Gravity's Rainbow: Part IX

When I wrote my thoughts on the last section, I was about one hundred or so pages into Gravity's Rainbow. Now I'm five hundred pages in! So maybe I'll understand 20% of what I read instead of just 6%!

This section begins with a conversation between Kevin Spectro and Ned Pointsman. They're two of the seven owners of the mysterious Book (which won't be that mysterious for long. It's like Pavlov's journal or something). Ned is a complete Pavlovian doing all the things you'd expect of him: catching dogs, torturing dogs, wiring dogs' salivary glands so they leak directly into tubes. Spectro, well, I don't remember exactly what his specialty is. It probably doesn't matter because he'll be dead soon.

Pynchon uses the word "abreaction" in this section for (possibly?) the first time. He'll use it again so it's probably important! Mostly he uses it in the context of Pointsman's reality. Pointsman, being a Pavlovian working in a madhouse leased by paranormal researchers, runs into a lot of people who tend to have abreactions (here's the definition so you don't have to bother poor overworked Google: "the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it (typically through hypnosis or suggestion)"). That word might be a really important world in postmodernist literature. Not that I ever remember coming across it! But I'm sure I just ignored it like I ignore all the words I don't know. The definition just makes me think, "How can that word not be constantly used in postmodernist writing since it perfectly describes what we're all going through in a postmodern world?!"

Pointsman has apparently just opened up to Spectro about maybe experimenting on Tyrone Slothrop rather than his dogs. Some stimulus is giving Slothrop hard-ons and isn't it the job of Pavlovians to push that stimulus reaction further and further? Surely something can be learned about the human condition by studying what makes Slothrop erect?! Spectro isn't supportive of the idea because he doesn't see how you can justify experimenting on just one man. But Pointsman figures it might be moot anyway because he can't figure out how to get the funding out of Pudding, the general running The White Visitation.

Spoiler Alert: he'll get the funding out of him by providing him with weekly visits from Katje (who?! You haven't met her yet!) where she pisses and shits in his mouth.

Here's the crux of Pointsman's desire to study Slothrop: through some unknown stimulus, Slothrop can detect where a German rocket that has yet to be fired will land in London. In a way, the rocket itself, traveling faster than the speed of sound, mimics Slothrop's reaction: it blows up before it's ever heard. Response seems somehow to be coming before the stimulus. It's a mystery which turns all Pavlovian experimentation on its head.

Spectro works at a ward where people wounded by rockets are treated. Not only physically but mentally as well. They are full of abreactions! Am I using that word correctly?! Who can tell?! Anyway, it's a good segue into quoting this bit that I love from this section (is it really a segue if I interrupt the performative segue with a mention of it being a segue?!):

"[S]ooner or later an abreaction, each one, all over this frost and harrowed city. . .
     . . . as once again the floor is a giant lift propelling you with no warning toward your ceiling—replaying now as the walls are blown outward, bricks and mortar showering down, your sudden paralysis as death comes to wrap and stun I don't know guv I must've blacked out when I come to she was gone it was burning all around me head was full of smoke . . . and the sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery, the snowy roofslates fallen across half your bed, the cinema kiss never completed, you were pinned and stared at a crumpled cigarette pack for two hours in pain, you could hear them crying from the rows either side but couldn't move . . . the sudden light filling up the room, the awful silence, brighter than any morning through blankets turned to gauze no shadows at all, only unutterable two-o'clock dawn . . . and . . .
     . . . this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness. (And is it really the rocket explosion that Slothrop's keying on, or is it exactly this depolarizing, this neurotic "confusion" that fills the wards tonight?) How many times before it's washed away, these iterations that pour out, reliving the blast, afraid to let go because the letting go is so final how do I know Doctor that I'll ever come back? and the answer trust us, after the rocket, is so hollow, only mummery—trust you?—and both know it. . . . Spectro feels so like a fraud but carries on . . . only because the pain continues to be real. . . ."

There's a strange bit in this section where Pointsman has a fantasy. On my first read-through, I thought we were learning that Pointsman was some kind of pedophile. But I think the creepy descriptions of children and virgins, the people he is lusting after to experiment on, to replace his dogs, is just an analogy of those who have moved past their trauma (as described in the transcribed passage above). They move past the trauma and spring anew as a blank slate, as a virgin, as a child. A mind so clean and clear of the trauma they had previously experienced that Pointsman lusts to project his own view of the world upon them. How can he get a better specimen, unless it's, say, an infant baby boy like Jampf used.

Pointsman, of course, does not get his mitts on one of Spectro's patients to experiment on (his fantasy being one of kidnapping as he lays in wait at the places he knows they will be extracted to once released from the hospital, and not a fantasy where Spectro just gives him access to one of his patients. Pointsman, you see, is a cold-hearted monster. That might be a spoiler unless you've already realized it). What Pointsman does get is an octopus named Grigori. It'll become important in one of Pointsman's schemes later.

Pointsman shows little concern for the war effort; he's merely trying to get enough money out of the war to fund whatever weird Pavlovian experiments he can get away with. So far the war has provided him with lots of free dogs and lots of money (maybe not enough money but he'll, you know, learn disgusting ways around that soon enough). Since I, for the life of me, can't figure out how Pavlovian studies could help the war anyway, it's nice to learn that Pointsman's goals are entirely self-motivated. And it's important to learn about him and his motivations now before we get to Chapter Two where his experiments on Slothrop begin in earnest.