This section was put in here so the reader could take a break from thinking and just laugh a lot. I remember laughing so much the first time I read this section. I would read a funny description of a terrible candy and then look up from my copy of Gravity's Rainbow—held prominently in a way which kept my hands from covering the title—glance around for somebody to make eye contact with and then laugh as if I were a laugh track for The Big Bang Theory. Then I'd nod sagely at the person whom I'm certain wasn't looking annoyed at all but totally interested and tilt my head toward the book as if to say, "Hunh? Hunh? Pretty great, right?!" Then the person would roll their eyes in the shared bond of experiencing great literature. I admit that it's not as effective as loudly blaring Alice Cooper's Killers from my station wagon as I slowly roll down the block, imagining all the kids I'm passing giving me devil horns and saying, "Rock on, dude!" But I still felt as if I were urinating on a lamp post to claim my territory.
The section begins with Slothrop returned to London after his interrogations at The White Visitation. But he notices things have changed like how he's definitely being followed constantly. I'm sure Poinstman could have found people to tail Slothrop successfully so having Slothrop notice the tails and become more paranoid must be part of the conditioning for the new experiment.
Having been returned to his old routine in the office he shares with his friend Tantivy, Slothrop meets a woman named Darlene with whom he's had a previous liaison. She takes him back to the place she's renting from an old woman suffering from "greensickness, tetter, kibes, purples, imposthumes, and almonds in the ears, most recently a touch of scurvy." I am not Googling any of those because they're almost certainly all made up by Pynchon. Especially scurvy.
And then the old woman starts giving him the candies, the wine jellies. That's when, if I were in public, I'd look up to find the eyes of some person nearby just trying to be ignored and I'd give them the quick eyebrow raise while glancing down at my book, raising it up just slightly so they understand that's what I'm gesturing to with my eyes, and then smiling that "Here we go again!" smile with a slight chuckle. After I go back to my book assured of our chummy communication, they, sitting there thinking I'm a madman, presumably go back to thinking about dog farts.
"'Now I remember you—the one with the graft at the Ministry of Supply!" but [Slothrop] knows, from last time, that no gallantry can help him now. After that visit he wrote home to Nalline: 'The English are kind of weird when it comes to the way things taste, Mom. They aren't like us. It might be the climate. They go for things we would never dream of. Sometimes it is enough to turn your stomach, boy. The other day I had had one of these things they call "wine jellies." That's their idea of candy, Mom! Figure out a way to feed some to that Hitler 'n' I betcha the war'd be over tomorrow!' Now once again he finds himself checking out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding, he hopes amiably, at Mrs. Quoad. They have the names of different wines written on them in bas-relief."
And so the section of Slothrop eating a bunch of terrible candies begins.
"These people are really insane. No sugar, natch. He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as he's biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, 'Oh, I though we got rid of all those—' a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingenue's thewse—'years ago,' at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels."
After the blitz of offensive candies (the entirety of the passage even more humorous than the short passages I transcribed), Slothrop and Darlene fuck. As they're waking up, a rocket hits nearby. This causes Slothrop to get an instant hardon and they fuck again while somebody from outside watches through the blinds.
The experiment to determine what the fuck is up with Slothrop has begun!
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