This section is about Leni, Franz's wife, Peter Sascha's lover, Ilse's mom. She's just left Franz and living in a crappy broken down building no better than a skip with a bunch of other dissidents. She has a thought which pulled me out of reading to come here and transcribe it:
"Franz is just the type they want. They know how to use that. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can't use?"
I mean, chills, right? In a way she doesn't yet realize, she's also talking about her daughter Ilse. When Ilse can't be used, she's in a camp. But when they figure out a use for her, designed to get Franz back under control when he seems to be slipping his bonds, they let her out. But those who they can't even find this small use for? Like I said, chills.
One of the aspects of Gravity's Rainbow narration style is how it almost exclusively mentions those things the character whose perspective the story is currently being told through would know. So we don't get much blatant and forthright discussion of the German death camps. We get maybe one mention of the atomic bombing of Japan. But we get reference after subtle reference to the existence and/or possibility of these things. The novel is informed by these tragedies while never really looking directly at them.
This section broke part of my mind because I realized that this book was written in 1973. So a lot of it is about 1973. Which isn't something I really thought about during the first read through and wasn't anything I thought about until reading this section. It's a commentary about the youth anti-war revolution of the 60s, right? And maybe the heart of what it's getting at is the writing on the wall: "AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN." So my mind broke because I began to realize, "I'm too far past 1973 to truly understand, on my own, without any guides, some major aspects of this book." So the part of me that sees the futility of truly understanding the majority of Pynchon's themes starts breaking in to say, "Yeah. Duh! That's why you're supposed to be making immature jokes about what you're reading! To camouflage your lack of understanding!" And then the truly stupid part of me that constantly forgets that says, "Oh yeah! Other people can point out how this section parallels the anti-war movement! Somebody else can explain who Rosa Luxemburg is and why she's mentioned! Some huge nerd can point out that Triangle D isn't a dirty reference but a Greek letter and math notation! You just enjoy the book as best you can, dumby."
There's that moment (after all the masturbation talk and then the sex with a Jewess talk that leads to masturbation (by other readers, I mean! Ahem)) when she meets with her old school friend Richard Hirsch, surprised to find he didn't die out on the front in France, which reads almost exactly as if it were a young American woman running into a friend she'd thought lost in Vietnam. The section is rife with astrology, something Leni wholeheartedly believes in. It might as well be the 60s moving on into the 70s.
Going back to the above quote, I suppose the question "What will happen to the ones they can't use?" can also be viewed in terms of the 1960s and 70s anti-war movement. How many Kent States did the politicians and soldiers actively long for? We see that even now with how much they want to run down protestors or send in the military to quash any protest criticizing police and government. It's so disturbing to see how many Americans have terrorist mindsets, especially now that so many of them have been inundated with so much propaganda.
That's not to totally let everybody off the hook though! As we'll see later, Pynchon sees in the overarching conspiracy how both sides simply wind up fighting for the rich and powerful. The bit where Pirate discovers he's working for Them whether he's with them or against them seems prophetic in this day and age and how corporations and government have infiltrated and manipulated the Green Movement for their own personal gain. Even when fighting for a better world, money and power manages to climb on top and direct the conversation.
"'Not produce,' she tried, 'not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know . . .' She didn't know, all she was trying to do was reach."
Is this not an explanation for how to read Gravity's Rainbow itself? Every section seems almost a short story that can be read out of context with the rest of the book. Sure, it all sort of tells a linear story. But so, in a way, do all of Roger Mexico's pins in his map representing rocket strikes. There's data to be analyzed, something to be learned. But the order of the strikes doesn't really matter, do they? If only we, as readers, could read every section in parallel rather than in a series. Would something more come together?
"But he said: 'Try to design anything that way and have it work.'"
Ha ha! Did it work, Tom? Has it worked? I don't think I'm smart enough to say.
I still don't know what the significance of the colors "magenta and green" are but they stealthily poke up their heads in this chapter too in the description of the destroyed paint factory Franz worked at before moving on to rockets: ". . . paint cans exploded in great bursts of crimson and bottle-green. . . ."
We learn the history of Franz and how he came to be working on the rockets (after the paint factory burned down and he began putting up advertisements for movies that turned out to be maybe not movies at all but times and dates for the meeting of revolutionaries?) and how Leni came to leave him and went to let Peter Sascha know. In this part, we get a bit about assassinations which reminded me of the moment Omar is killed in The Wire:
"The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator."
Only somebody who is ignorant of who the powerful is, of what he represents, can muster the nerve to murder them. Nobody dared go after Omar until somebody who didn't know anything about Omar decided to. It's probably exactly what happened between Caesar and Brutus too! The subject of assassination comes up because that night, Peter Sascha is trying to contact a man named Walter Rathenau, a former minister who was assassinated and whose import to one of the main themes of Gravity's Rainbow will probably be lost on first time readers. And also second time readers (which would normally be me but, well, sometimes I notice things?).
"Rathenau—according to histories—was prophet and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm—a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine."
A large part of the conspiracy that everybody lives under is that of The Firm, or the generalized "They." I'm pretty sure that entire conspiracy is the corporations coordinating to manipulate everything—the war, the economy, people's lives—simply to increase profits. Before this account of Rathenau, there's a minor story about how one corporation built a weapon that would blind people in a ten mile radius but they were censured by the rest of the corporations because a bomb like that would destroy the dye industry post-War. So you see, the war must be waged in a way that profits everybody, during and after!
The section ends with Rathenau's words through Peter Sascha. I don't know what it means, what any of it means! Something about the creation of plastics, maybe? It ends with this "You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?" Hmm. Maybe I should think about reading a book about Gravity's Rainbow instead of Gravity's Rainbow! Because then instead of exclaiming after each paragraph, "Duh!", maybe I'll be able to exclaim, "Aha!"
