If you were a reader thinking "I wonder what The White Visitation looks like and one compelling story about the patients who used to be housed there" then this is the section you've been waiting for! Because it begins with those things! In the story about the patient who escapes from The White Visitation when it used to be solely a place to house the insane, we learn that the Lord of the Sea has been named Bert. This might be important later. Try to remember it's a Pynchon novel. Every weird bit with a general eating shit directly from a woman's ass or some guy jerking off on an encoded war missive is probably important!
The White Visitation slowly became more than a mental hospital as the war began. The new military occupants' first piece of business was to set up a broadcasting station to broadcast paranoid thoughts into Germany on a constant basis; it's why The White Visitation was chosen: high on a cliff overlooking the sea and facing the Continent. It was the perfect place to beam wireless paranoia directly at the German people. A BBC broadcaster named Myron Grunton took up the job. And being wireless, his paranoid programs also infiltrated the dreams and daily life of the locals. How could it not? Paranoia isn't exactly a domesticated and controllable entity.
Myron's broadcasts became the first iteration of Project Black Wing. The idea of Project Black Wing began when Pirate brought back intel on a group of ex-colonial Africans—the Hereros—now living in Germany and involved in a secret weapons program for the War. What better subject to fire up paranoia among the Germans than the possibility of a race war brewing, based on the Hereros' vengeance for Germany's colonial and genocidal treatment of them back in Africa in the early 1900s? They named them the Schwarzkommando and they broadcasted, continuously, descriptions of the possible (probable!) danger of their discontent.
Moving on from Project Black Wing, also headquartered at The White Visitation is our Pavlovian and his dogs, Pointsman. As the War is nearing its end and victory is in sight, Pointsman grows more and more desperate and disillusioned. His experiments have not provided him with any material to make his name known; the War, while being an apt conduit for funding, turned out to not be the ideal situation for Pavlovian ideas. And he knows that when the War ends, so will his revenue. This is why he is so desperate to get his hands on Tyrone Slothrop and his bomb predicting boners. It's hard to show how making dogs drool can be turned to usefulness in the war effort. But figuring out the cause and effect, discovering the stimulus present to give a man's penis the ability to predict where a rocket will fall, how can that be denied by the people parceling out the money?!
Pointsman's biggest obstacle to more funding is Brigadier Pudding.
"Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him. His greatest triumph on the battlefield came in 1917, in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man's land some 40 yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit. He was pensioned off around the beginning of the Great Depression—went to sit in the study of an empty house in Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades, none of whose gazes quite met one's own, there to go at a spot of combinatorial analysis, that favorite pastime of retired Army officers, with a rattling intense devotion."
That's Pudding. Pynchon adds more that evocative opening description of Pudding which is well worth reading but my goal isn't to transcribe the entirety of the novel here! I'm just trying to come to an understanding of what is happening in every section of this book. That's not going to be easy because I already feel like I've failed with the Slothrop's Sodium Amytal hallucination.
One of the great things about reading a 1973 Thomas Pynchon book in 2020 is that I have the Internet at my disposal. So when Pynchon says something like "Maud Chilkes, who looks from the rear rather like Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot Asquith, sits dreaming of a bun and a cup of tea," I can simply Google "Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot Asquith" and voila:
The White Visitation slowly became more than a mental hospital as the war began. The new military occupants' first piece of business was to set up a broadcasting station to broadcast paranoid thoughts into Germany on a constant basis; it's why The White Visitation was chosen: high on a cliff overlooking the sea and facing the Continent. It was the perfect place to beam wireless paranoia directly at the German people. A BBC broadcaster named Myron Grunton took up the job. And being wireless, his paranoid programs also infiltrated the dreams and daily life of the locals. How could it not? Paranoia isn't exactly a domesticated and controllable entity.
Myron's broadcasts became the first iteration of Project Black Wing. The idea of Project Black Wing began when Pirate brought back intel on a group of ex-colonial Africans—the Hereros—now living in Germany and involved in a secret weapons program for the War. What better subject to fire up paranoia among the Germans than the possibility of a race war brewing, based on the Hereros' vengeance for Germany's colonial and genocidal treatment of them back in Africa in the early 1900s? They named them the Schwarzkommando and they broadcasted, continuously, descriptions of the possible (probable!) danger of their discontent.
