrisch's point of view. He prepares for death, conceived as a kind of Brenschluss point: "B, B-sub-N-for-Närrisch, is nearly here." (518)

20. The Great Escape! Or…The Great Extraction? In a manic action sequence, Slothrop, Närrisch, Otto, Otto’s his new girlfriend, a gaggle of circus chimps—the “crashout party”—slink through the wastes of the former rocket sites to extract Der Springer. The rocket site at Peenemünde is described as a “holy center.” After all, Peenemünde (and especially Test Stand VII, the name of the actual rocket firing facility) were the heart of Nazi rocketry, at least until it was stormed by Red Army troops in May 1945. It’s in ruins now. All stripped and hollow. Slothrop fashions makeshift molotov cocktails out of vodka bottles stuffed with decorative feathers plucked from the chorus girls’ costumes. They’ll never work. But they imply, at the very least, the threat of violence. (Do they?) We learn of Kurt Mondaugen’s Law— Mondaugen, you’ll recall, was a rocket engineer and colleague of Franz Pökler, a practitioner of “electro-mysticism” who appeared in 1.19, and 3.11 and also as a character in Thomas Pynchon’s V.—which holds that “Personal density…is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” I always struggle with anything in this book that is vaguely math-y. (And if it’s explicitly math-y? Forget it.) The point here is that Slothrop “has begin to thin, to scatter.” He has trouble remembering his past, and even his present. His personal density is apparently thinning out, whatever that even means. (We’ll figure it out later, together.) In any event, he seems to be getting a bit confused. Asking questions and then forgetting what he was asking, totally blanking on his fakemolotovs being fake—behaviour that extends past even the typical “duh-duh” Slothrop dopiness.

Slothrop and Närrisch locate Der Springer, who is under the influence of “some kind of dope!” (Slothrop recognizes it as Sodium Amytal). The trio run afoul of Major Zhdaev and Tchitcherine. Tchitcherine greets Slothrop with an excited “Rocketman!” and asks him why he’s dressed like a fascist (i.e. in his fancy evening wear). Slothrop and Närrisch disarm/disrobe the Soviet, switching clothes with them—all the better to sneak out undetected. There’s a quick narrative detour to the capture and death of John Dillinger. (Dillinger was fatefully gunned down outside a cinema. Something to keep in the back of your mind, maybe?) Slothrop and Der Srpinger make it back to Frau Gnahb’s boat. Närrisch stays back, attempting to hold off Soviet pursuit. Despite Slothrop’s protestations, they motor away without him. So much for “no man left behind.” Huddled inside a broken drainage pipe, Närrisch reflects on his work at Peenemünde. “Did the S-Gerät program at Nordhausen in its time ever hint that so many individual nations, firms, communities of interest would come after the fact?” Närrisch himself begins to disperse, girding himself for death. He imagines himself as a rocket, reaching Benschluss (remember? From 3.2). Fuel has burned out. He belongs to external forces now. To the inexorable pull. To gravity.

[21], 519-525. Enzian and two Herero subordinates, Andreas and Christian, burst into an abandoned room. They are too late; Christian's sister, Maria, has already been abducted by Joseph Ombindi and the Empty Ones (see 3: [3], above), for an enforced abortion. As Enzian and his cohorts head for the (Jamf) refinery on motorcycles, Enzian begins to see the bombing of factories not as random destruction but as deliberate modification--"part of a plan both sides--'sides?'--had always agreed on." (520) The true War, he now speculates, was "dictated . . . by the needs of technology." (521; cf. 105, above?) Another song, "Just a daredevil Desox-yephedine Daddy" (522) At the refinery the motorcycle trio finds Pavel, Maria's husband, hallucinating, high from sniffing Leunagasolin. Again, Enzian thinks of his mission: to find the center (whether rocket, refinery, Volkswagen factory), the "true text." He fantasizes an address to all the assembled Erdschweinhöhle (see 1: [3], above): "My people, I have had a vision" (525; cf. M.L. King, Jr.?). "Somewhere," he thinks, formulating the ideology of his "new Search," ". . . is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom." (525) From Pavel, finally, the three Hereros get the address of "Ombindi's medical connection."

21. Here come the Zone-Herero! Enzian, Andreas, and Christian “coming on like Smith, Klein, ’n’ French…” (I had to look this up: Smith, Klein, and French was an American pharmaceutical company, acquired by a Belgian concern in the late-‘60s.) They, too, are engaged in a daring rescue. Or a would-be daring rescue. They’re trying to liberate Christian’s sister, who has been abducted by rival Herero leader Joseph Ombidini (from 3.3), who is trying to abort the jets insider her. Like a trio of Steve McQueens, they head out on motorbikes to track Ombidini to a refinery, formerly run by Laszlo Jamf.

Visions of the Zone being restructured, carved up by Allied forces. A British truck roams the streets with a speaker: “Clear the streets. Go to your homes.” As someone (Enzian?) wonders, “go to your what?” He begins to speculate that the bombings, and The War, were themselves fabrications. Not made up out of whole cloth. But just part of some larger scheme of modification and remodelling. “It all means the War was never political at all…” Enizian is going a little manic (he’s been gobbling down Nazi methamphetamine rations). He is becoming overwhelmed with a “paranoid terror.” He is “too encrimsoned in his feud with the Russian, to care much about anyone outside himself…” Encrimsoned! A practically Melvillean invention! At the refinery, they find Pavel, Maria’s husband and father of the fetus in question. He too, seems high; all sniffed-up on the refinery’s various ambient gasses. He finally reveals the address “of Ombindi’s medical connection,” i.e. the doctor who presumably has Maria. He’s in Hamburg, in Saint Pauli. They roll out.

[22], 525-532. Back on Frau Gnahb's boat, Slothrop, waking, berates von Göll for abandoning Närrisch: "Springer, this ain't the fuckin' movies now, come on." "Not yet," von Göll replies, and the narrative turns, briefly, into basic travelogue. In spite of his anger at the betrayal of Närrisch, Slothrop makes another deal with von Göll: he will pick up a package von Göll is after in return for discharge papers, to be delivered at Cuxhaven. They approach, ram, and board the Anubis (the package is on board). Slothrop is dispatched to the suddenly darkened engineroom, where he is attacked, and then bumps into "something hanging from the overhead. Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. . . . and the smell of . . . of . . ." (531; cf. 285, above?). When the lights come on he finds the package; but he does not look up. At Stralsund he leaves the boat, urging von Göll to get the papers to Cuxhaven soon.

22. Slothrop snaps to at sea, and proceeds to give Von Göll (now, curiously, identified in the text mostly as “The Springer” instead of “Der Springer”) an earful for abandoning Närrisch. Von Göll laughs off such flighty, chivalric concerns. He needs Slothrop to recover a package for him. In exchange, Slothrop asks for Von Göll to arrange his military discharge—more laughter. Slothrop wants to contact his old cronies in the British military. Why? Wasn’t he finally free of them? Is this an effort to restore his waning personal density, by tethering himself to outside forces, to other people? Whatever the case, Von Göll promises to deliver discharge papers to the North Sea town of Cuxhaven, where the British are apparently operating, “the only English connection to the Rocket any more.” Such papers will, naturally, make the British aware that Slothrop is, at the very least, for now, still out there.

Through heavy rain, Frau Gnahb spots a familiar ship. It’s the Anubis— the pederast cruise ship from 3.14. Von Göll’s precious cargo is on board. They set a collision course. They ram the ship and Slothrop scrambles on, “salty and buccaneering.” He makes it in the dark to the engine room. He begins losing himself again. He hears a voice (his own? But outside himself?) guiding him, reminding him how to use his body. He struggles with names. In the dark, he finds “something hanging overhead. Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea.” But there is another smell. Or smells… “perfume and shit and the smell of brine…and the smell of…of…” Of Imipolex G, I presume. Its familiar pong described earlier in 3.1. So? Is this poor Bianca? Dead and encased in Imipolex G? Slothrop finds Von Göll’s package, wrapped in brown paper. He grabs it, trying to avoid confronting what’s dangling in the periphery.

[23], 532-536. We cut to "The White Visitation." Brigadier Pudding died in June, of a massive E. Coli infection (contracted, presumably, during his sessions with Katje/Domina Nocturna--see 2: [4], above). Left alone, Katje finds the film that was shot of her, secretly, at Pirate's (see 1: [14], above--and cf. Katje, here, to Margherita Erdmann). She then screens a film of the octopus, Grigori, watching and responding to the first film (cf. Grigori, here, to Franz Pökler responding to Alpdrücken?--see 3: [11], above). Spliced to the end of this is a film of Osbie Feel, narrating into the camera the scenario of his film, "Doper's Greed" (534-5; is this, perhaps, a model of the narrative technique of the book we're reading?). Katje interprets "Doper's Greed" as an allegorical prophecy (as we, perhaps, are to interpret Gravity's Rainbow?) of Pointsman's fall. She leaves "The White Visitation" (cf. her departure from Blicero's Hansel and Gretel "game"?). Once again, she goes to Pirate's maisonette. Osbie is there, shooting up; Katje learns that they are getting organized, to work against Pointsman. "Dialectically, sooner or later, some counterforce would have had to arise." (536; NB. title of Part 4.)

23. We return, at long last, to “The White Visitation.” Just what’s been going on there, anyhow? Not a lot. Brigadier Pudding has died, of E. Coli, presumably from eating too much of Katje’s (or, uh, Domina Nocturna’s) shit, in those nauseating nightly rituals from back in 2.4. Pointsman is in London, attempting to keep his work going by taking drunken lunches with various wealthy industrialists (state funding, and states, doesn’t figure much anymore).  Katje herself is still there, and seems to just spend her days roaming the empty halls. She finds some film canisters—left for her by Webley Silvernail, maybe—that feature the footage of her shot by Osbie Feel in 1.14, which was in turn screened to condition Griogri the octopus, to prepare him for the Casino rescue in 2.1. There’s also footage of Griogri responding to the footage of Katje. Like Prentice’s fantasy-incursions from 1.1 and 1.2, this is another case of the author telling you how the book itself operates: the way scenarios zoom in, open up inside of one another, zoom out, etc.

Osbie’s reels also include a screen test, featuring Osbie himself. He’s outlining a scenario for a movie called Doper’s Greed, which stars Basil Rathbone and Hungarian actor S.Z. Sakall, along with “the Midget who played the lead in Freaks.” (Which one? Angelo Ristotto? Harry Earles?) It’s a western film, about cowboys who share hallucinations, perhaps attributable to psychoactive cacti. (This tightens my theory that Osbie is a stand-in, or riff on, LSD impresario Owsley Stanley.) Rathbone and Sakall’s characters endlessly debate whether to kill the midget, who is dressed as a sheriff. They decide to do it, and the sheriff hightails it out of there. Katje “knows a message when she sees it.” Rathbone is Osbie himself. Sakall is Pointsman. The midget is “the whole dark grandiose Scheme.” Osbie knows that Pointsman’s schemes are a dead-end. Pointsman/Sakall ends up falling off his horse in a trough. Katje gets the message. Pointsman’s downfall is assured. She leaves “The White Visitation,” and goes to visit Osbie and Pirate Prenitce, who are, indeed, plotting against Pointsman. A new “counter-force” has emerged. Note: in addition to the Owsley connection, we can potentially read Osbie as another stand-in for the author. His film for Katje is sort of like novel itself. “Read it allegorically,” he's saying. (Is there another way to read it?)

