Scott Trudell
Trudell is a doctoral student of English literature at Rutgers University. In the following essay, Trudell argues that sexuality and illicit sexual affairs are key topics by which Pynchon develops his critique of postwar culture in Gravity's Rainbow.
A common motif in the diverse and complex array of events in Gravity's Rainbow is the affair, or the brief sexual relationship, that is usually extramarital or illicit in some way. Characters are constantly having sex, running off together, cheating on their partners, and becoming carried away by their forbidden fantasies. Frequently, they engage in violent, sadomasochistic acts that include rape and pedophilia—acts that led the Pulitzer Prize advisory board to deem the novel obscene. Affairs often involve spying on the part of one or even both parties, and lovers have a tendency to leave or betray each other based on their roles in one of the novel's many plots and conspiracies. From Mexico's affair with Jessica to Katje's sadomasochistic control of Brigadier Pudding to Blicero's sexual domination of Gottfried to Slothrop's pedophilic sex with Bianca, illicit relationships are among Pynchon's most frequent devices.
Pynchon uses sexual affairs in his thematic agenda for a variety of reasons, including as a twist on the conventional tool of the romantic encounter as a way to drive the plot (this allows Pynchon to build up and then betray his readers' expectations). Sexuality, particularly illicit or deviant sexuality, is especially important in the characterization of Slothrop, whose identity is based on his frequent sexual acts as well as his sexual desire for death itself. Perhaps the most important role sexuality plays in the novel, however, is to develop and underscore Pynchon's central message that late-twentieth-century humanity is obsessed with securing its own violent destruction, both literally and in terms of its metaphysical identity.
The novel's numerous sexual affairs are, among other things, authorial tricks that involve the reader in a straightforward, coherent, and traditional narrative which Pynchon then completely undercuts or eliminates, forcing the confused reader to speed off on a completely different storyline. Affairs perform this function well because they immediately create a series of traditional expectations for a reader: the common convention of the love story in which two characters meet and fall in love, often working together to solve a mystery or achieve a positive resolution to the crux of the plot. This sort of love story was particularly common in American films of Pynchon's era, a medium to which the novel refers frequently. Unlike a formulaic film or a predictable love story, however, Pynchon first complicates the affair by rendering it forbidden or illicit, then overturns readers' expectations about how it fits into the greater plot and finally abandons the relationship entirely.
Brief, illicit sexual encounters are particularly common to Slothrop, Pynchon's main character. Slothrop's promiscuity is perhaps his defining personality characteristic, and it is one of Pynchon's favorite tools to rapidly jolt the reader into a new narrative mode and move the plot forward. In a sense, Slothrop's affairs are connected to the V-2 rocket strikes on London not because they anticipate them according to any scientific rules of behaviorism, but because the rockets metaphorically represent the incessant shocks to identity and purpose that occur because of technological and cultural modernity. In Pynchon's worldview, rapid escalations in technologies of mass destruction have changed the way people live and conduct relationships. By disorienting the reader and transferring the action to a string of distinct affairs, Pynchon underscores the lack of purpose in postwar life and the deep confusion that characterizes late-twentieth-century Western culture.
Slothrop is an appropriate character to demonstrate Pynchon's vision...
(This entire section contains 1714 words.)
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of modern life because he is an anti-hero, someone whose identity has been stolen, who is hopelessly separated from his home, and who has very little knowledge or understanding of his goal and purpose in the postwar world. His past affairs completely disappear from his life (another reason that the image of V-2 rockets destroying their locations is an apt metaphor) with no possibility of lingering attachment or comfort. Perhaps his most heartfelt or loving attachment is, perversely, to the young girl Bianca, and she dies a gruesome death on the ship where they met and had sex. Taken as a whole, Slothrop's hopeless and isolating affairs define his identity as an absence of identity because they contain no possibility for sustained human contact. This is particularly true because they are generally sadomasochistic, violent, or socially unacceptable.
Pynchon also uses Slothrop's sexual affairs as a technique to prepare the reader for Slothrop's disappearance in part 4 of the novel; the fragmentation of Slothrop's character is the natural result and unavoidable outcome of his incoherent, unstable identity. Readers are surprised by Slothrop's disappearance because Pynchon sets up the novel as a mystery and readers expect mysteries to be solved, but irresolution and dismay are the only possible results of Slothrop's problematic sexuality. His love life is as unsolvable as the corporate-governmental mystery/conspiracy working against him; neither has any hope of being exposed, uncovered, or resolved.
