Gravity's Rainbow: Part XI

This is the Kenosha Kid section. If you haven't read Gravity's Rainbow because you're either too stupid or too sane, you don't have any idea what that means. If you have read the book, even if it's been forty years, you're now rolling your eyes and saying, "You never did The Kenosha Kid." Although I have no idea which way you're choosing to say it. Those of you who haven't read the book don't know what I mean by that. Those of you who have read the book are now doing the International Sign Language sign for jerking off and saying, "What the fuck was that shit all about?!" I would love to tell you! But being that I've now finished my first read of Gravity's Rainbow and I didn't understand it at all (okay, maybe I understood it a little bit! But I'm hoping to understand it more by writing hundreds of these blog posts during my second reading!), I'll never manage to write some kind of academic paper revealing what the fuck is going on. Although if I'm going with my gut instinct, Pynchon is just having a bit of fun with language here. And of course, in that fun is evidence that language isn't exactly the clear cut way to communicate a thought. It's sometimes a bit foggy and nebulous.

The various ways the words "you never did the Kenosha kid" can be spoken or written or punctuated are occupying Slothrop's thoughts (for whatever reason) as he's being prepped for interrogation in The White Visitation by being injected with Sodium Amytal. The people interrogating Slothrop work for PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender). They're asking him about his experience with Black Americans back in Boston before Slothrop enlisted. I believe it's to gather information for Project Black Wing, a psi-ops to make the Germans believe in a secret Black German underground movement called the Schwarzkommando. To increase paranoia which would lead to "expedited surrender," I guess?

Spoiler Warning: The Schwarzkommando wind up being a real thing. Nobody really knows which was the stimulus and which was the reaction. Which brought the other to life. Which was the cause, which the effect.

Slothrop has become a favorite subject at The White Visitation because of his ability to predict rocket impact sites via his sexual encounters. But tonight, in this session, he will simply talk about the night he lost his harmonica in the toilet as he was bent over vomiting up his day.

About all the scientists with PISCES will learn tonight is that Slothrop has a terrific and vivid imagination, especially when it comes to describing various kinds of shit. Because maybe Tyrone Slothrop did, one time back in Boston, lose his harmonica in the toilet while vomiting. But he almost certainly did not fish it out by climbing down into the toilet (while nearly being raped by Malcolm X before he could wiggle his ass down into the bowl) and following its path through the pipes and out to sea. Maybe, being that PISCES has that bit of the acronym about Psychological Intelligence, the point of the Sodium Amytal is to just get Slothrop fucked up enough to expose his own fears and fetishes. I don't know which of those two categories being gang ass-raped by a bunch of Black men falls under.

After somebody takes a shit and flushes, Slothrop tumbles end over end into a hidden toilet world, a beleaguered city with buildings full of people Slothrop seems to know but which he cannot enter for fear of joining them forever in whatever daily ritual of death or disaster they seem to forced to suffer through. In this landscape, he meets Crutchfield the Ur-Cowboy and his sidekick Whappo. Or not really the Ur-cowboy but the only cowboy. Apparently this fantasy landscape shifts according to Slothrop's whims and perspective. It's easy to think this is just a drawn out fantasy of Slothrop's while drugged up for the interrogation except for one small detail which nags at me saying, "This is probably important. Why would this be like this if it wasn't more important?!" That detail is Whappo's magenta and green bandana. One of the headers of the short passages in the final section of the novel is called "The Last Green and Magenta." Another one of the passages is called "Orpheus Puts Down the Harp." And what is this fantasy other than Slothrop descending into the bowels of the Earth to recover his lost harmonica.

These things must mean something, right?! This section is more than just Slothrop describing the different kinds of shits the people he knows would take and musing on the various ways to interpret the phrase "you never did the kenosha kid." Right?! Somebody tell me!

That's really about it. Slothrop begins the interrogation discussing a night at a Roxbury club and winds up hallucinating a trip down a toilet into a world where only one of any person or animal exists. As Slothrop begins to rise out of the fantasy, he seems to be asking the interrogators questions about how many people are real or unreal, and how many are necessary or unnecessary. And ominously, the response hints at having plans for those that are real and unnecessary. Or the other way around? No, no. It seems like the real and unnecessary ones since it evokes an image of thousands of dead in Ardennes.

The section ends with Slothrop's hallucination merging with his pre-drugged thoughts and he meets some pusher in an alley who gives Slothrop one more way of saying, "you never did the kenosha kid."

Oh wait! One more thing was hidden in this section! The realization that I'll never fucking really understand what is going on in this book! How many times do you have to read it to understand it?!