[24], 537-548. Pirate dreams (cf. 1: [1]? Is this, in some sense, a continuation of the dream that opens the book?) of arriving, as a "novice," at a kind of Guilt-Convention. Father Rapier discourses on Death and Them, on the hope "that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History." (540) It is a Purgatory (or maybe an Inferno) of former employees of the Firm, employees who have repented or "turned." (NB. to "turn" an agent, technically, means to convert him or her into a counter-agent, one who will then betray, covertly, his or her former "side." But cf. all the talk here about "turning"--e.g., "turn again" [544]--to T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"?) Pirate meets, among others, Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck (see 2: [3], above). He then comes to recognize that there can be, for him, no mercy, that he is doomed "to stay down among the Preterite, . . .impossible to locate or to redeem." (544) Katje arrives. There is debate about the guilt of Frans van der Groov (545; see 1: [14], above). "But the People will never love you," she says to Pirate, who is holding her, "or me. . . . Do you know where that puts us?" (548) They begin to dance, as do the others around them, dissolving "into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition." (548)

24. Pirate Prentice is dreaming, as he was at the book’s opening, in 1.1. He’s inside a “disquieting structure,” teeming with people. The space itself is many-layered and seems to spontaneously generate, as if it were wrought from organic matter, or some newfangled chemical polymer. People follow taffy-pulls that stretch out, seemingly to infinity. It’s some sort of heaven. Or purgatory. Or something. There are committees dedicated to the A4 rocket, self-defence, “Oil Firms,” etc. A priest called Father Rapier offers a sermon on Their plot. “We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests…”

Like Osbie Feel’s Doper’s Greed movie scenario, this dreamland seems conjured with some distinct purpose: it’s a hangout for various people who have turned against Them. Gerhardt von Göll is there. And Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. Dodson-Truck offers a vague lay of the land. Anyone entering this place must first grapple with tremendous shame and guilt. Dodson-Truck himself is now currently “involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill.” Pirate breaks down crying, confronting the possibility of a future where he does “without having helped a soul,” doomed “to stay down among the Preterite.” He then imagines himself among the Elect, watching tests of “the new Cosmic Bomb” (this was what the atomic bomb was called for a brief period after its initial deployment in Japan). Katje arrives now, inside the dream. (We know from the above, 3.23, that she is considering defecting.) She, too, is confronted by the guilt: of her ancestor, the prodigious dodo murderer Frans van Der Groov (whose story was outlined in 1.14). Together in this dream, Pirate and Katje dance together. The two of them “feel quite in touch with all the others as they move,” all united in their Preterition. They may be everywhere. But They cannot encroach upon the dreamworld of defectors.

[25], 549-557. Slothrop, wearing Tchitcherine's uniform (see 3: [20], above), is now walking alone in the Zone. "The Nationalities are on the move." The potato fields have been stripped by the SS, to make alcohol for the rockets. Slothrop dreams about Tantivy (551-2). He is becoming sensitive to the presence of animals, trees--which his family made money cutting down, for paper. "That's really insane," Slothrop says to himself (553). We are given his "Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period " (cf. 760, below?), and we learn of his meeting with a fat kid, Ludwig, who's looking for his lost lemming, Ursula (553; cf. the racial suicide program of the Empty Ones?). Slothrop reassures Ludwig (cf. 3: [10], above?) and joins him in his search. As they look for Ursula, Slothrop thinks about his "first American ancestor William," a dissenter from "the Wintrop machine" (cf. Amy Sprue, 329, above?). William fled from Boston to the Berkshires, where he raised pigs (cf. 3: [28], below?) with his son John. (NB. Nathaniel Hawthorne's first American ancestor was also named William, and also had a son named John. Is it relevant that the family whose history provides the subject of Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables is named "Pyncheon"?) William also wrote a theological treatise, burned in Boston, entitled On Preterition--which argued for the importance of "the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation . . . without whom there'd be no elect." (555) Because of orthodox hostility to this work, he moved back to England. "Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? . . . It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back" (556; cf. Enzian, 525, above?), via the temporary anarchy of the Zone. Slothrop gets separated from Ludwig in a town near the sea, when they chance upon--of all people--Major Duane Marvy, warming himself in front of a fire (see 3: [1], [2], and [4], above).

25. Back with Slothrop. In Tchitcherine’s liveries, he’s trekking north along the Baltic coast, to Cuxhaven, to receive his discharge papers, per his agreement with Von Göll in 3.22. He watches the displaced nationalities roaming the landscape, shambling home, or else just shambling. The potato fields have all been stripped by the SS. Not for food or vodka-distillation purposes. For rocket fuel. He dreams of the ghost of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, “his friend from long ago” (you’ll recall that Slothrop got news of his death in 2.7). Slothrop asks the ghost if he’s appeared to help him. “No, Slothrop,” the spectre replies. “Not you..” Who then? We see a list of Slothrop’s wishes offered to the night stars. One of them: “Let Bianca be all right, a-and—.” But don’t we know that Bianca is very much not alright, i.e. from 2.22? Or, as suggested by the stutter, is this simply knowledge Slothrop is trying to avoid confronting head-on. As if to atone for failing the child, Slothrop helps a chubby ex-Hitler Youth kid named Ludwig look for his missing lemming, Ursula. Ursula has acquired a mind of her own, and has darted across the landscape, solo. The comparison—between Slothrop and this suddenly liberated lemming—is probably self-evident.

Slothrop is visited by another ghost: that of his ancestor, William Slothrop. (As I understand it, much of this stuff riffs on Pynchon’s own ancestry.) We learn of William’s love of pig-herding, and of ambling the American countryside, shooting the breeze with whomsoever may cross his path. We learn of his heresies, published in a tract called On Preterition, wherein he claimed that the Elect and the Preterite are categories that create one another, and that Jesus Christ (patron of the Colonial Elect) would simply not matter were it not for Judas Iscariot, who reps the Preterite and trampled-underfoot. On Preterition become the first book not only banned, but burned, in Boston. The author mulls the implications of William Slothrop and his writings. “Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she limped the wrong way from?” (This section reads like a rough draft of Pynchon’s own 1997 colonial novel, Mason & Dixon.) We compare the possibilities of colonial America with those of The Zone, and the hope that, somewhere within it, someone will recover “a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up…” Pynchon considers the postwar landscape as a place of such profound possibility. We end with Slothrop and Ludwig coming across a little girl carrying bundle of contraband furs. They follow her to the basement of a church, where they find none other than Major Marvy, last seen, I believe, being socked with pies back in 3.4, when Slothrop was flying in a hot air balloon with Schnorp. Remember Schnorp?!?

[26], 557-563. Marvy--seeing the Russian uniform, and worried about his black market activities in the Russian zone--does not recognize Slothrop. With Marvy is Clayton ("Bloody") Chiclitz (a magnate, later in his career, in V. and The Crying of Lot 49), at this point into the black market, and manufacturer of such curious toys as "Juicy Jap" and "Shufflin' Sam." After declining a taste of Marvy's "Atomic Chile," Slothrop accompanies them on a visit to a rocket site, where he learns of their plan (with Tchitcherine) to raid a nearby Schwarzkommando camp at midnight. He sets out to find and warn the Schwarzkommando; he is also losing his ability to focus on his Schwarzgerät quest. At the camp he meets Andreas (Enzian is absent) and delivers his warning. He also tells Andreas what he learned about the Schwarzgerät from Thanatz and Margherita. Andreas explains the Herero mandala, and the relation of the Hereros' being "passed over" to their quest for the Rocket.

26.  But Slothrop’s old nemesis, weirdly, does not even recognize him. Maybe it’s the Russian uniform. Maybe it’s that “thinning out” noted in 3.20. In any event, he welcomes Slothrop—who adopts a Bela Lugosiish accent, in order to seem Russian (Lugosi is Hungarian, of course)— into his lair, and feeds him champagne and Atomic Chilli (an especially macho concoction, which is inedibly hot). Marvy is dispatching war orphans, like the little girl from the previous episode, to collect valuable wares, for sale on the black market. His partner is Clayton Chiclitz, a.k.a. Old Bloody Chiclitz. (Another character familiar to Pynchonheads: he appears in V., and as the head of the military mega-corp Yoyodyne in The Crying of Lot 49. Here, he is a modest manufacturer of racist children’s toys. We presume that his later lucre is attributable to his various exploitation rackets in The Zone.)

Among those rackets, Chiclitz and Marvy are scheming with Tchitcherine to raid a nearby Schwarzkommando base. Slothrop cannot abide that. Under the pretence of doing reconnaissance, Slothrop heads to the camp to warn the Zone-Herero of the imminent raid. Along the way, he begins to lose himself again. He can’t remember what he’s doing. Wasn’t he supposed to be the “hardboiled private eye,” drawing together all the loose threads around Jamf, Imipolex G, the S-Gerät, and his own personal history as an infant test subject? Now he feels only as if he’s “LOOK-IN’ FAWR A NEEDLE IN A HAAAAAY-STACK!” He reaches the camp (Enzian is not there) and warns them. Marshalling what’s left of his memory, he fills them in on Greta Erdmann’s story (from 3.17) about Blicero, the Heath, the S- Gerät, Imipolex G, and that young kid Gottfried. He tells them Erdmann's husband, Miklos Thanatz, may know more. Andreas, Enzian’s bosom buddy, explain the groups mandala logo to Slothrop: it is a merging of opposites that work together, and it is reflected in the four fins of the rocket, which accounts for the rocket’s place in the group’s presumed destiny.

[27], 563-566. With Marvy and Chiclitz, Tchitcherine has raided the Schwarzkommando camp, only to find it empty. He recalls what he learned from interrogating Närrisch (who was not killed after all). There was a special oxygen hook-up, from which Tchitcherine concludes that the "Schwarzgerät" was some sort of after-burner. He's also worried about the "Soviet intelligence officer" Marvy met (i.e., Slothrop, in Tchitcherine's uniform); do his superiors know about his vendetta against Enzian? Listening to Marvy and Chicklitz talk, Tchitcherine (like Enzian--see 3: [21], above) begins to suspect a conspiracy: "A Rocket-cartel transcending national boundaries, a "Rocket-state whose borders he cannot cross." (566)

27. Some info about the Schwarzgerät, extracted from a narcohypnotized Närrisch by Tchitcherine. Like: there was a one-way radio link from the ground to the S-Gerät, and a special oxygen line. An afterburner of some kind? Curioser and curioser…Tchitcherine, Marvy, and Chiclitz execute their raid on the Schwarzkommando camp. But— having been warned in advance by Slothrop—they’ve vamoosed.

Without any action, the three howl about post-war prospects. Tchitcherine’s worried about a court-martial by the Soviets, should they discover how his operations are being dictated by his personal vendetta against Enzian. Marvy and Chiclitz, meanwhile, serve higher powers: General Electric, IG Farben, the multinational corporate powers who are consolidating across the Zone. So much for the anarchic possibilities of post-War, mulled by Slothrop 3.25. What did Pasolini say? “Nothing is more anarchic than power”? Tchitcherine thinks back on Wimpe, the IG Farben man from 3.5. States are old-fashioned. A new superpower is emerging, a rocket cartel: “A structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it.”

[28], 566-577. Slothrop is on his way to Cuxhaven. Stairstep gables on the houses he passes lead the narrator (apparently) to a meditation on "film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Reminders of impotence and abstraction." (567) As he approaches a village, children tell Slothrop the legend of "Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero," who held off a Viking invasion in the tenth century. They ask him to take the part of the hero in their annual festival. This he does, next day, dressed in a pig suit. Later, the police brutally break up the village's black market (cf. the death of Peter Sachsa?--see 1: [18] and [19], 2: [3], above). Slothrop is rescued from the ensuing riot by a girl with whom he hides (cf. Bianca?), and who then helps him escape. Back on the road, alone, he befriends a fellow pig. Song: "A pig is a jolly companion." (575) Next day, they enter Zwölfkinder (see 3: [11], above). Slothrop meets the pig's owner, Pökler. Realizing suddenly that he's heard of Pökler (see 3: [1], above), Slothrop asks him about the Schwarzgerät. But Pökler, first, tells him about Ilse.

