Gravity's Rainbow: Part VIII

This book has so many sections that I'm going to have to contact my twelve year old self for help with the Roman numerals. I would do it via time phone over time machine because that kid smelled bad.

This section begins confusingly from the point of view of a dog and ends hilariously with Pointsman's foot stuck in a toilet and hanging out the side of the car as they drive away. It's a good thing history books exist because if I had to judge World War II by Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow, and Slaughterhouse-Five, I'd have to assume the war was 85% soldiers slipping on banana peels and depraved sex acts.

I wonder if I should apologize to Vonnegut for remembering Slaughterhouse-Five as more Three Stooges than it probably was? It's been awhile but he's the guy who invented Kilgore Trout, interrupted his own book while talking about Vietnam to simply say, "Losers," taught me that an asterisk looked like a butthole, and concluded the whole point of evolution was to create beings that laugh at their own farts. I'm pretty sure I got all of that right.

Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake have finally found Doctor Pointsman in a wrecked part of London. Pointsman is hunting for dogs to use in his experiments. He's a Pavlovian and his research on stimulus will somehow help the war effort. I'm not sure how it's supposed to but eventually he takes an interest in Slothrop and the mystery of Slothrop's hard-ons. At that point, I stopped wondering how experimenting with Pavlovian stimuli was supposed to help defeat the Germans. Pavlovian experimentation looms large on the themes of this book but I haven't yet grasped why they're part of The White Visitation's experiments. I suppose that should be the least of my worries when The White Visitation is also dealing with telekinesis and clairvoyance and talking with the dead and promoting racial strife and there's also some guy who can change his skin color or something?

Anyway, this whole section is called "Beyond the Zero" which, and I know I'm getting ahead of the story here, has something to do with removing the reaction to the stimulus from the patient. See, if you train a baby to get a hard-on from an indirect stimulus, as a medical professional, you're supposed to also untrain the baby. So you have to get it to stop getting hard-ons from the indirect stimulus. But when you do that, you can't stop at the baby just not getting a hard-on. That's the zero point. But just because he doesn't get a hard-on doesn't mean the stimulus isn't still affecting him somehow, you know, to just to the point where it's about to get a hard-on. So removing the stimulus even further is going "beyond the zero." But why that's the title and a major theme of this chapter would take a smarter person to explain it to you. Maybe I'll figure it out by the time I get back to the section that discusses the whole "beyond the zero" part.

Where was I? Oh yeah! Pointsman was hunting a dog and had just gotten his foot stuck in a toilet!

If a reader hadn't noticed this book was funny in the previous forty pages due to the fact that nobody told them it was funny and Pynchon's writing can be a bit opaque, this section leaves no doubt about it. The physical comedy with the toilet bowl on the foot would be a big hit with the type of person who would never fucking read this book (and also me) but there are some other bits that really make me smile. Like this part with Jessica moaning about hunting dogs with the boys:

"The night, full of fine rain, smells like a wet dog. Pointsman seems to've been away for a bit. 'I've lost my mind. I ought to be cuddling someplace with Beaver this very minute, watching him light up his Pipe, and here instead I'm with this gillie or something, this spiritualist, statistician, what are you anyway—'
    "Cuddling?" Roger has a tendency to scream. "Cuddling?'"

Okay, maybe that's not ha ha funny like a joke but I fucking love Roger's oversensitivity to any possible intimate interactions between Jessica and her serious boyfriend, Beaver.

There's a bit of foreshadowing in this early section about Pointsman moving on from experimenting on dog's to experimenting on Slothrop.

"'What will you do for a dog, then.'
    They are under way again, Roger at the wheel, Jessica between them, toilet bowl out a half-open door, before the answer. 'Perhaps it's a sign. Perhaps I should be branching out.'
    Roger gives him a quick look. Silence, Mexico. Try not to think about what that means. He's not one's superior after all, both report to the old Brigadier at 'The White Visitation' on, so far as he knows, equal footing. But sometimes—Roger glances again across Jessica's dark wool bosom at the knitted head, the naked nose and eyes—he thinks the doctor wants more than his good will, his collaboration. But wants him. As one wants a fine specimen of dog. . . ."

I've probably already quoted too much of this section to include a somewhat confusing bit near the end but the bit seems more important than an actual description of the building where Doctor Spectro works. Pynchon describes a building built to house patients with colonic and respiratory illnesses. He describes the necessity and drive to build this building as the Victorian equivalent of what drove the people of an earlier age to build Gothic cathedrals. It feels very much like a writer describing the similarities and quite obvious differences between postmodern literature and literature from earlier centuries. What once drove mankind to write and think and ponder was almost exclusively God and religion and spirituality. But in a time when there is "a doubt as to God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence)", the drive must come from another source. Pynchon's "joke" is that the new source is colonic and respiratory diseases. He says it much better (if not so mundanely):

"They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals—but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year. The grimed brick sprawl is known as the Hospital of St. Veronica of the True Image for Colonic and Respiratory Diseases, and one of its residents is a Dr. Kevin Spectro, neurologist and casual Pavlovian."

See? It's practically a definition of postmodern writing! "Remember when we could look to an Almighty creator for hope and salvation?! But now it's like, man, that Guy can't exist, right? I mean, the fucking A-bomb, man! What the hell is going on?! How do we get out of this mess?!" Or maybe it isn't a definition of postmodern literature at all and it just speaks to me! Who can tell? Not God!

Just...what a great section. Mostly because it's so comprehensible! But also funny! And charming! And a bit melancholic by the end.

This is the first chapter that mentions Pointsman's mysterious "Book" with a capital "B". It was expensive and seven of the doctor's at The White Visitation had to chip in to buy it, so it makes the rounds, spending one week at a time with each different owner. Or wait. Was The Book already mentioned?! I can't remember since I'm reading this book so many times at once! Anyway, The Book is one of only seven copies (or something?) of Pavlov's notes. I'm not sure if it's ever named but one of the chapters is named later and I did a Google search back then to discover what book exactly they were discussing. I don't remember it exactly but it was Pavlov's notes and crap. More on The Book later, I'm sure!