"Franz is just the type they want. They know how to use that. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can't use?"
I mean, chills, right? In a way she doesn't yet realize, she's also talking about her daughter Ilse. When Ilse can't be used, she's in a camp. But when they figure out a use for her, designed to get Franz back under control when he seems to be slipping his bonds, they let her out. But those who they can't even find this small use for? Like I said, chills.
One of the aspects of Gravity's Rainbow narration style is how it almost exclusively mentions those things the character whose perspective the story is currently being told through would know. So we don't get much blatant and forthright discussion of the German death camps. We get maybe one mention of the atomic bombing of Japan. But we get reference after subtle reference to the existence and/or possibility of these things. The novel is informed by these tragedies while never really looking directly at them.
This section broke part of my mind because I realized that this book was written in 1973. So a lot of it is about 1973. Which isn't something I really thought about during the first read through and wasn't anything I thought about until reading this section. It's a commentary about the youth anti-war revolution of the 60s, right? And maybe the heart of what it's getting at is the writing on the wall: "AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN." So my mind broke because I began to realize, "I'm too far past 1973 to truly understand, on my own, without any guides, some major aspects of this book." So the part of me that sees the futility of truly understanding the majority of Pynchon's themes starts breaking in to say, "Yeah. Duh! That's why you're supposed to be making immature jokes about what you're reading! To camouflage your lack of understanding!" And then the truly stupid part of me that constantly forgets that says, "Oh yeah! Other people can point out how this section parallels the anti-war movement! Somebody else can explain who Rosa Luxemburg is and why she's mentioned! Some huge nerd can point out that Triangle D isn't a dirty reference but a Greek letter and math notation! You just enjoy the book as best you can, dumby."
There's that moment (after all the masturbation talk and then the sex with a Jewess talk that leads to masturbation (by other readers, I mean! Ahem)) when she meets with her old school friend Richard Hirsch, surprised to find he didn't die out on the front in France, which reads almost exactly as if it were a young American woman running into a friend she'd thought lost in Vietnam. The section is rife with astrology, something Leni wholeheartedly believes in. It might as well be the 60s moving on into the 70s.
Going back to the above quote, I suppose the question "What will happen to the ones they can't use?" can also be viewed in terms of the 1960s and 70s anti-war movement. How many Kent States did the politicians and soldiers actively long for? We see that even now with how much they want to run down protestors or send in the military to quash any protest criticizing police and government. It's so disturbing to see how many Americans have terrorist mindsets, especially now that so many of them have been inundated with so much propaganda.
That's not to totally let everybody off the hook though! As we'll see later, Pynchon sees in the overarching conspiracy how both sides simply wind up fighting for the rich and powerful. The bit where Pirate discovers he's working for Them whether he's with them or against them seems prophetic in this day and age and how corporations and government have infiltrated and manipulated the Green Movement for their own personal gain. Even when fighting for a better world, money and power manages to climb on top and direct the conversation.
"'Not produce,' she tried, 'not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know . . .' She didn't know, all she was trying to do was reach."
Is this not an explanation for how to read Gravity's Rainbow itself? Every section seems almost a short story that can be read out of context with the rest of the book. Sure, it all sort of tells a linear story. But so, in a way, do all of Roger Mexico's pins in his map representing rocket strikes. There's data to be analyzed, something to be learned. But the order of the strikes doesn't really matter, do they? If only we, as readers, could read every section in parallel rather than in a series. Would something more come together?
"But he said: 'Try to design anything that way and have it work.'"
Ha ha! Did it work, Tom? Has it worked? I don't think I'm smart enough to say.
I still don't know what the significance of the colors "magenta and green" are but they stealthily poke up their heads in this chapter too in the description of the destroyed paint factory Franz worked at before moving on to rockets: ". . . paint cans exploded in great bursts of crimson and bottle-green. . . ."
We learn the history of Franz and how he came to be working on the rockets (after the paint factory burned down and he began putting up advertisements for movies that turned out to be maybe not movies at all but times and dates for the meeting of revolutionaries?) and how Leni came to leave him and went to let Peter Sascha know. In this part, we get a bit about assassinations which reminded me of the moment Omar is killed in The Wire:
"The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator."
Only somebody who is ignorant of who the powerful is, of what he represents, can muster the nerve to murder them. Nobody dared go after Omar until somebody who didn't know anything about Omar decided to. It's probably exactly what happened between Caesar and Brutus too! The subject of assassination comes up because that night, Peter Sascha is trying to contact a man named Walter Rathenau, a former minister who was assassinated and whose import to one of the main themes of Gravity's Rainbow will probably be lost on first time readers. And also second time readers (which would normally be me but, well, sometimes I notice things?).
"Rathenau—according to histories—was prophet and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm—a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine."
A large part of the conspiracy that everybody lives under is that of The Firm, or the generalized "They." I'm pretty sure that entire conspiracy is the corporations coordinating to manipulate everything—the war, the economy, people's lives—simply to increase profits. Before this account of Rathenau, there's a minor story about how one corporation built a weapon that would blind people in a ten mile radius but they were censured by the rest of the corporations because a bomb like that would destroy the dye industry post-War. So you see, the war must be waged in a way that profits everybody, during and after!
The section ends with Rathenau's words through Peter Sascha. I don't know what it means, what any of it means! Something about the creation of plastics, maybe? It ends with this "You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?" Hmm. Maybe I should think about reading a book about Gravity's Rainbow instead of Gravity's Rainbow! Because then instead of exclaiming after each paragraph, "Duh!", maybe I'll be able to exclaim, "Aha!"
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