Moving on from Project Black Wing, also headquartered at The White Visitation is our Pavlovian and his dogs, Pointsman. As the War is nearing its end and victory is in sight, Pointsman grows more and more desperate and disillusioned. His experiments have not provided him with any material to make his name known; the War, while being an apt conduit for funding, turned out to not be the ideal situation for Pavlovian ideas. And he knows that when the War ends, so will his revenue. This is why he is so desperate to get his hands on Tyrone Slothrop and his bomb predicting boners. It's hard to show how making dogs drool can be turned to usefulness in the war effort. But figuring out the cause and effect, discovering the stimulus present to give a man's penis the ability to predict where a rocket will fall, how can that be denied by the people parceling out the money?!
Pointsman's biggest obstacle to more funding is Brigadier Pudding.
"Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him. His greatest triumph on the battlefield came in 1917, in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man's land some 40 yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit. He was pensioned off around the beginning of the Great Depression—went to sit in the study of an empty house in Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades, none of whose gazes quite met one's own, there to go at a spot of combinatorial analysis, that favorite pastime of retired Army officers, with a rattling intense devotion."
That's Pudding. Pynchon adds more that evocative opening description of Pudding which is well worth reading but my goal isn't to transcribe the entirety of the novel here! I'm just trying to come to an understanding of what is happening in every section of this book. That's not going to be easy because I already feel like I've failed with the Slothrop's Sodium Amytal hallucination.
One of the great things about reading a 1973 Thomas Pynchon book in 2020 is that I have the Internet at my disposal. So when Pynchon says something like "Maud Chilkes, who looks from the rear rather like Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot Asquith, sits dreaming of a bun and a cup of tea," I can simply Google "Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot Asquith" and voila:
Maybe, for some reason, I'd have already been familiar with this if I'd read the book in 1973. But I doubt it! Unless there was some big Cecil Beaton revival that year.
Whether or not readers of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 would have recognized this image, it's beyond doubt that 80 year old Brigadier Pudding would have used it as a point of comparison in 1944. He probably jerked off to that image on multiple occasions as a wee lad of 63.
The point of Pudding's mini-biography in his introduction is to point out that he's not really happy being in charge of doling out money to a bunch of maniacs who nobody would have thought twice about pre-War but he's too old and set in his outlook to be of any serious use to other parts of the war effort.
Here, have a line that broke my heart:
"In the ARF wing, the stolen dogs sleep, scratch, recall shadowy smells of humans who may have loved them, listen undrooling to Ned Pointsman's oscillators and metronomes."
It's just one line so it only brought me to the brink of weeping as opposed to the section on the Dodos and the other section on the Hereros' plans for generational suicide.
And now we get into discussions of Pavlovian theory. It's not as confusing as Alan Moore's Lucia James chapter in Jerusalem (I mean, what is? Could I have at least chosen something understandable without unending hours of torturous speculation and guesswork? Like maybe Memento or Lost Highway?) but more confusing than the boner I get reading and Archie and Jughead comic book (because of Veronica, of course! Va-va-va-voom! If it wasn't for Veronica, the boner would be more confusing than the discussion of Pavlovian science). It's sad that I don't understand it because I'm pretty sure it's all this smart theoretical stuff that is the key that unlocks the door to the room where all the good porn is hidden. The porn is a metaphor for postmodernist themes.
One dog, Vanya, has entered "the 'equivalent' phase, the first of the transmarginal phases." That means her response to the stimulus is no longer dependent on the strength of the stimulus. Her response is the same no matter how great or how meager the stimulus. Vanya's body and mind are literally being changed by her exposure to overwhelming stimuli. She no longer perceives a difference between inconsequential stimuli and life-and-death stimuli. Vanya has become numb to not just subtlety and nuance but to any degree of difference in outside stimuli she's exposed to. This is commentary on us, isn't it?! Especially in a time of war where rockets exploding around us have become just a part of our daily lives. It's an example of Roger's earlier confession to Jessica upon driving by scenes of devastation where people are searching for the living and wounded.
"Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days. . . . By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of one's nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal . . . the value of n my be different for each of us, but I'm sorry: sooner or later . . ."
See? This is why this project is good for me in understanding Gravity's Rainbow. Because now I get why all the Pavlovian stuff! It's making sense!
