Discussion - Week Seven - Gravity's Rainbow - Part Four, pp. 731 - 816 (617-687)

[Jim]

This discussion covers Part Four, pp. 731 – 816 ( 617 – 687)
Last sentence, page 816, “It may be that They have something different in mind for Slothrop.”

FOUR

The Counterforce

What?
- Richard M. Nixon


I’m with Tricky Dick on this part, only I’d add “dafuck!?”

I’ve been writing clever little summaries for each week, but in Part Four things are breaking apart to a point where pithy witticisms are harder to compose. Are we coming to the end of the trip? Would Thorazine help? Should we put Eat A Peach on the turntable and wait for morning to come? I could use something citrus-y about now…

Slothrop and company do some stuff. Rocketman has become an urban legend. The Roger-Jessica-Jeremy triangle stumbles along. Eddie Pensiero shivers his way through a benny haircut in Happyville. Byron The Bulb illuminates the ages. Laszlo Jamf surfaces here and there, or is it just an echo? Katje continues to impress the troops. Sloshed Mom Slothrop sends a sloppy letter to Mister K. Säure harasses Slothrop about backwards asses’n shit’n shinola, tra-la…

See what I mean?




To avoid spoilers, please restrict your comments to Part Four, pp. 731 – 816 ( 617 – 687)
(and the earlier chapters).

[Matthew]

Yeah...things kind of break down at this point. Less clear indication of plot and more indication of what almost feels like a switch being flipped (Writing this on a brokendown Android mid-transit on the way to the doctor atter having fallen on my back after erroneously, and I suppose foolishly, walking down a wet muddy embankment between two parking levels, I seem to have broken down myself, heading towards St. James infirmary? nothing is permanently broke...maybe some muscle relaxants....) the scene with Slothrop on the grass staring back at ...well nothing (and completely ignoring the rainbow bedeckled phallus in the sky)....with just the environment and him communing with nature and finally finding after a good 80% of the novel ... himself. and maybe that's the key, nothing is controlling Slothrop in that moment. It's one moment where he is free. He isn't rocketman and perhaps that's why he isn't the focus after this point, or not, could be completely wrong. But then reading GR has led me to appreciate the possibility that Two Things can happen at the same time, even co-exist, or not exist, in this Vacuum. wrong and right. (i don't view GR as an alternate history as much as someone else's view of history, because many of those things still happend, just Pynchon is taking a fly-on-a-windshield-falling-through-a- wormhole view of it to upplay the huge amount of structural(ist?) damage done during a war.

when prentice gets an appearance of a paranormal land of levels, it reads in my mind as an image of hell...but not hell...but the hell they seem to have created for themselves. and sadly, maybe it just isn't hell...maybe its just the Preterite..a limbo... maybe Pynchon wants us to see this vacuum morally....if there is no moral authority but the one we build....and the people we allow to build it are themsleves fallen...well....how are we supposed to rise above that....or is there even a place to rise above to? Who's to say we all aren't preterite in this moral vacuum. when you find yourself working on rockets made by slave labor used to kill people and fundamentally built for that purpose, which Pynchon I'm sure did. He writes as if he's trying to get something off his chest (i always wondered if he was a cia spook) ...
Nice to see Joe Kennedy appear again. I'm glad it wasn't my imagination this time, or the last time.

might type some more thoughts down at some point...

[Jim]

Matthew wrote: "Yeah...things kind of break down at this point. Less clear indication of plot and more indication of what almost feels like a switch being flipped (Writing this on a brokendown Android mid-transit ..."

Sorry to hear about your back. On the plus side, there might be drugs involved, and so you could maybe experience a bit of the GR haze.

I'm kind of holding back my thoughts until I reach the end of the book, but I have been wondering a lot about Pynchon's supposed military-industrial complex experiences. That, coupled with the 60's and early 70's drug culture, the Viet Nam quagmire, The Apollo Missions, the Pentagon Papers, the SALT 1 talks, etc., make the book seem as much about the era it was written in as the end of WWII.

I haven't read Dante, but I am curious to compare Prentice's Preterite experiences with Dante's visions of Hell.