PROVERBS FOR PARANOIDS
A GRAVITY’S RAINBOW READING GUIDE
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PART 3: IN THE ZONE
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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. 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 double-integral, or ∫∫. The symbol is, apparently, used in mathematical calculations of Brennschluss: 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. 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-rocket-nutso Dominius Blicero, a.k.a. Weissman (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. “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 Marz 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. The skinny on Tchitcherine. (I can’t help but pronounce his name in the same way Gavin Rossdale sings “Glycerine” in the 1994 post-grunge 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 villain-ish 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, 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. 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.) Weissman 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. Weissman’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 rocket-mysticism. 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 Weissman). 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. “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 rip-off!)

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. 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 minor-seeming 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 Weissman) 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.  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 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. 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 the 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. 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 sale 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 sub-heading 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. “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. 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. “Loos 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. 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. 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 fake-molotovs 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. 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. 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 want 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. 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. 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. 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.  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 Lugosi-ish 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 Pynchon-heads: 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. 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 Passolini 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. 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. 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. Filling in some blanks now, re: Lyle Bland, and the various global-scale 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-knows-where-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. 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 rocket-predicting/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. 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 relfection 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.)