28. Slothrop is “floating on to Cuxhaven.” He arrives at a coastal town, near Wismar, on the eve of a festival of Schweinheldfest, dedicated to Plechazunga, “the Pig-Hero,” who helped these villagers rebuff a Viking invasion, way back in the 900s. But the local shoemaker, who usually dresses up as a pig for the festivities, did not return from the front. And so: Slothrop is press-ganged into embracing yet another identity, that of Plechazunga, a brightly coloured pig. The costume, the author notes “…seems to fit perfectly. Hmm.” (Compare this to the gifted zoot suit from 2.6, and the tux he’s fitted with on the Anubis in 3.14, which also “fit perfectly. Compare this also to the story in 3.25, about Slothrop’s ancestor, William, who sanctified pigs as avatars of preterition.)

During the festival, a riot breaks out, as cops bust up local black-market operations. Slothrop slips out with the aid of a young girl. “She is about seventeen, fair, a young face, easy to hurt.” (Echoes of Bianca here…) Out on the road, Slothrop (still dressed as Plechazunga) befriends a wandering pig, who he follows, singing a song about what “a jolly companion” a pig is. The pig leads him to, of all places, Zwölfkinder, the abandoned children’s amusement park, where Franz Pökler had his annual liaisons with his daughter (or daughter-dopplegänger), Ilse. And, sure enough, this pig, Frieda, belongs to Pökler, who is still there, idling in Zwölfkinder, where we last found him in 3.11. Light bulb. The name rings a bell. Slothrop unloads with his story about looking for the S-Gerät (Pökler can’t help there) and Imipolex G (“an aromatic polyimide”). Pökler tells Slothrop of Ilse, and thoughts of Bianca come rushing back. (The connections between Ilse and Bianca have been established, via their weird symmetry of their conceptions, unpacked in 3.10 and 3.11.)  “…still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams.” I admit I’m not 100% on what all this Bianca stuff is about. Her death a sort of loss-of-innocence, which Slothrop was unable to prevent—indeed, he took part in her exploitation and debasement, during his brief holiday as one of Them, back in 3.15. Is she a reminder of Slothrop’s own lapse (or conversion) into barbarism? Keine Ahnung!

[29], 577-580. Pökler tells Slothrop about Jamf's last phase, "National Socialist chemistry," which he confuses with memories of his film-actor idol, Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Central to the appeal of both are fantasies of brutally transcendent power. Klein-Rogge played Dr. Mabuse (a film projection of Hugo Stinnes--see 3 [1], above), "the savage throwback, the charismatic flash." (579) Pökler recalls Jamf's last lecture: "move beyond life toward the inorganic." (580) But Jamf himself stayed with carbon, and moved to America, "under the sinister influence of Lyle Bland" (Slothrop's "Uncle Lyle"--see, again, 3:[1], above).

29. Slothrop keeps pressing Pökler for info on the whole overarching Jamf-Imipolex-G-S-Gerät conspiracy. Pökler seems game, but he “keeps getting sidetracked.” He goes on and on about German movies (we know from 3.11 that his conception of reality has become increasingly cinematic…and ditto the prose of the novel, to an extent). He manages to tell Slothrop about a series of Jamf lectures he, Pökler, attended, when the eminent chemist was late in his life. The lectures fell into a madness, as Jamf railed against the centrality of carbon in our understanding of the universe, which he had begun to regard “as a cosmic humiliation.” He hated the covalent bond. It was a kind of “National Socialist chemistry,” which regarded chemists as roaring lions, “eternal predator[s].”

Pökler begins muddling up these lectures with memories of Rudolf Klein-Rogge, a German film star who played a mad scientist in Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis (a film which, with its triumph of classicism and science, offered a model utopia for a young Pökler). Klein-Rogge also played the super-sinister Dr. Mabuse, a cunning hypnotist who appeared in a series of popular German films. Like Mabuse, Laszlo Jamf seemed oriented “toward a form of death that could be demonstrated to hold joy and defiance.” This echoes with the spirit of Walter Ratthenau, who warned back in 1.19 that death was perfecting its reign. Jamf wanted to move beyond the organic, to the world of pure synthesis. Of pure death. Chemistry as fascist death cult. (“Fun” fact: the Italian futurists, who were big-time fascist cheerleaders, imagined a revamped culinary culture that traded heavy pasts and grains for edible plastics, a particularly Jamfian fantasy.) Jamf, we learn, never actually made the leap to the world of synthetics, the world beyond carbon. He was recruited and dispatched elsewhere, to America, “under the sinister influence of Lyle Bland. Remember him? Lyle Bland? “Uncle Lyle”? You know: from 3.1, the industrialist with deep ties to the Slothrop clan, and to Infant Tyrone, especially. Well, get ready for more of Uncle Lyle’s adventures!

[30], 580-591. (The story of Lyle Bland and the Masons.) We learn about Bland's "nefarious tricks," including covert encouragement of "genital obsession" among workers. His business downfall began when he befriended Alfonso Tracy, Princeton '06, who had been stuck by the Chicago mob with a consignment of wildly messed-up pinball machines. Visiting the Masonic Temple at Mouthorgan, Mo., to see the machines, Bland then calls in his German "expert," Bert Fibel--who works for General Electric in Pittsfield, Mass., as Bland's agent (to keep an eye on local boy, Tyrone Slothrop). Fibel fixes the machines, which is how Bland joined the Masons; they gave him membership out of gratitude. We then learn something of the history of the Masons, as a conspiratorial force behind much of American History (587-8). They have now lost touch with their former magic, becoming simply a businessman's club, but Bland gets in touch with the old magic. He learns to leave his body. He took to leaving it for longer and longer periods. Getting into it he finds "that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody" (590; his mysticism is compared to that reported by the late Walter Rathenau to Carroll Eventyr--see 1: [19], above). Finally he announced to his family: "Tonight, I am going out for good." And he did.

30. Filling in some blanks now, re: Lyle Bland, and the various globalscale conspiracies and cartels that involve him. You’ll recall from 3.1 that Bland became quite wealthy during the Weimar era, by printing his own currency to distribute in interwar Germany. (The printing of the actual notes was undertaken by the Slothrop Paper Company.) He tasks a German agent, Bert Fibel, with keeping a close eye on Infant Tyrone. Via his various institutes and foundations, Bland “has had his meathooks well into the American day-to-day since 1919.” He singlehandedly stifled planes for a 100-miles-per-gallon carburetor. His business operations extend across America, Europe, and god-knowswhere-else. His resume is like that Stonecutters’ song from The Simpsons (“Who controls the British Crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do!”). Indeed, Bland consolidated much his power as a high-ranking member of the Masons, formerly a Stonecutters’-like secret society that had become, by Bland’s time, basically a businessman’s club. Bland is made a Mason as a courtesy, after he fixes a bunch of busted pinball machines at a Masonic clubhouse in Missouri. The author indexes various conspiracies regarding the Masons and their shaping of American life, which shaping Bland seems to be himself capable of, pretty much singlehandedly. (For more on such conspiracies, the author refers the reader to Ishmael Reed. Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo, about a Harlem vodoun preacher facing off against the nefarious internationalist “Wallflower Order,” was published in 1972, just a year before Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t know novels were allowed to do this.)

Basically bored with the Mason’s business activities, Bland commits to reviving some of the old magic in its rituals. He learns to hallucinate, or astral project. He lays down on his davenport sofa and is able to travel elsewhere, in time and space. “Old magic had found him.” Max Weber wrote about the “progressive disenchantment of the world. Bland is attemtping something like re-enchantment. He begins to regard history as the mind of the Earth. It has layers, metaphysical layers of past-ness, that are not too different from the planet’s nesting geological veneers. His travels invest him with a form of amorality, “past secular good and evil.” Again: like the ghost of Rathenau that communes with Peter Sachsa in 1.19. The description of this process also recalls “The Cause”: the past life regression cult from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. (Anderson, of course, wrote and directed an adaptation of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice; and an early draft of The Master included a sequence where its protagonist, mentally ill ex-navy sailor Freddie Quell, hunts alligators in the sewers, like Benny Profane in V., Pynchon’s first novel.) One night, Bland says his goodbyes to his family. “Tonight, I am going out for good.” And he seemingly takes off forever. Dies? His wife covers his face (“serene”) with an old drape.

[31], 591-610. Doctors Muffage and Spontoon are in Cuxhaven. They're working for Pointsman--who, Muffage thinks, is "losing his grip." And they're looking for Slothrop--who, they learn from a British corporal, is in town, wearing a pig suit. At an alcohol dump, the fuel now fuelling a party, Seaman Bodine (see 3: [6] and [8], above) is promoting a runciple spoon fight. Slothrop's nearby, in a trailer, still wearing his pig suit. As the police close in he escapes with one Albert Krypton. They find Bodine who--the runciple spoon fight over--flees with them, the MP's (and Muffage and Spontoon) in hot pursuit. They hijack a Red Cross canteen truck, which takes them to a barcasino-opium den-whorehouse, "Putzi's," where Slothrop hopes to meet up with Der Springer. Bodine introduces Slothrop to a whore named "Solange," who offers to take him to the baths. She explains to a by now very paranoid Slothrop that the Zone is not one Plot but, as he reflects, "a network of all plots," which "may yet carry him to freedom." (603) As they head for the baths Bodine goes off to make a cocaine delivery--to, as it turns out, Major Marvy. Marvy then gets set up with a Spanish whore (a victim of Franco), Manuela, who hangs his uniform in a closet and leads him to the baths. An MP raid is suddenly announced; Marvy, fleeing, finds only Slothrop's pig costume in the changing room. He puts it on, and is then captured. He is taken off in an ambulance, in which Muffage and Spontoon--thinking he's Slothrop--remove his testicles, for Pointsman. Marvy, too, as "Slothrop," is to be taken back to Pointsman.

Meanwhile, back at Putzi's, Slothrop is asleep in bed with Solange, dreaming of Zwölfkinder and Bianca. "Solange," who is in fact Leni Pökler, is also dreaming--of her Bianca, Ilse. "Leni's early dream for her is coming true. She will not be used." (610) Upstairs, one Möllner explains to Bodine that von Göll is very busy; there are, in any case, no papers (the discharge von Göll promised to Slothrop--see 3: [22], above) for the sailor's friend.

31. In Cuxhaven, we meet two bungling doctors, Muffrage and Spontoon. They have been tasked by our old nemesis Pointsman with tracking down, and castrating Slothrop. (Unclear if this mutilation is purely punitive, or has something to do with the rocketpredicting/dousing abilities of Slothrop’s bits-and-bobs, which Pointsman still takes for granted as legitimate, despite the discoveries of the SEZ WHO team from back 2.8.) They know that Slothrop has been spotted in a “[b]ig bloody pig suit,” and track him down to a local alcohol dump (a depot for Nazi rocket fuel, which is now being used as moonshine for an endless, sinister, weird party, which will dominate the bulk of the chapter), military policemen in tow. Seaman Pig Bodine is back. And, with a guy named Albert Kyrpton, they hijack a Red Cross truck and escape the MP raid.

They head to Putzi’s, an expansive brothel-mansion, where a party rages. Slothrop meets a woman named Solange, who is really Leni Pökler, last presumed (by me, anyway, and I think by her hubby, Franz) dead in the Dora camps, back in 3.11. She builds out Slothrop’s anarchic vision of The Zone, introduced in 3.25. As she tells Slothrop, attempting to ease his paranoia, “the arrows are pointing all different ways.” The Zone represents a panoply of plots, a tangle of possibilities. At Putzi’s, everyone is doing cocaine, and things are very weird. In the darkened baths, a naked Major Marvy (yep, he’s there, too) accidentally puts on Slothrop’s pig costume, just as the place is raided. He’s dragged off, and parted from his testicles, under the assumption that he’s Slothrop. Slothrop sleeps with Solange/Leni, and the two dream of the irrevocably entwined daughter-figures, Ilse and Bianca. Slothrop learns that Der Springer has not arranged for his forged discharge papers, queering the deal they struck in 3.22.

