Gravity's Rainbow: Part V

Tyrone Slothrop gets his first V2 hardon in this chapter. He's remembering back to the time he first heard a rocket hit London (two nearly at the same time). He's also recounting a story to Tantivy about the time two of the women he has slept with wind up sitting next to each other at a club he's just walked into. I think I've only read this section twice so I should probably read it a third time to see if the two women are the stars on that map that would become these first two rockets. My instincts say, "Yeah! Of course! Duh! You suck at reading, you fat loser!"

I fucking hate my instincts. Bastards.

We also learn that the V2 that Prentice was worried about earlier wasn't a real V2. It was a delivery system for a message or mission for Prentice. The chapter is mostly from Slothrop's point of view so the reader doesn't get to find out what the secret message in a missile thing is all about. Whatever it is, it isn't great because Prentice was dreading it earlier. I'm sure somebody important somewhere is having an out-of-control fantasy that's interfering with their work and Pirate has to come save the day by fantasizing for them.

Slothrop has been investigating the blast zones of the missiles to both get a good look at them and to deal with his increasing paranoia that they're being launched specifically at himself. Tantivy tries to calm him by pointing out that they're trying to kill everybody and that even if it was a bullet on the front, it's effectively the same way to die: you're dead before you even know you're going to die. But much like Yossarian in Catch-22, Slothrop doesn't take much comfort in knowing that the people trying to kill you aren't specifically trying to kill you but just generally trying to kill you and whoever the hell they can.

But investigating blast sites is nearing an end for Slothrop since he's being called to "The White Visitation" to help them with their testing program. He has a sense that something in his Dossier points toward an abnormal ability to sense the rockets although he still doesn't understand why they give him a hardon.

The first time through, I still didn't realize how funny this book was. This time reading it, I see the jokes I missed earlier. Like when Slothrop recounts the poem by Thomas Hooker about how wild love exists but people should grow love in Gods garden (or something. It's very much a "Don't go having sex outside of marriage with lots of folks because love is special and Godly and you should only do it super boringly to one person for your entire boring and terrible life). After recounting the poem, Pynchon writes of Slothrop's romantic encounters around London, "How Slothrop's garden grows." He then lists all the flowers named for the best sexual innuendoes.

This is one of my favorite passages from this section: "When he couldn't help he stayed clear, praying, at first, conventionally to God, first time since the other Blitz, for life to win out. But too many were dying, and presently, seeing no point, he stopped."

Oh, yes, of course. Reading it through for the third time, I see where I missed the transition from present to past. The story about the two women does take place just before Slothrop experiences his first V2 missile strike (two at once in separate locations with Slothrop between them). The two incidents are related in that way that nobody knows quite exactly how they're related and also why Slothrop gets a hardon.

The section ends with a bit of Slothrop's family history. A family that almost prospered but chose, in the end, not to. A family obsessesd with death as a debt of the living. And it ends in a remembrance of Slothrop's that I might have greater meaning to the entirety of the book:

"[The Northern Lights] scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just about to swing open? What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?"

I don't know what it will have to do with the theme or anything! But I bet America dropping the bomb figures into this book at some point being that it's a bit like the V2s but on a much larger scale. Not that it comes secretly but that its final payload was nothing any of the victims would have been anticipating.

Especially since it's followed with Slothrop's reaction to the V2s glow on the horizon: "But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment, all of it, the complete night, were to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at. . . ."

See what I mean?! How was I supposed to know, at this point, that this book was so funny!?