After the bit about the dog Vanya, Pynchon describes Brigadier Pudding's weekly group meetings. It's fucking hilarious but I won't go into it here. It's another example, 80 pages in, of how hilarious this book is and, at the 80th page or so, easily still a surprise, especially if it's your first time reading it. A reader could easily make it this far having missed the truly hilarious other parts of the book (like, say, maybe the reader thought of themselves as too intellectual for toilet humor or slapstick. Why, they would have been doubly, but sternly, apoplectic over Poinstman's hunt for a dog that winds up with his foot stuck in a toilet!). But I submit there's nobody who could get to this section and not think to themselves, "Oh! Ha ha! Good show, chap! Mighty funny, this!" Unless, of course, they missed it because they were so confused by the transmarginal stuff it caused them to miss the way Brigadier Pudding's meeting devolves into other topics so that they read the entire section and thought, "Oh! I mean, what? 'Vertical interest'? I don't get it."
One scientist, Géza Rózsavölgyi, is concerned not with Pudding's meetings but how everyone at The White Visitation will be funded after the war. He believes they need a powerful program to justify their existence rather than a charismatic leader able to secure funding through pure force of ego and will. The work is what should matter; it is what should drive the science. Currently, Géza Rózsavölgyi believes that Tyrone Slothrop is their best bet for studies which will lead to a promising post-War program. And so Géza Rózsavölgyi sets out the parameters for Chapter Two:
"Precise-ly why," leaps Rózsavölgyi, "we are now proposing, to give, Sloth-rop a complete-ly dif-ferent sort, of test. We are now design-ing for him, a so-called, 'projec-tive' test. The most famil-iar exam-ple of the type, is the Rorschach ink-blot. The ba-sic theory, is, that when given an unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How, he goes a-bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes—will provide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind." Eyebrows going a mile a minute, extraordinarily fluid and graceful hand gestures, resembling—most likely it is deliberate, and who can blame Rosie for trying to cash in—those of his most famous compatriot, though there're the inevitable bad side-effects: staff who swear they've seen him crawling headfirst down the north façade of "The White Visitation," for example. "So we are re-ally, quite, in agree-ment, Reverend Doctor. A test, like the MMPI, is, in this respect, not adequate. It is, a struc-tured stimulus. The sub-ject can fal-sify, consciously, or repress, un-consciously. But with the projec-tive technique, nothing he can do, con-scious or otherwise, can pre-vent us, from finding what we wish, to know. We, are in control. He, cannot help, himself."
Christ that was a pain in the ass to transcribe!
Basically, the plan is to expose Slothrop to the rocket in more direct and intimate ways than just wandering around London getting boners where rockets will land. See what he makes of it. See how he reacts. Watch his paranoia run out of control until the world is exactly what he thinks it is: people manipulating his life to the point that he has practically no free will. And, I mean, yeah. How does one account for the observers observing the observation ruining the experiment? I mean, if you're manipulating a guy to see how he reacts and he reacts by assuming his entire world is being manipulated, does that mean, you know, anything?!
Oh, and who is Rosie trying to emulate? What person is the most famous Soviet war-era compatriot? It sounds like it should be Spider-man!
I said the section begins with a description of The White Visitation. But that's nothing compared with the actual detailed description of the building on which the section ends. It's practically a treatise on postmodern architecture.
And that's it! This was a most enlightening section to re-read. How come we can't just re-read books instead of having to read them first before we can re-read them? They'd be so much easier to understand!
The point of Pudding's mini-biography in his introduction is to point out that he's not really happy being in charge of doling out money to a bunch of maniacs who nobody would have thought twice about pre-War but he's too old and set in his outlook to be of any serious use to other parts of the war effort.
Here, have a line that broke my heart:
"In the ARF wing, the stolen dogs sleep, scratch, recall shadowy smells of humans who may have loved them, listen undrooling to Ned Pointsman's oscillators and metronomes."
It's just one line so it only brought me to the brink of weeping as opposed to the section on the Dodos and the other section on the Hereros' plans for generational suicide.
And now we get into discussions of Pavlovian theory. It's not as confusing as Alan Moore's Lucia James chapter in Jerusalem (I mean, what is? Could I have at least chosen something understandable without unending hours of torturous speculation and guesswork? Like maybe Memento or Lost Highway?) but more confusing than the boner I get reading and Archie and Jughead comic book (because of Veronica, of course! Va-va-va-voom! If it wasn't for Veronica, the boner would be more confusing than the discussion of Pavlovian science). It's sad that I don't understand it because I'm pretty sure it's all this smart theoretical stuff that is the key that unlocks the door to the room where all the good porn is hidden. The porn is a metaphor for postmodernist themes.