[32], 610-616. Tchitcherine has traced Weissmann's rocket battery to the Lüneberg Heath; but what he has found there is the set of Martin Fierro (see 3: [8], above), which he's never read. But the singing-duel is now being filmed, and he recognizes its similarity to the one he saw in Central Asia, on the way to the Kirghiz Light. He knows that Weissmann in fact fired the 00000 rocket nearby. But now he must wait; "there is a counterforce," he believes, "in the Zone." He hopes he might meet Enzian here. Felipe--one of the Argentine anarchists involved in the filming of Martin Fierro--meditates (in the cinematic terms that have become popular in the group) on the true nature of history (612-13). This set, we learn, will remain as a permanent village. And we learn about new, strange villages springing up in the Zone, including the Hund-Stadt, populated by trained killer-dogs who, since their masters have died or disappeared, cannot be pacified. A study on how to induce factionalism (master-cults) among these dogs, in order to facilitate the re-taking of the village, has been contracted to Pointsman. He is now in official disgrace, since the castrating of Marvy. Clive Mossmoon (see 1: [5] and 2: [4], above) and Sir Marcus Scammony discuss what is to be done about Pointsman--and about "the American" (i.e., Slothrop). Sir Marcus's "idle and bitchy faggotry" is contrasted with the loving homosexuality of the World War I battlefields (cf. Pudding's memories, 2: [4], above?). "Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper." (616)

32. Our long, strange trip through The Zone is coming to an end. Tchitcherine has traced Weismann’s 00000 rocket squad from Holland to Lüneburg Heath, north of Hamburg. But nobody’s there. Well, not rocket-wise. Instead, he finds Von Göll and Squalidozzi’s production of the Argentine epic, Martín Fierro. He watches a singing-duel between two actors, one white and one black. It reminds him of his own time Central Asia (from 3.5), and of his imminent duel with Enzian. He worries he may be dragged out of The Zone by the Soviet command before he has a chance to confront his half-brother and nemesis. One of the Martín Fierro actors reflects on the thinking of rocks and minerals, and how most of history is buried and untold, settled underneath the crust of an official narrative, like geologic layers. (This recalls Lyle Bland’s conception of history from 3.30. And also, Gravity’s Rainbow itself could be regarded as such a historiographic project: an imagined excavation/alternate history of the Second World War, and the whole long 20th century. Literary critic Edward Mendelson called it an example of an “encyclopedic narrative.” That is, a novel that making an effort “to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge.”)

The Martín Fierro set will apparently become a permanent community The Zone. Ditto communes of Hasidic Palestinians—Pynchon does not use the word Israelis, as the State of Israel did not exist during the time of the book’s setting, though of course it had during the course of his writing—sprouting up in Italy, and company towns dedicated solely to mail delivery (cf: the postal monopoly conspiracies of The Crying of Lot 49). There’s also a village occupied exclusively by roving packs of killer dogs, which is being examined by none other than Pointsman. He’s been disgraced in the wake of the botched castration (from the previous chapter) and is apparently back to the more limited canine behaviourist studies he was conducting way back in 1.7. Speaking of throwbacks: Clive Monsoon, former benefactor of “The White Visitation” is mulling Pointsman, and Slothrop. Big reveal: Slothrop’s real “function” in The Zone was to eliminate Enzian and the Schwarzkommando. This makes sense, given his seeming obsessions with “blackness,” from the Roseland fantasy of 1.11, to his investigation by Tchitcherine in 3.9, to the Schwarzgerät hunt, etc. They were trying to weaponize Slothrop’s own good old fashioned American racism against the subversive enemy they created. Diabolical. The chapter, and section, ends with a reflection on the death of chivalry and camaraderie in war. Mossmoon reflects, in an archly romantic way, on the killing fields of The Great War: “while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved.” Now love has been replaced by more purely carnal pleasures, and the sort of rank horniness that pervades in the novel. (Compare this with Brigadier Pudding, whose own shit-eating rituals are tied, psychologically, to muddy trenches of Passchendaele.)

00000. Their rocket, the 00001, has been assembled, and is ready for lift-off. The colonial subjects have finally descended upon the secret base of their former overlords: “a Diaspora running backwards, seeds of exile flying inward in a modest preview of gravitational collapse.” There’s a weird story about “the kid who hates kreplach.” His mother shows him how to make the little pastries, and he follows along gamely. But as soon as the pastries are folded into the triangular shape recognizable of kreplach, the kid freaks out. It’s an allegory, maybe, for Enzian and his gang. They gamely followed their plan, but are getting queasy at the last moment. As soon as the rocket becomes the rocket, they lose their nerve.

We also hear of Slothrop, whose status as folk hero is certified. More than that, he has become a kind of holy figure, and interpretations of his life have created schisms inside The Zone. He was supposed to be there, at Lüneburg, at this appointed time—presumably to thwart them. “He is being broken down instead, and scattered.” We learn that Dr. Laszlo Jamf may be (like Slothrop’s own rocket map) a fiction: a way of helping Slothrop rationalize his own erotic responses to the rockets, and to the prospect of “his race’s death.” (How does this square with independent verification of Jamf’s existence, such as that given by Pökler in 3.29? And doesn’t Slothrop visit Jamf’s grave at one point?)

Seaman Bodine remains one of the only people able to “see” Slothrop, “even as a concept.” He gives Slothrop a bloodied scrap of John Dillinger’s shirt, the one he was wearing the night he was shot in Chicago. (The killing of Dillinger, another American folk hero of sorts, was previously described in 3.20.) Barely a phantasm Slothrop all-but disappears: from the world, and from the text. His scattered embers (or sparks?) have developed into their own personae. We learn of his last “appearance,” on the back cover of a ‘60s rock album by an English group called The Fool. We also hear a kind of Slotropian mantra: “The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death.” Surely, our hero’s scattering qualifies. There’s a reading of Slothrop’s tarot, too. It is incomplete.

At a convention of village idiots, Džabajev (a former companion of Tchitcherine, during his Eurasian excursion circa 3.9) and other sidekick/fool-types, who are themselves perhaps Slothrop-offshoots, are rallying for nation-state status. Using a large hypodermic needle, they begin injecting wine to get high. The high is called a “wine rush,” and anyone who partakes defies gravity, and breaks in two. These bifurcated, fucked-up state apparently transports Džabajev to the elevator from the chapter’s beginning, and produces the final sub- sections of the novel. Which proceed as follows: THE OCCUPATION OF MINGEBOROUGH: The ancestral Massachusetts home of Slothrop (and Lloyd Nipple!) is set upon by soldiers of unknown alliance. This glimpse of a future also allows glimpses of Slothrop’s past; his quiet life waiting for the school bus, and courting a girl named Marjorie. Whether it’s a military occupation from outside forces, or merely soldiers returning home, is unclear. But one thing is certain: for Slothrop, there’s no path home, no way back to this Rockwellian idyll.

BACK IN DER PLATZ: In Säure Bummer’s lair, where the layabouts are smoking hash. Gustav (last seen scoring the Cuxhaven cannibal party that Bodine and Mexico mess up in 4.8) is smoking hash from a kazoo. He notices that the threads above the reed match those of a light socket. And so, he screws in a lightbulb—“none other than our friend Byron” (from 4.3). He watches a film, New Dope, by Gerhard von Göll. Not a film but dailies from a film that Der Springer will never finish. It’s about a new kind of dope. And it’s part of a “reverse world.” Agents run backwards, away from dopers. Bullets are sucked back into guns. Corpses come back to life. (An inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet perhaps?) Cause-and-effect undone, again. Within the film, we see that Der Springer has become a “sodium amytal freak,” muttering and mad, sitting on an infant’s training toilet.

WEISSMANN’S TAROT: What it sounds like: a reading of Weissmann’s tarot, which came up “better than Slothrop’s.” It’s pretty selfexplanatory, I assume. Maybe refer to A.E. Waite’s book on tarot if you want more info. (This stuff can give me a headache, sorry.)

THE LAST GREEN AND MAGENTA: We are on the Heath. But it’s spring now. Time for the 00000 launch.

THE HORSE: A horse watches on. Horses used to be political sacrifices. Now they are tools of the state. “The sacrifice in the grove is beginning.” And the horse watches on. He (or she) has been spared. It’s Gottfried’s big day.

ISAAC: More mysticism, This time Kabbalah: the mystical branch of Judaism which was revived in the 1960s, along with sundry other “New Age” modalities. Is Gottfried Isaac? Sacrificed to Weissmann, as perverse, Abrahamic primal father? Or is the 00000 itself the sacrifice? Something, we are told, is ascending to the Merkabah, which is the throne or chariot of God in Jewish mysticism. Magic is about to return to the world. Bring it on!

PRE-LAUNCH: Weissmann’s all gung-ho for the launch. Gottfried is dressed in all white. “Deathlace is the boy’s bridal costume.” He is gagged with a white glove, and jammed into the womb of the 00000. “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…” So: mystery solved. It’s not about the sacrifice of Gottfried or the rocket. It’s about the sacrifice of Gottfried as rocket. Gottfried is the Schwarzgerät. (Dressed in all white, of course. Another inversion, and perversion.)

HARDWARE: More details on the 00000/Gottfried combo. The IG- Farben engineers have fitted the rocket with a sapphire window, through which the boy can see. He is fitted with a small in-ear headphone, through which he can hear Weissmann’s mad coos.

CHASE MUSIC: A melancholic bit of po-mo fun, as a string of fictional heroes—Superman, The Lone Ranger, Submariner, Phillip Marlowe, Plasticman (Slothrop’s favourite, from 2.3), and, most obscurely, Marvel comics detective Sir Denis Naylund Smith—attempt to intervene to stop the rocket. But they are, for the first time ever, “too late.” Cut to Pointsman (last seen, in any real way, in 4.2), who is also too late. He’s withering away in some ministry somewhere. He misses his dogs. But he is not built for this world. He is left with the cold comfort of Cause and Effect.

COUNTDOWN: Quick riff on the standardized rocket countdown. You know: 10…9…8…etc. Pynchon locates the origin of this convention in Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent short Frau Im Mond. As explained by a Kabbalah scholar named Steve Edelman, the rocket countdown can be compared to the ten distinct aspects of the Sepiroth in the Kabbalah: mystical configurations the soul must master to return to God.

STRUNG INTO THE APOLLONIAN DREAM: Gottfried in the 00000, in a shroud made of Imipolex-G. Voices buzz in his ear, “like the voices of surgeons, heard as you’re going under ether.” The familiar smell (described at length in 3.22, and elsewhere) calms him.

ORPHEUS PUTS DOWN HARP: Weird flash-forward (?) into the present (i.e. of the novel’s writing and publication, roughly). News report about a vaguely Nixon-ish L.A. movie theatre manager named Richard M. Zhlubb, who is complaining about sourceless harmonic music being played in the theatre’s lineups—Slothrop, or what’s left of him, naturally. Zhlubb rails against the hippies and beatniks and troublemakers He is nicknamed the Adenoid, like the sci-fi creature of Prentice’s fantasy from way back in 1.2. We are coming full-circle, or close to it. In the L.A. traffic, Zhlubb passes a funeral and gets teary. He describes his fantasy of dying in traffic, smothered by a dry-cleaning bag that floats in the window. A weird death. Suddenly: a siren. Very loud. “I don’t think it’s a police siren.” Shift to the second-person POV: “Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio.” A screaming comes across the sky… THE CLEARING: Blastoff. The 00000 is up, up and away. Weissmann, curiously, is now referred to as Blicero. He becomes Dominus Blicero, Death Incarnate, with the rocket launch. He has a huge hard-on, naturlich. He comes in his trousers as the rocket takes off.

ASCENT: “The ascent will be betrayed by Gravity.” What goes up…after all. At this climactic event Pynchon’s own mastery of language seems to clarify into a crystalline form. There is no mystery or metaphor anymore. “The knife cuts through an apple like a knife cutting an apple.” The rocket hits the apex of its trajectory, the Brennschluss described in 3.2. “Gravity dips away briefly.”

