Discussion - Week Three - Gravity's Rainbow - Part Two, pp. 213 - 331 (181 - 278)

[Jim]

This discussion covers Part Two, pp. 213 – 331 (181 – 278)


Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering

You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.
- Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray


Cold, English, winter under siege from German rockets and Allied intrigues suddenly gives way to lovely Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. No London? No Blitz? Petit-déjeuner sur la plage avec trois jeunes filles françaises? Surely Slothrop must be dreaming, but when a moistened Dutch spy-ette emerges from the surf with a giant octopus wrapped round her neck, he realizes this is no vacation. Everyone seems to be in on the game, but what the game might be is clear as la boue!

Brigadier Pudding plays toilet games in the seventh cell. Slothrop takes a break from his studies to travel around Europe. Pointsman and his pals spend a day at the beach, but his plans, and mind, appear to be slipping.




To avoid spoilers, please restrict your comments to Part Two, pp. 213 – 331 (181 – 278) (and the earlier chapters).

[Matthew]

Weekly GR thoughts:

The image of Katje coming out of the water reminds me of the myth of Venus on the shell. However, behind that pretty image is the exact opposite of a hard-on, a castration. I'm referring to the origin myth of Venus, in which she's the consequence of the castration of Uranus. It wouldn't surprise me that Slothrop's programmers (or Pynchon for that matter) would put that image in there for that reason, but probably not that reason alone. I might be stretching, but it might be worth noting that the last 180 pages I read were filled with hard-ons.

I love the wacky change of scencery and how the French scene here turns out to be more like just another stage. However, it seems Slothrop is beginning to act contrary to what his programmers want and that's pretty cool. Because at times it felt like Slothrop was just have things done through him in the first part, while in this section he seems to be doing more things on his own, for better or worse. Or so it seems, I can't say if I remember things so concretely this first time around with GR. But the prose here is still lots of fun:

"Turns out that some merrymaker has earlier put a hundred grams of hashish in the Hollendaise. Word has got around. There has been a big run on broccoli." The whole chapter here was great and felt like some surreal Hollywood slapstick.

However, just a few chapters later and we are deep into rocket science and confusing paper trails, conglomerates and sub-conglomerates, secret contracts and back-deals. Parabolas and formulas, both sceintific and deeply occult, as presented by Pynchon. (I'm worried that after a few more chapters I'll start seeing parabolas everywhere, they certainly appear all over the place in GR....)

I also am reminded a whole lot of the TV series The Prisoner (original 60s series, not the remake), when Slothrop is let loose to go to Zurich. Actually, lots of things about GR remind me of The Prisoner, and The Manchurian Candidate, (again the 60s movie, not the remake, haven't read the Condon novel), and a bunch of other things. It's like a secret satirical pervert's history of the Twentieth Century. A well read pervert though, I'm certain Pynchon's read his fair share of both De Sade and Masoch. (A lot of scenes with power and sex combined in mood remind me much of Sade's writing and the Mistress of the Night scene drops a blatant Venus in Furs reference.)

Also, I like how Pynchon plays with the idea of Postwar. I mean, there's WWII and it's big, but even early on all the main characters are looking not at the big war but the big picture...the postwar period. And that has multiple meanings for a reader. I think of postwar, I think of today, but I also think of Postmodernism, because that's what Postwar literature evolves into, or at least one strain of Postwar fiction does. Also, all that military inteligence evolves into covert intelligence programs like the CIA.

However, I think Pynchon is trying to show how the powers that be basically at the end of WW2 basically stopped the overt stuff of war, called it Postwar, and just kept on with their insane schemes, with nothing really having changed or gotten better, just out of the public eye. Okay, certainly technology has changed and gotten better, but at what end? Or more importantly, Whose end? And to what means?

As usual, good job with the synopsis Jim.