One dog, Vanya, has entered "the 'equivalent' phase, the first of the transmarginal phases." That means her response to the stimulus is no longer dependent on the strength of the stimulus. Her response is the same no matter how great or how meager the stimulus. Vanya's body and mind are literally being changed by her exposure to overwhelming stimuli. She no longer perceives a difference between inconsequential stimuli and life-and-death stimuli. Vanya has become numb to not just subtlety and nuance but to any degree of difference in outside stimuli she's exposed to. This is commentary on us, isn't it?! Especially in a time of war where rockets exploding around us have become just a part of our daily lives. It's an example of Roger's earlier confession to Jessica upon driving by scenes of devastation where people are searching for the living and wounded.
"Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days. . . . By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of one's nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal . . . the value of n my be different for each of us, but I'm sorry: sooner or later . . ."
See? This is why this project is good for me in understanding Gravity's Rainbow. Because now I get why all the Pavlovian stuff! It's making sense!
After the bit about the dog Vanya, Pynchon describes Brigadier Pudding's weekly group meetings. It's fucking hilarious but I won't go into it here. It's another example, 80 pages in, of how hilarious this book is and, at the 80th page or so, easily still a surprise, especially if it's your first time reading it. A reader could easily make it this far having missed the truly hilarious other parts of the book (like, say, maybe the reader thought of themselves as too intellectual for toilet humor or slapstick. Why, they would have been doubly, but sternly, apoplectic over Poinstman's hunt for a dog that winds up with his foot stuck in a toilet!). But I submit there's nobody who could get to this section and not think to themselves, "Oh! Ha ha! Good show, chap! Mighty funny, this!" Unless, of course, they missed it because they were so confused by the transmarginal stuff it caused them to miss the way Brigadier Pudding's meeting devolves into other topics so that they read the entire section and thought, "Oh! I mean, what? 'Vertical interest'? I don't get it."
One scientist, Géza Rózsavölgyi, is concerned not with Pudding's meetings but how everyone at The White Visitation will be funded after the war. He believes they need a powerful program to justify their existence rather than a charismatic leader able to secure funding through pure force of ego and will. The work is what should matter; it is what should drive the science. Currently, Géza Rózsavölgyi believes that Tyrone Slothrop is their best bet for studies which will lead to a promising post-War program. And so Géza Rózsavölgyi sets out the parameters for Chapter Two:
"Precise-ly why," leaps Rózsavölgyi, "we are now proposing, to give, Sloth-rop a complete-ly dif-ferent sort, of test. We are now design-ing for him, a so-called, 'projec-tive' test. The most famil-iar exam-ple of the type, is the Rorschach ink-blot. The ba-sic theory, is, that when given an unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How, he goes a-bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes—will provide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind." Eyebrows going a mile a minute, extraordinarily fluid and graceful hand gestures, resembling—most likely it is deliberate, and who can blame Rosie for trying to cash in—those of his most famous compatriot, though there're the inevitable bad side-effects: staff who swear they've seen him crawling headfirst down the north façade of "The White Visitation," for example. "So we are re-ally, quite, in agree-ment, Reverend Doctor. A test, like the MMPI, is, in this respect, not adequate. It is, a struc-tured stimulus. The sub-ject can fal-sify, consciously, or repress, un-consciously. But with the projec-tive technique, nothing he can do, con-scious or otherwise, can pre-vent us, from finding what we wish, to know. We, are in control. He, cannot help, himself."
Christ that was a pain in the ass to transcribe!
Basically, the plan is to expose Slothrop to the rocket in more direct and intimate ways than just wandering around London getting boners where rockets will land. See what he makes of it. See how he reacts. Watch his paranoia run out of control until the world is exactly what he thinks it is: people manipulating his life to the point that he has practically no free will. And, I mean, yeah. How does one account for the observers observing the observation ruining the experiment? I mean, if you're manipulating a guy to see how he reacts and he reacts by assuming his entire world is being manipulated, does that mean, you know, anything?!
Oh, and who is Rosie trying to emulate? What person is the most famous Soviet war-era compatriot? It sounds like it should be Spider-man!
I said the section begins with a description of The White Visitation. But that's nothing compared with the actual detailed description of the building on which the section ends. It's practically a treatise on postmodern architecture.
And that's it! This was a most enlightening section to re-read. How come we can't just re-read books instead of having to read them first before we can re-read them? They'd be so much easier to understand!
No comments:
Post a Comment