DESCENT: Back in Zhlubb’s Orpheus Theatre, and the crowd has grown restless. The cinema screen has gone white. Filmgoers chant, “Start the show!” An image of a falling star, an angel of death. Fear strikes the audience. A rocket—the rocket?—dangles over the audience, “the last delta-t.” In this moment before death, people clasp hands, or fondle themselves. They join together, singing a long-lost hymn by none other than Slothrop’s ancestor, William, the heretical philosopher of preterition described in 1.4, 3.25, and elsewhere. The crowd (and reader) are cajoled to sing along. “Now everybody—”

Like the Floundering Four crawling into the audience in 4.6, Gravity’s Rainbow ends (I believe) with the 00000 rocket passing through space, time, and layers of ontological reality, destroying us: the reader, in the real-world in which the novel was written and received. I won’t riff too much on my interpretation of the ending and all that (not now, anyway), but I think this is why the novel merely ends. Because the rocket is destroying not the world of the novel, but our world, there is nobody and nothing outside to continue writing, and receiving it. That’s what I think, anyway. The other option is that the rocket fall is the “Screaming” that opens the book, which Prentice dreams of. The story loops back on itself. There is only the interiority of the novel, which may all be a dream inhabited by Pirate Prentice. I find this idea massively less satisfactory, in part because “it was all a dream…” interpretations are always cheap and dorky. The collapsing of different levels of reality is something that Pynchon stages throughout the novel. And so I find it more compelling that the book would end with a final destruction: not just a terminating bomb drop, an extinction of all humanity. Slim Pickens yahoo-ing, riding the Dr. Strangelove rocket, ripping through the screen and immolating the whole wide world. That’s an ending.

[1], 619-626. Bette Davis, Margaret Dumont and Tyrone Slothrop (waking) hear the overhead passage of a P-47 Thunderbolt ("it sounds . . . like a kazoo"), piloted by Pirate Prentice. Others (Osbie Feel, Webley Silvernail, Katje) are also on Slothrop's trail. Since V-E day Pirate has lost "his odd talent for living the fantasies of others," but he's still "haunted" by Frans van der Groov (see 1: [14], above). Beneath him, Gustav and Säure Bummer (see 3: [12], above) are still arguing about Beethoven vs. Rossini (621-2). Slothrop, elsewhere in the Zone, finds his harmonica, soaking in a stream--the same harmonica, in fact, that he lost at the Roseland Ballroom in 1938 or 1939 (see 1 [10], above); but he doesn't remember. "Yup, still thinking there's a way to get back . . . America. Poor asshole, he can't let her go." (630) Eventually, wandering, drawing diagrams of the rocket as graffiti, "he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads." (625) He dreams of a dog, killed by the noise (cf. the rocket?) as he retrieves a mandrake-root for a magician (cf. Pointsman?). Then (as it will be put later) he is "dispersed"; he "sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth [cf. 693, below?], green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural." (626)

1. OK lil pards, this is when the book all comes together, and falls apart, and things get extremely weird/tricky. Let’s just move slow and steady. Starting with Slothrop (who isn’t long for this world, not really) dreaming of actresses Bette Davis and Margaret Dumont. They hear the sound of a kazoo. Well, not a kazoo, but the engine squeal—a sort of whining coming across the sky…—of a hijacked, Kelly green P-47 fighter plane, flown with abandon by Pirate Prentice, who has made his way into The Zone, along with the rest of the Counterforce (Katje, Osbie, Webley, and so on). Pirate whizzes over Berlin, where Säure Bummer is (still) arguing Beethoven v. Rossini. Since the War ended, Pirate has lost his “odd talent for living the fantasies of others.” His own fantasies are haunted by the spirit of Frans van der Groov, the dodo murderer last heard from in 3.24. Now, it’s Slothrop dreaming of Pirate.

Slothrop, scrambling through a stream, finds his old harmonica, that “jive accessory” that went kerplunk into the toilet at the Roseland ballroom, back in Boston, way back inside the flashback in 1.10. The hell is it doing here? Meanwhile, Slothrop himself has gone feral. His hair and beard are long. Ants crawl all over him, and butterflies land on his shoulders, like some scuzzy Disney Princess. He still hasn’t gotten his discharge papers. He’s at a loss, rudderless, having (it seems) finally forgotten about Jamf, and the S-Gerät, and all those marching orders that were already getting fuzzy back in 3.26. No more paranoia. Only augury, as he reads fish guts for clues. He has moved past those heady days where “he could make it all fit.” In a public toilet, among the graffiti he sees a scrawl: ROCKETMAN WAS HERE. He stencils his own graffiti, with the edge of a rock: a rocket, seen from below, which looks like a bit like a bullseye, or a mundane cross. Laying spread eagle on the ground, Slothrop, “becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection.” He ejaculates, and the sperm dribbles down into the centre of this cross, and transforms into a mandrake root, a hallucinogenic perennial, which is, on the following Friday, dug up by a magician who stalks the land with “a coal-black dog.” (I am assuming the magician is meant to be Pointsman, or a version of him. In A.E. Waite’s guide to the Tarot, the magician is viewed as a vulgar mountebank.) The Magician is facing inquiries about capital and inflation from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes (CIA), but is busy with his folkloric alchemy.

The chapter ends with Slothrop, somewhere in The Zone, seeing “a very thick rainbow, a stout rainbow cock drive down out of pubic clouds into the Earth.” It resembles the titular arc of the rocket—Gravity’s Rainbow. And Slothrop feels changed: “his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…”

[2], 626-640. Roger Mexico (been a long time, hasn't it?) is driving on the Autobahn. He recalls Jessica's last visit to "The White Visitation," his own need (which, however, wanes at times) to do "what's right" about Slothrop--whom Jessica regards mainly as a monster. The war over, Jessica was leaving--and left, to go to Cuxhaven, with Beaver (see 1: [16], above). Milton Gloaming (see 1: [5], above), back from the Zone, filled Roger in on "the great struggle for the IG's intelligence machinery" (630), to which Slothrop seemed quite important. Mexico arrives (still a flashback here, but now in the present tense) at Twelfth House, to confront Pointsman. Geza Rózsavögli (a "White Visitation" veteran) is there, in the reception room; backed into Pointsman's "shadow-corner," he enters a bizarre Hawaii fantasy (634-5; a Slothropian "appearance"?--note the language, and cf. Slothrop's shirt, 2: [1], above?). Mexico finds Pointsman in the office of Clive Mossmoon (see 1: [5], 2: [4], above), where a meeting is in progress.

He leaps on the conference table, and pisses all over the assembled elite--except Pointsman, whom he curses, elaborately. Then, after escaping, he goes to Pirate's, to be told about "Creative Paranoia," the need to combat the "They-system" with a "We-system." "Well," replies Roger, "you're playing Their game, then." (638) Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck is there (see 2: [3], 3: [24], above); we learn about the fate of his wife, Nora (see 1: [18], above): she has identified with Gravity, and become victim to practical jokes from her friends. (639) Thomas Gwenhidwy (see 1: [17] and [20], above) is also there. And in spite of his doubts, Roger joins them. Which is why (back to this chapter's opening "present") Roger is on the Autobahn, driving into Cuxhaven.

2. Who’s this zipping down the Autobahn? It’s none other than our old friend Roger Mexico, last seen way, way back in 2.8 picnicking at “The White Visitation.” He’s flashing back, and we go with him. First to Jessica, who has left him, cut her hair, and fled to Cuxhaven to reunite with her boring old beau Jeremy Beaver. Roger and Jessica were a product of the War. And now that that’s over, so are they. Dommage, as the French say. He learns of Slothrop’s wanderings in The Zone, and feels compelled to help him. Mexico visits Pointsman at a new PISCES offices, called Twelfth House. (Astrologers will tell you that Pisces in the "twelfth house of the Zodiac,” if you go in for that sort of thing!) Mexico freaks out in front of the staff, entering some bizarre Hawaiianinfluenced reverie. It’s like he’s possessed. By Slothrop perhaps? He was wearing a multicoloured Hawaiian shirt, during his daring (staged) rescue of Katje back in 2.1. Anyhoo. Pointsman’s not there, so Mexico tracks him down to a meeting at Clive Mossmoon’s office. He barges in and, very un-Mexico-like, pisses all over the desk, humiliating Pointsman in front of his superiors. He curses his former boss, vowing to haunt him his entire life.

Free from Pointsman, with nothing but “a pocket full of spare change and anger unlimited,” Mexico heads to Pirate Prentice’s. There, he finds the assembled Counterforce: all the usual suspects (Prentice, Katje, Webley, Osbie) as well as Stephen Dodson-Truck, Thomas Gwenhidwy (one of the remaining owners of the mysterious book from 1.17, and theorizer of The City Paranoiac in 1.20). It’s a sort of “Avengers Assemble” sequence, in which all the outcasts and weirdoes join together. Prentice schools Roger on the need for a “We-system” to combat the “They-system.” A We-system is more anarchic, more (to use a slightly-annoying contemporary phrase) “random” than the reasonable, interlocking They-system. And Roger buys it. Cut back to him racing down the Autobahn to Cuxhaven, singing about bringing down Their system. “This isn’t resistance, it’s war.” Truly one of those chapters that just absolutely fills my damn heart to the brim. Which, again!, I don’t know if the author is necessarily world-renowned for drumming up such feelings. But he can! He can drum ‘em up! I mean, come on: Osbie Feel grooving around with his gut hanging out, which gut is stamped with a Porky Pig tattoo. Is this not the image of Pynchonian preterition?

[3], 640-655. In Thuringia, at night, Pfc. Eddie Pensiero, "amphetimine enthusiast" and expert reader of shivers, is giving a haircut to his colonel. An overhead bulb is kept lighted by a hand generator, cranked by Paddy ("Electro") McGonigle, an expert reader of strobing frequencies. They hear somebody "playing blues on a mouth harp" in the dark (624; another Slothropian "appearance"?). The colonel is from Kenosha, Wisconsin (cf. 1: [10], above?). We shift (in the colonel's fantasy) to a dialogue between "Skippy" and "Mister Information"--about "Happyville," the "pointsman," the persistence of the War in which, still, "the right people are dying." (644-46) Then "Skippy" (turning back, more or less, into the colonel) meets Dr. Jamf. Then we learn that the bulb run by Paddy's generator is the same bulb that Franz Pökler slept under at Nordhausen (see 426-7, above): "This bulb is immortal"! Which brings us to "The Story of Byron the Bulb" (647-55), told to "Skippy" by "Mister Information." Byron's early dreams of power set him against "Phoebus"--the agency of the international light-bulb cartel which "fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world." After 1000 hours, with a Phoebus hit-woman on her way to get him, Byron is bulb-snatched, and dispatched on a series of travels too bizarre to detail here. We learn, meanwhile, about the working arrangements between Phoebus and "The Grid." (654) Byron survives, but his early ambition has been thwarted; he "is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything." (655; cf. Pirate's hopes for "Creative Paranoia," 4: [2], above?) The story over, Lazslo Jamf ("Mr. Information"?) walks away; "the colonel is left alone in Happyville." Then, his throat is wholly exposed to Eddie's razor, to the strobing of the bulb.

3. Here’s the sort of chapter that frustrates. At first, anyway. Like: why are we meeting new characters, this late in the book? Shouldn’t we be tying up narrative threads. Well, we are. Kind of. In a rather, roundabout, Pynchonian way. In Thuringia, central Germany, the U.S. Army is (still?) sweeping through villages, increasingly susceptible to “lycranthropophobia” (fear of werewolves, or in this case, Werewolves: the Nazi guerrilla resistance forces). Pfc. Eddie Pensiero is giving his Colonel, who is from Kenosha (the “Kenosha Kid” from 1.10, maybe), a haircut. They hear the sound of a “mouth-organ,” which seems like another occurrence of the “dispersed” Slothrop, who reunited with his long-lost harmonica in 4.1. Private Eddy McGonigle hand-cranks a light bulb, which burns overhead. We learn the rich history of this lightbulb, in an extended (and fan favourite) vignette titled THE STORY OF BYRON THE BULB.

In short: Byron was manufactured way back when, in Budapest, in Baby Bulb Heaven. Byron’s “an old, old soul trapped inside the glass prison of a Baby Bulb.” Beyond his sentience, Byron is also immortal. He can’t burn out. He has burned across Berlin, and all parts of Germany. He has burned in the background of several episodes of the novel itself, keeping Franz Pökler company in Nordausen back in 3.11; see also the sentient bulbs mentioned in 3.14. Byron burns so brightly, and steadily, that becomes the target of an international light bulb Cartel, Phoebus, who sets the prices of energy, and of lightbulbs, and for whom an immortal bulbs is a serious threat. (Phoebus is a real thing, by the way. Their international light-fixing racket was effectively interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.) Byron is aware of their plans, and instructs other bulbs to keep a watchful eye out. He plots to trigger epileptic fits in people via strobing, and to coordinate the kamikaze explosion of all bulbs. A figure of preterition, and also of the counterforce, it’s said that “[s]omeday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before…He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything.” We end with an image of Laszlo Jamf, of all people, walking down a canal, followed by a Dog (Pointsman, perhaps? Or another transmutation of him?). Cut back to Eddie Pensiero, who is now shaving the Colonel, his throat wholly exposed. Byron’s light beats down, practically begging the private to slit his superior’s throat. The matter is left unresolved.

[4], 656-663. Katje, in a white tennis dress, on a stolen bicycle, meets the Hereros, in white sailor suits, singing "Para-noooiia" (657; "ooooi"?). She was not ready for the "blackness." She meets, for the first time, Enzian, who talks to her about the "Raketen-Stadt" (660; cf. 4: [6], below?), and about Weissmann: "Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended." (660-61) He recalls what Weissmann, in a letter, said about Katje (662). He tells her the Hereros have someone "who was with Blicero in May" (this being, we learn in the next chapter, Thanatz--see 3: [14], above). Katje is invited to attend the interrogation.

4. With Katje now, all light and breezy and riding a bicycle in a tennis dress. Her quest to find Slothrop has led her to the Hereros, and to Enzian. The Schwarzkommandos are wearing sailor suits, and singing a song about paranoia. Katje is enlisted in a dance number, playing “the allegorical figure of Paranoia.” (She had previously played the allegorical figure of Death, for Brigadier Pudding, in 2.4 and elsewhere.)

Via her sexual escapades with Weissmann (see: 1.14), she has already entered the Hereros expansive lore. The meeting is stressful for Katje, who had not been prepared for the “blackness” (emphasis is the author’s). But this feeling extends beyond “racist skin-prickling.” The Hereros blackness is symbolic of the heaviness of The Zone, and of the task at hand (i.e. Slothrop retrieval). “There’s a failure in the light,” she tells Enzian. “I can’t see.” She’s entering a void. “Is this how the Vacuum feels?”

We learn more about Enzian’s relationship with Weismann/Blicero. As a young man, Weismann was “in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance.” Enzian loved his man. Katje did, too, in a weird way. The two wonder if he he is still alive, or if he has, somehow, transcended. He talks, too, about Raketen-Stadt (Rocket City), a headquarters of the Zone Hereros, and one of the multiple ad hoc city’s sprinting up across The Zone. Enzian tells Katje that his men have captured someone was who with Blicero in May, “[j]ust before the end.” That is: before the end of the war, and before his firing of the 00000 rocket.

[5], 663-673. "You will want cause and effect. All right." (663) Thanatz fell off the Anubis in the same storm that sent Slothrop overboard (see 3: [18], above). He was rescued by a Polish undertaker, trying (in order to make him better in his particular line of work) to get struck by lightning--seeking to "experience a singular point." After setting Thanatz ashore, he gets his wish (664-65). Thanatz then encounters a village of male homosexuals, liberated (or, as they see it, "banished") from Dora (see 3: [11], above). They have reproduced, in their "freedom," a "phantom SS command," modelled on their fantasy of the Rocket-structure at the Mittelwerke. They are waiting for Blicero, of whom they've only heard, to be their leader. Thanatz has come to be haunted by his memories of Blicero (see 3: [14], above). He seeks him out, however, at a nearby gasworks--recalling, meanwhile, Peter Sachsa's prewar séances (668; see 1: [5], [18] and [19], above). Thanatz is nabbed by the Russians, then freed (by mistake) by Polish guerillas. So begin his "lessons in being preterite" (668). He travels the Zone as a DP. His memory of the last rocketfiring grows clearer--which he is now (i.e., in the "present" of the close of the previous chapter) relating to the Schwarzkommando. He's coming to see that "the two children, Gottfried and Bianca, are the same." (672) Telling all he remembers to the assembled Erdschweinhöhlers, "he is the angel they've hoped for." They have already assembled their own rocket from scavenged fragments (cf. Mexico to Pointsman, 88, above?). And by the time he's done "they will all know what the Schwarzgerät was, how it was used, where the 00000 was fired from, and which way it was pointed." (673) All this brings the various Herero factions together, reconciles them. Maria has even appeared in a dream to Christian (see 3: [21], above), saying she seeks no revenge on Ombindi.

5. We begin with the narrator addressing us in a resigned, almost condescending tone (readers love that!): “You will want cause and effect. All right.” Now to Milkos Thanatz, Greta Erdmann’s husband, who we learned back in 3.26 may know more about the when/where/why of Biclero firing the 00000 rocket at Lunenberg Heath. He had tumbled off The Anubis shortly after Slothrop did, back in 3.18, and is rescued by a Polish undertaker who is trying to get struck by lightning. Thanatz has been hunkering down in a village populated exclusively by gay survivors of the Dora concentration camp, abutting Nordhausen. These 175s (homosexual camp inmates) feel that there “liberation” is closer to a “banishment.” And so they’ve set about replicating the Nazi hierarchy in their village. It is based not so much on Dora but on the authoritarian structure of the neighbouring rocket plant at Nordhausen. At the top of their imagined hierarchy is a man named Blicero, who has now become (like Katje, enshrined in the Herero songand-dance routines, of 4.4) a legend. They await his triumphant return, like some rocket messiah. “On hearing the name of Blicero, now, Thanatz’s asshole tightens a notch.” He's heard no word of Blicero since the day of the 00000’s firing. Is he alive or dead? A fugitive or a hero? Thanatz is being drawn back in.

Despite his terror and his tightened asshole, he follows a tip, seeking out Blicero at a nearby gasworks. No dice. Instead, he’s pinched by Russian cops. Then he is rescued, quite by chance, by Polish rebels. “This is one of his earlier lessons in being preterite: he won’t escape any of the consequences he sets up for himself now, not unless it’s by accident.” He’s shipped back West, by train, one of 2000 DPs (displaced persons) en route to Berlin. There, he reflects on the day the 00000 was fired. (Sort of…his reflection actually jogs into the present; he’s relating all this to the Schwarzkommando. He is the captor mentioned in 4.4.) He has memories of Bilcero’s big, black eye, reflecting a windmill, then reflecting bottle of gin, then reflecting the past itself. He sees Blicero, in drag, about to sacrifice his captive boy Gottfried (introduced in 1.14). And Thanatz feels implicated, and heartbroken. Is he, who threw his daughter Bianca to the vultures, any different from the menacing and insane Blicero? He sees that Gottfried and Bianca “are the same loss, to the same winner.” Thanatz reveals to the Schwarzkommando more and more about that day: “what the Schwarzgerät was, how it was used, where the 00000 was fired from, and which way it was pointed.” (This information is withheld from the reader, for now.) News of the rocket’s firing has drawn all the warring Herero factions back together. Joseph Ombidini and the Empty Ones (from 3.3) have joined up with Enzian. They have all scavenged the required parts. And with Thanatz’s intel, they may have all they need to complete their own rocket.

[6], 674-700. (This long, bizarre chapter may give us [see, for instance, 682, below] what's left of Slothrop's "point of view," since his "dispersal.") We are in the Raketen-Stadt, "where the Father ["Broderick"--see 3: [1], above] plots constantly to kill his son." Tyrone sets out to rescue the "Radiant Hour," stolen from the day's 24 by "colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own." (674) The "Floundering Four"--Tyrone, Myrtle Miraculous (she can perform miracles), Maximillian ("a Negro in a pearl-gray zoot suit and Inverness cape"), and Marcel ("a mechanical chess-player") set out to combat the "Paternal Peril." Each has a flaw (cf. Dorothy's three companions in The Wizard of Oz?). Song, "How-dy neighbor, how-dy pard!" (677; cf. various details to 760, below?) They gradually infiltrate their own audience (or someone else's). Maximillian is reading "the Closet Intellectual Book, The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots, with illustrations by Walt Disney." Then, as parts of the "nonstop revue," watched by the now-infiltrated-audience, various sketches. "The Low Frequency Listener" (681-2): Slothrop, for reasons he can't remember, is trying to get through to the Argentine anarchists. He's at Magdeburg, site of a low-frequency antenna. He's having trouble remembering his parents, "as Broderick progresses into Perilous Pop and Nalline into ssshhhghh . . ." (682) Next (in the "revue"), "Mom Slothrop's Letter to Ambassador Kennedy" (682): she asks, familiarly and drunkenly, for news of Tyrone. Then, "On the Phrase 'Ass Backwards'" (683-87): Säure Bummer, talking to Slothrop, attacks the illogic of this phrase. We learn about the umlaut-deficient robbery victim (female) who, meaning to shout "Hübsch Räuber ("cute-looking robber"), instead came out with "Hubschrauber" ("helicopter," which had not yet been invented) (683-4). Seaman Bodine, after defending "Ass Backwards," sings "My Doper's Cadenza" (685-6). Then (still the "revue"), "Shit 'n' Shinola" (687- 8): their color is contrasted with the white of toilets--"Odorless and Official Death." Next, "An Incident in the Transvestites' Toilet" (688-90): Slothrop's dressed in drag, as Fay Wray. An ape hands him a sodium bomb, which explodes when flushed down the toilet by an Asian--also in drag, as Margaret O'Brien. Next, "A Moment of Fun with Takeshi and Ichizo, the Komical Kamikazes" (690-92): they keep learning from "old Kenosha (cf. 1: [10] and 4: [3], above?) the loony radarman" that no American targets are within range. Then, "Streets" (692-94): Slothrop finds (he doesn't know where) a newspaper fragment--"a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky downward out of a white pubic bush" (cf. 626, above?) under a partial headline: "MB DRO / ROSHI (cf. 480, above? But NB., also, "Roshi" is the title of the highest Zen master.) Then, "Listening to the Toilet" (694-97): on waiting to hear the sound of the toilet shut off (by Them), waiting for brief cessations of "the roaring of the sun," in towns which turn out to be "on the borders of Time Zones"--was it "Kenosha, Wisconsin?" (696)--where the Kenosha Kid is caught in a "sound-shadow" (cf. 4: [2], above?). Then, "Witty Repartee" (697-98): more of Ichizo and Takeshi, then some information on the Hotchkiss machine gun. Then, "Heart-to-Heart, Man-to-Man" (698-99): "Pop" and "Tyrone" discuss the latter's growing "electrofreak" addiction to "screwing in," "waves." Next (and last), "Some Characteristics of Imipolex G" (699-700): "the first plastic that is actually erectile." (Hmmmmm?) Various theories about the necessary stimulus: "a thin matrix of wires," "a beam-scanning system . . . analogous to the wellknown video electron stream," or projection of an "electronic 'image,' analogous to a motion picture."

6. The best case, so far, that it’s not just Tyrone Slothrop who has “dispersed.” It is the novel itself. Any pretensions to conventional novelistic form are scattered, or at least rewired. This is an extremely tricky and confusing bit of reading. So let’s just try and push through it, together, preterite lil pards… So: Slothrop is back. Kind of. He’s…somewhere…else… now. He’s part of a comic book superhero squad called “The Floundering Four.” The team is rounded out by Myrtle Miraculous, a zoot-suited hepcat named Maximilian, and Marcel, who is an animatronic chess-playing robot; sort of like a classic “Mechanical Turk” but without a real chess player hunkered inside. They’re in a Neo-futuristic “City of the Future,” called Raketen-Stadt (foretold by Enzian in 4.4), squaring off against their arch-nemesis: Broderick Slothrop, Tyrone’s pop who (we learned in 3.1) sold his infant son off to Lyle Bland for experimentation by Laszlo Jamf, and who now plays a kind of villainous primal father. Paging Dr. Freud! Raketen-Stadt is laid out like a shifting chessboard. The Floundering Four are setting out to rescue, from Broderick Slothrop’s “Paternal Peril,” someone (or something) called “The Radiant Hour.” They sing a song, naturally. And they have a kind of free-flowing, hallucinatory adventure, including Slothrop climbing into an icebox (recalling his journey down the toilet in 1.10), and a talking Chiquita Banana. There’s also reference to United Fruit Company radio ads, suggesting the reorganization of power post-War. Like the movable tiles of Raketen- Stadt, the chessboard is moving, as the nation-state gives way to a new form of colonialism, in the form of a corporate multinational. (Skim the history of the United Fruit Company, “banana republics,” etc., if you’re curious about this.)

It’s made clear(ish) that this adventure is being watched by an audience, which is then infiltrated by the Floundering Four. There’s a shift here that’s key, I think, to what Pynchon is doing. From 1.1 the idea of inhabiting fantasies and shifting perspective has guided the narrative of Gravity’s Rainbow. Now that idea is expanding to another dimension. The audience (i.e. the reader) is now implicated. Look behind you! Tyrone Slothrop could be over your shoulder, tooting on his trademark harp! This idea—of the action extending into the audience—will reappear towards the very end of the book. So keep it in mind, eh?

Anyway. Now in the audience, we see various skits play out. There’s an interlude of Slothrop, confused, trying to contact Squalidozzi and his Argentine anarchist crew (introduced in 2.7) who have hijacked a Nazi submarine (3.8). Then there’s “Mom Slothrop’s Letter to Ambassador Kennedy,” which sees Tryone’s mother drunkenly writing Jospeh Kennedy for news of her son, who has seemingly disappeared (or dispersed) somewhere in the War. Then to a conversation between Säure Bummer, Slothrop, and Seaman Bodine (back in Berlin) arguing about the phrases “ass backwards” (one of those cause-and-effect reversals, maybe) and “shit ’n’ shinola.” Bodine sings a song (“My Doper’s Candenza”), which contrasts the blackness of shit (death) with the cold sterility of toilets. Then a toilet gag, in which Slothrop, in drag as Fay Wray, is handed one of those cartoon anarchist bowling ball bombs by a gigantic ape (King Kong?). Slothrop plunks it in a toilet.  KRUPPALOOMA goes the bomb. (Real English Major hours here, but maybe this scene is a flashback to Slothrop’s toilet adventure in 1.10. If his trip down the Roseland Ballroom toilet represented both a journey through his own past, and his own racialized anxieties, then the bombing of the toilet represents the immolation of that past, those anxieties, everything really. Oh and speaking of bombs…)

On to three Japanese kamikaze pilots, whose “loony radarman” promises them there are no American targets nearby. “No dying today!” But there is dying today. Then back to Slothrop, who is in the streetscape of one-or-another muddy Zone town. On the cobblestones, he sees a scrap of newspaper “with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, tangling in the sky straight toward out of a white public bush” (this description recalls the “stout rainbow cock” he sees in 4.1) and the tattered headline reading: MB DROP          ROSHI. So, like, “BOMB DROPPED ON HIROSHIMA.” It is Aug. 6, 1945, or shortly after. Slothrop sits on a curb staring at the photo. He is sad, perhaps, not only because of the generalized death, but because he remembers that good ol’ Ensign Morituri (from 3.16) who was en route back to his home in Hiroshima.Then some more toilet talk, as we wait for Them to shut off all the water in The Zone. (This is another of Pynchon’s counterculture nods: hearing the water shut off was a classic hippieera tip-off of an imminent police raid: no water, means no way to flush contraband.) The Kenosha Kid (1.10 and 4.3, maybe) reappears. Then back to the kamikaze pilots. Then to a father-son chat between Broderick and Tyrone Slothrop, about a young Tyrone’s addiction to being electroshocked, plugging into electrical outlets and “keying waves.” (Perhaps the young Tyrone is being influenced by the seditionist plot of Byron, the Immortal Bulb, from 4.3?) “ Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back?” (Recalls Lyle Bland’s magical disappearance in 3.30, and Slothrop’s own dispersal.)

Then, finally, “Some Characteristics of Imipolex G.” We learn that the plastic is erectile, i.e. it can stiffen under the appropriate stimulus. In this case, that stimulus is an electronic signal, an electron stream (what?), or a projection, onto the plastic, of an electronic image “analogous to a motion picture.” Movie buffs take note!

OK. Wowza. Take a break.

[7], 700-706. Tchitcherine is alone now; Soviet intelligence officer, Nicolai (yes) Ripov, is closing in. Tchitcherine remembers what Wimpe (see, for instance, 3: [5], above) once said to him: "Marxist dialectic s? That's not an opiate, eh?" (701) The peculiarity of Oneirine: "Pökler's singularity" (702)--a "haunting," dull and difficult to distinguish from reality, but leading to "the discovery that everything is connected" (703). Then comes "Tchitcherine's Haunting," an interrogation by Ripov. "Why were you hunting your black brother?" "I thought," Tchitcherine replies, "I was being punished. Passed over. I blamed him." (705) He then learns his future from Ripov: a 30-days' leave, then back to Russia, then to Central Asia with captured German rocket personnel.

7. Tchitcherine on Oneirine (say that fives times fast). Oneirine, you’ll recall, is the time-modulating Jamf drug introduced in 3.8. Oneric, means “of or relating to dreams.” And the term was used in mid-20th century film theory to refer to the dreamlike states produced by motion pictures, and (more radically) to the idea that a filmgoer’s consciousness effectively merges with that of the images on the screen. Something to chew on, following the blurring of actor and audience explored in the previous section. Anyway. Tchitcherine is all fuzzy, assailed by the drug’s feeling that “everything is connected.”

He is visited—either literally, or in this dreamlike state—by Nikolai Ripov, a fellow Soviet intelligence officer, who has come to deliver Tchitcherine’s latest marching orders. Ripov grills Tchitcherine on his hunt for Enzian. He reveals that said hunt for Enzian was a bit of a wild goose chase. After all, as we learned in 3.32, it was Slothrop who was tasked with taking down the Schwarzkommando (a plot that, we can deduce, involved the Soviets at the highest level, too). The Soviet brass let Tchitcherine run around, pursuing his own blood lust, purging it, so that he can be shipped back to Central Asia with a gang of captured German rocketeers, left to serve out the rest of his career in a purely bureaucratic capacity, and “operationally, to die.” A sad and anticlimactic end to his adventures in the Zone…almost.

[8], 706-717. The Gross Suckling Conference (named after the inn where it was held): Ensign Morituri (see 3: [16], above), Carroll Eventyr (see 1: [5] and [18] above), Thomas Gwenhidwy (see 1: [20], above), and Roger Mexico. They deduce the firing direction of the 00000 rocket--true north; but where was it fired from? Roger recalls (another flashback shifting into present tense) Jessica telling him, in Cuxhaven, of her decision to marry Jeremy. Jeremy, at lunch, invites him to dinner, at the home of a former Krupp manager, Stefan Utgarthaloki. Roger brings along Seaman Bodine, who's wearing an extraordinary zoot suit (cf. 2: [6]), above?). Arriving, they notice four musicians-- including Gustav and Anton (see 3: [12], above)--scheduled to play Haydn's suppressed "Kazoo" quartet (711-12). Slothrop, we learn, "has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell--stripped. Scattered, all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be 'found' again, in the conventional sense of 'positively identified and detained.'" (712) We learn about the Counterforce's abiding awe of "the man"--who "has a branch office in each of our brains." (712) At table, seeing a huge barbecue pit at the end of the dining room, and realizing that they themselves are to be the "Überrashungbraten" ("surprise roast"), Roger and Bodine proceed to gross out the other guests by inventing disgusting, alliterative menu entries (e.g., "menstrual marmalade," "clot casserole"). "Commando Connie" Flamp, war correspondent, joins the game ("discharge dumplings"), as do the musicians ("wart waffles," "puke pancakes, with sweat syrup"). The others begin to vomit uncontrollably. Jessica leaves with Jeremy. "Does Roger have a second of pain right here? Yes. Sure. You would too." (716) Then Bodine and Roger, followed by the musicians, escape--as Connie continues the game alone.

8. On to the Gross Suckling Conference, a meeting of the Counterforce in Northern Germany. Ensign Mortituri, the Imperial Japanese officer from 3.16 whose home in Hiroshima has been nuked, joins Roger Mexico, Carroll Eventyr and Thomas Gwenhidwy. (Eventyr will, later in this chapter, summon the ghost of the late Brigadier Pudding; avenging his legacy as a shit-eater by serving the Counterforce from beyond the grave.) They determine the trajectory of Blicero’s rocket. “000º: true North. What better direction to fire the 00000?” Roger Mexico flashes back to Cuxhaven, where Jessica (hair shorter, wears a sterner countenance) decides to stay with her husband, Jeremy Beaver. Hers and Roger’s affair was for the War. And that’s that. Mexico (increasingly erratic) can’t take it. He makes a stink. Beaver attempts to ease tensions by inviting Mexico to a fancy dinner at the home of an exweapons manufacturer—real dining among Them vibes. Invited to bring a guest, Mexico picks the irascible Pig Bodine, who sports a lavish zoot, with quintuple-vented trousers. The two arrive to find the party loaded with corporate execs and big-wigs, from global investment funds and multinationals like General Electric. Some talk of Slothrop, who is there in spirit, but who has become (to everyone’s seeming knowledge) “[s]cattered all over the Zone.” They doubt they’ll ever be able to find him again, that is, “in the conventional sense of ‘positively identified and detained.”

Mexico and Bodine also find out out that they’re intended to be barbecued and eaten, as the Überraschungbraten (that is: surprise roast). At first they’re seduced by the show of wealth and power. “They’re as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s a hard fact. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains…” (great lines). Rebuking their fate, Mexico and Bodine engage in a bit of life-saving juvenilia, grossing out the dinner guests by requesting increasingly nauseating foodstuffs: barf bouillon, abortion aspic, pus pudding, etc. Soon a war correspondent named Commando Connie, and a group of chamber musicians (one of whom is a veteran of Säure Bummer’s den) begin barking out orders for wart waffles and haemorrhoid hash. The assembled, hoity-toity guests begin vomiting uncontrollably, as Mexico and Bodine make their escape. One of the great befouled dinner parties in all of literature, and a classic Pynchon scene: low, bodily humour used to fuck up the elites and snobs. The grossness is both a weapon, and a way of accentuating Their grossness, as über-wealthy, scheming, war profiteering cannibals. There’s an absurdist, surrealist edge to the stark seriousness of the proceedings, which befits the absurdism/surrealism of the real historical moment.

Take this sentence: “But there are nosepick noodles to be served up buttery and steaming, grime gruel and pustule porridge to be ladled into bowls of a snivelling generation of future executives, pubic popovers to be wheeled out onto terraces stained by holocaust sky or growing rigid with autumn.” Like a thesis statement, of both style and intent.

[9], 717-724. Geli Tripping (see 3: [1] and [2], above) is looking for Tchitcherine; she's "the only one in the Zone who loves him completely." She is alive to Titans, to "the green uprising," to the primal energy which we deny, instead promoting death (720). Cut (721) to Gottfried and Blicero (see, for instance, 1: [14], above). Blicero tells Gottfried about his search for "the edge of the World," and about earlier "edges," such as America, Africa--gifts, ways of "returning," which Europe refused, establishing instead "its order of Analysis and Death." "In time," he explains, "the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away [cf. Brenschluss?]. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on." (722) "I want," he says, "to break out--to leave this cycle of infection and death." (723)

9. We return, now, to Geli Tripping, the sorceress and lover of Tchitcherine, last seen in 3.4, when she sent Slothrop to Berlin in the care of the balloonist, Schnorp. She is one Tchitcherine’s many lovers, but believes herself the only one to actually love him. (Some symmetry between Slothrop and Katje, Roger and Jessica…and we saw how those romances resolved.) In the company of an older woman (another witch?) Geli attempts to summon an image of Tchitcherine in her tea leaves. Nothing materializes. She reflects instead on “the World” (capitalized, like the Tarot card I reckon): the whole of the World, in all its long history, ruled over by the Titans, and by Pan (that is, Satan, basically), and then by human beings, “God’s spoilers…It is our mission to promote death.”

Cut then to the book’s prime Death-booster, Weissmann. He is addressing Gottfried, who has fallen to his knees, in awe of his master. Blicero discusses the Kingdom of Death: America, the final edge of European expansion. America has learned death from Europe. Both “we have only the structure.” None of the pomp and circumstance of Empire. Or Colony. Only Death itself. What can the next Kingdom of Death be? What is the new frontier? The Moon? Gottfried recalls Blicero’s rocket-mad promises of conquering space, and living on the moon, where men are cold and frigid and “no more alive than memories.” Blicero is dying. And he wants to destroy “that stupid clarity” in young Gottfried’s eyes. Their S&M play has evolved into something else: like a perverse love between father and son, a conduit through which the virus of sickness and Death passes. They are planning something grand.

A side note: lots of Tarot, astrology, Kabbalah, “New Age” talk in this section. We’re a long way from the hardened mathematics of Roger Mexico, or Pointsman’s cause-and-effect trip. It’s as if the characters (and author) are reaching out to other systems of knowledge or sensemaking, as the old systems of Power break down, or retrench themselves.

[10], 724-733. Enzian is transporting the Hereros' rocket (see 4: [5], above), the 00001, constructed from scavenged parts. We move into "scholasticism . . . , Rocket state-cosmology." (726) Enzian talks to Christian--to whom, he reflects, he must tell "everything he knows." Katje is with them. And nearby is fat Ludwig; he has found his lemming, Ursula, who peers out of his pocket (729; see 3: [25], above). Tensions between Enzian and the Empty Ones have reemerged, but Enzian maintains control. Ludwig follows on the periphery of the Herero march. "They have," he senses, "somewhere to go."

10. The Herero rocket, the 00001, is complete. The narrative flashes fleetingly into the present: “How did you feel about the old Rocket? Not now that it’s giving you job security, but back then…” The Rocket has gone—in the period between the War and the early-1970s of Gravity’s Rainbow’s release—from a perverse fetish object to an economic engine. But Enzian and Co. aren’t bored of it yet. They’re still wrapped up in “Rocket-state cosmology,” and in the dream of their own annihilation. This ideas are engaged in a Manichaean struggle, between “a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide.” Which is which? I’m starting to forget…And does it matter? Both are united by a dream of death, for the whole world. Their differences are quibbles of ideology, and politics.

Enzian, Christian and Katje are together, transporting the rocket to its launch site. They’re spied upon by chubby Ludwig, the ex-Hitler Youth kid from 3.25, who has recovered his pet lemming, Ursula. (It’s implied that Ludwig has been hustling, sexually, to survive in The Zone. A sign that Their perversions, abounding in the Anubis sections 3.14-3.16, and elsewhere, have come to take over the formerly anarchic realm of The Zone.) Ludwig is on the lookout for a “vast white army,” that will swoop in and stop the Schwarzkommando from firing the 00001. Enzian, meanwhile, is “falling into reveries.” His insane plan is to push the rocket along the borderlines cleaving America, British and Soviet power, believing the (no longer) Allied forces will be too cautious to cause trouble with the Hereros and their rocket. Tensions are reemerging among the previously (if temperamentally) united Herero. “His people are going to demolish him if they can.” And not because he wants to kill them all. But because he’s waffling on the matter. Joseph Ombidini, leader of the Empty Ones faction introduced in 3.3, resurfaces, and questions Enzian’s commitment to the suicide of their people. Enzian writes off Ombidini as a hallucination, and the Empty Ones take their weapons and go, breaking away from Enzian’s group. Ludwig watches all this, invisible.

[11], 733-735. Geli finds Tchitcherine at last. She has put a spell on him: "May he be blind now to all but me." Later, the Herero convoy passes by. Tchitcherine, waking, stops them--and hustles some American cigarettes and three potatoes from Enzian, whom he does not recognize. "This is magic. Sure--but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it." (735)

11. Back to Tchitcherine, who has gone feral (not unlike Slothrop in his final physical appearance in 4.1), and is living under a bridge like some kind old troll. He’s making doodles and graffiti in commando face paint. He is one in a series of soldiers, English, German and whatnot, who have hunkered down here, under the arch. (Like the arch of a rainbow. Or rocket. Hmm.) Geli Tripping finds him there. She has cast a hex on him. He is now blind to all but her. These two lovers are reunited.

The spell has an odd effect, as Pynchon tweaks the apparent climax to the long-gestating Tchitcherine/Enzian meetup. At night, Tchitcherine heads to the road, where he comes across his half-brother’s rocket caravan. The two communicate in broken German. Tchitcherine cannot recognize Enzian, because of the spell.  Enzian cannot recognize Tchitcherine—because of his new beard, or because Enzian’s double and “Primal Twin” (see the above section) has always been Blicero, and not his own blood. Tchitcherine manages to chisel a few smokes and some potatoes from his nemesis. And almost impossibly beautiful scene, in which these mortal enemies pass as strangers, and even as friends. “Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it.” Pynchon repeats that Herero mantra. Mba-kayere: “I am passed over.”

[12], 735-760. We move from a fantasy elevator of the future (strange noises as it passes abandoned floors), through "The Lederhoseners" singing about "the beatings Mutti gave to me," to Ludwig and Thanatz--the latter explaining "Sado-anarchism" to the former (737). They have reached the Lüneberg Heath, where the Hereros are assembling the 00001 rocket. We learn the story of "the kid who hates kreplach" (737). Slothrop was to be "present at . . . his time's assembly"; but "he is being broken down instead, and scattered." (738. Is this a defeat, a fall? Or has Slothrop's plastic ego turned out to be, as it were, in a positive sense bio-degradable?)

Seaman Bodine looks up and sees Slothrop; he's one of the few still able to see him at all, "to hold him together, even as a concept": "Rocketman, Rocketman. You poor fucker." (740-41) He gives Slothrop a piece of a shirt soaked in the blood of John Dillinger, outside the Biograph Theater (see 368, 516, above; and cf. the cloth with which St. Veronica [see, for instance, 1: [7], above] wiped Christ's face?). Later, Bodine began, "helpless, in shame, to let Slothrop go." We learn of Slothrop's last appearance--on the cover of the only album released by an early-'60's rock group, the Fool (742). Dzabajev (earlier, a sidekick of Tchitcherine, see 3: [9], above) and his friends are at a convention of village idiots. They are shooting wine--defying gravity with a "wine rush" (743). Which, apparently, sets off the series of titled sub-chapters that conclude the book: "The Occupation of Mingeborough" (744): back in Massachusetts, a memory which is also a look into the future; "it may be too late to get home." "Back in Der Platz" (745-6): at Säure's, Gustav and Anton have converted kazoos into hashish pipes; Gustav screws a light bulb into his- -turns out to be our friend, Byron. We're told about "the movie under the rug," in which various irreversible processes are reversed. "Weissmann's Tarot" (746-49): "He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible" (747). Weissmann's present condition is set forth by the Tower, over whose significance there is considerable debate. Others of his cards are analyzed. "The Last Green and Magenta" (749): on the Heath. "The Horse" (749): the last horse in waiting to be sacrificed (cf. 337, above?). "Isaac" (749-50): at the moment he was about to be sacrificed by his father, Abraham, Isaac saw the antechambers of the Throne.

"Pre-Launch" (750-51): Weissmann has bound and dressed the boy prettily, before placing him in the Rocket; "the 00000 is the womb into which Gottfried returns." (750; i.e., we are now learning directly what happened on "the Heath"). The Rocket is the Oven (see 1: [14], above). And Gottfried himself is the "Schwarzgerät." "Hardware" (751): Gottfried is encased in Imipolex. There is an earphone for communications from Weissmann, but there is no return channel. "Chase Music" (751-53): various aging super-heroes (e.g., Superman, The Lone Ranger, Philip Marlowe) begin arriving "too late." "He [i.e., Pointsman] actually misses the dogs." He has missed his chance. "He'll be left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium . . . his mineral corridors do not shine." "Countdown" (753-54): the rocket countdown was actually first invented for a movie, Die Frau in Mond (1929; cf. Ilse's dreams, 3: [11], above?) by Fritz Lang. It is interpreted by "Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman:" it "appears to be serial, [but] it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel" (cf. Leni Pökler to Franz, 159, above?).

"Strung Into the Apollonian Dream" (754): Gottfried waits in the Rocket, gazing at his Imipolex shroud, lulled by the familiar smell. "Come, wake," it says. "All is well." "Orpheus puts Down Harp" (754-57): Richard M. Zhlubb (cf. the source of the epigraph to Part 4?), manager of the Orpheus Theater, Los Angeles, complains to "our" reporter about harmonica-playing in movie lines. Steve Edelman is one of the principal trouble-makers. Zhlubb takes our reporter for a drive in his black Volkswagen, with its special laugh-track cassette system. They pass a funeral (JFK? RFK?). Zhlubb has a fantasy of being smothered, while driving, by a dry-cleaning bag: "a plastic shroud." They hear a siren, but "the sound is greater than police." (cf. the opening of Gravity's Rainbow?) "The Clearing" (757-58): the Rocket is launched. "Ascent" (758-60): Gottfried, in the rocket, moves past Brenschluss, rushes into growing whiteness. "Descent" (760): in the Orpheus Theater the screen has just gone blank. The rocket is poised, in its last delta-t above the roof of the theater. For our last moment's diversion we are offered a hymn, written by William Slothrop. "Now everybody--."

Index back to Pynchon

12. OK. Here we are at last. Endgame. The end of all things? Maybe! Like 4.6, Gravity’s Rainbow’s final, culminating chapter is chopped into —or disperses into?—a bunch of disparate episodes. These episodes span times and place and even (I think) different planes of reality. But they mostly account for the launch of the 00000 rocket and (perhaps) its final terminus. I will attempt here to work through these, in order, without getting too bogged down in detail, if that’s even possible. Ready? OK!

We begin in an elevator in a City of the Future, presumably Raketen- Stadt, from earlier. The City is stacked vertically like a high tower reaching towards the heavens. As one Mindy Bloth of Carbon City, Illinois explains, this is “The Vertical Solution.” We learn of the Lederhoseners, a group of singing Hitler Youth who roam across The Zone, performing ditties about their mother’s beatings (cf: the “Mother Conspiracy” bit of 3.19?), packed into the leather trousers that give them their name. Thanatz and Ludwig, an odd pair, are discussing S&M. Thanatz hypothesizes that sexual acts of submission and dominance are taboo precisely because they are key ingredients of “the Structure,” and so, sadism and masochism, the performance of master and servant “cannot be wasted in private sex.” Thanatz is becoming the “leading theoretician” of a new form of politicized “Sadoanachism.”

The Herero have made it to Lüneburg Heath, the launch site of the