Nevertheless, Pynchon teases the reader by tracing this conspiracy back to Slothrop's childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf, explaining Slothrop's importance to the many corporate and governmental agents searching for him on the basis of his unique, manipulated sexuality. Insofar as there is a root solution to the mysteries of the novel, it is connected to Slothrop's childhood and his sexual conditioning. In fact, all of Slothrop's military and conspiratorial adventures are related to his sexuality. His sexual adventures precede the rocket strikes, his erections are related to the rockets, his searches and missions always involve the objects of his lust, his lovers are frequently also the lovers of key governmental agents (including Tchitcherine, Blicero and Pökler), and he is betrayed and manipulated by lover-spies such as Katje. Slothrop's promiscuous sexual identity becomes increasingly violent, obscene, and illicit until he is having sex with little girls and literally turning into the pig Plechazunga, and eventually it is utterly fragmented and destroyed.
In his entry on Pynchon for the Dictionary of Literary Biography John Stark argues that Gravity's Rainbow is preoccupied with developing a "culture of death," and he points towards a comment in the final episode of the novel that Slothrop "might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race's, death." This sexual connection to Pynchon's central theme of death is shared (among other characters) by Dominus Blicero, whose represents the spirit of death in the novel (even his name is a conflagration of German and Latin that means "Lord of Death"). Blicero's obsessive sadomasochistic domination of Gottfried and his ultimate murder of Gottfried by placing him inside Rocket 00000, are extreme examples of the desire to explore and control death—a desire that Slothrop also feels.
The sexual obsession with death in Gravity's Rainbow is, in part, a reference to Sigmund Freud's theory of the "death drive." Freud believed that there is an unconscious desire to die in human psychology which, like Buddhist philosophy, seeks to reach a void or a state of non-existence. Although Pynchon suggests that this desire exists and is an extremely important force, he frames it as a sociocultural phenomenon as opposed to the kind of innate desire described by Freud. In fact, the novel's entire structure is designed to emphasize that modern, post-World-War-II Western culture is obsessively dedicated to the sexual violation and destruction of the human race. This nihilistic desire to rape or sexually dominate humankind extends to humanity's conception of itself and its metaphysical convictions about its purpose. Pynchon argues that postwar culture is like Slothrop or Dominus Blicero in the sense that it sacrifices what is most private and most sacred to it in a kind of self-obliterating ritual that destroys all forms of identity and purpose.
An alternative example of Pynchon's suggestion that the death drive is a cultural phenomenon of the postwar world is the illicit relationship of Roger and Jessica. These two characters (not Slothrop) are the protagonists of part 1, and the reader is invested in the success of their relationship, which is one of true love according to the conventional rules of romance. Their relationship is a sanctuary from the war, and it is the opposite of the trend towards death, nihilism, and the destruction of humanity that the war represents. They are, in a sense, the great hope of the novel, and their relationship signifies a trend away from death. According to the narrator's dramatic claim in part 1, episode 6, "They are in love. F―the war."
It is no coincidence, therefore, that Roger and Jessica disappear for five hundred pages around the time that the war ends, and, when they finally reappear, they separate permanently and bitterly. Roger discovers that Jessica was, in fact, working on behalf of Pointsman, and he goes slightly crazy, urinating on Pointsman's desk before dedicating himself (like Slothrop) to finding Rocket 00000. The fact that Roger and Jessica's relationship ends in this way suggests that the culture of destruction has become permanent, the "war" (in the conspiratorial sense of a mechanism for buying, selling, and destruction) is interminable, and humanity is actively seeking to destroy itself.
Slothrop's experience parallels Roger and Jessica's. As the novel progresses and humanity moves closer to the cataclysmic event of the atomic bomb, Slothrop gets further and further away from his home and from any sense of self-understanding. He seems to be discovering some kind of truth about himself and his childhood, but in fact the solution to the mystery of Slothrop's sexuality (and the mystery of the corporate-governmental conspiracies of the novel) is ironic. Laszlo Jamf turns out to have been quite probably nothing more than a figment of Slothrop's imagination, and the deviant string of sexual affairs slowly end as they become increasingly obscene. Slothrop's journey of self-discovery, as far as it is one, leaves him with no identity at all; it only leads him to a nihilistic vision of purposelessness and despair. Sexuality, particularly illicit sexuality, is the key to understanding the vast and mysterious conspiracy of the novel, but this key does not actually uncover or solve the mystery; it simply reinforces Pynchon's message that the postwar world is an immense mechanism for self-obliteration and death.
Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on Gravity's Rainbow, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
Christine Turier
In the following essay, Turier identifies sources for the octopus and Pointsman in Gravity's Rainbow.
The bizarreness of the image of the octopus Grigori's attack on Katje in Gravity's Rainbow, together with the orchestration of that attack by the mad Pavlovian Pointsman, stamps it with a typically "Pynchonian" uniqueness. Yet it is not the singular product of an eccentric imagination but another example of Pynchon's extreme eclecticism. For the octopus combines two radically different sources: one, that of early Japanese art; the other, the field of neurobiology. The image of a woman being "attacked" by a giant octopus is, in fact, not uncommon in early Japanese art. It is best known in the West through the rendition of Katsushika Hokusai. Reproduced as "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" in Lucie-Smith's Eroticism in Western Art, it is also widely represented in texts on Japanese Ukiyo-e, especially those concerned with Hokusai, in the West the best known of the Ukiyo-e school. Hokusai's rendition portrays a naked woman swooning in the arms of "twin incubi" between rocks and sea. Her lower torso is enveloped by the "giant" octopus, and the tentacles of the smaller octopus encircle her neck.
What is most notable about this image, besides its eroticism (certainly not out of place in Pynchon's text), is the ambiguity of the woman's reaction to the "attack"; does she swoon from terror or ecstasy? It is an ambiguity also present in Pynchon's portrayal of the scene; is Katje truly afraid or a knowing and willing participation in the "attack"? It is not her scream that is heard on the beach but that of "one of the dancers." She thanks Slothrop afterward, with "[n]ot a tremor in the voice." Yet, during the attacks we see her "… already half in the water,… trying to cry out, but the tentacle, flowing and chilly, barely allows her windway enough to breathe." Slothrop becomes mesmerized by her hand clutching his shirt, causing it to furrow "in tangents to her terror." As well, we know as readers that it was the film taken secretly in Osbie Feel's kitchen that was used to condition Grigori. Paradoxically though, and in contrast to Slothrop's reaction to Grigori—"wow it's a big one, holycow"—her comments betray a cool detachment bordering on familiarity with the octopus—"They are very optical aren't they. I hadn't known"—as well as a genuine surprise that it should attack her: "It saw me. Me. I don't look like a crab." Nevertheless, as with Hokusai's print, which exudes eroticism, not terror, the intuition comes out in favor of the woman's participation. The ambiguity of Katje's response is not lost either on Slothrop: "Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart."
In relation to Pynchon's use of the octopus, however, it is not only this image which has antecedents. The suggestion that Pointsman might find the available Grigori a more suitable subject for experimentation than either Slothrop or the more conventional canine ones has, as does much of Pynchon's reference to science, a sound empirical base. Spectro's summary of the advantages of octopi as subjects ("… docile under surgery," survival of "massive removal of brain tissue," and the reliability of their unconditioned response) is in fact extremely accurate. His assertion that there is "[n]o limit to the things you can teach them" is more than just the punchline to a parodic joke at the expense of psychological research (not to mention Pointsman himself). Joke though it is, the octopus has often been used in research into the structure and functioning of the brain. British anatomist J. Z. Young, during the late fifties and early sixties, pursued extensive research into brain function using cephalopods. His book A Model of the Brain documents the results of his work. Young used in his research both trained (that is, conditioned) and untrained octopi. His subjects also "stuffed" themselves "with crab meat"; their learned tasks also involved attacking "strange moving figures." Besides the attributes outlined by Spectro, the structure of the cephalopod's nervous system makes it an ideal subject for the study of the brain. Octopi have limited sensory inputs—they are very "optical." In addition to vision, they have only chemo-tactile receptors in the arms. They are entirely without hearing or an effective sense of smell. They possess a limited response range, that is, to attack or not to attack. These attributes, together with the size of their nerve fibers, make the study of brain function in cephalopods a much simpler task than it is in the more complex vertebrates, while the similarity of their optical system to that of vertebrates (including humans) makes the comparison of brain function a viable one.
The similarity between Young and Pointsman, however, does not end here. Pavlov and Pointsman's search for the mechanical/physiological root of behavior is echoed by Young: "I believe that it will be possible to find some changes in certain specific places after each learning occasion." Some 230 pages later, he acknowledges that "there is still no definite knowledge of what this change is" but goes on to speculate on where it might be found. Young states, "Whatever process operates in learning it seems likely that it involves the choice between two or more possibilities. It is usually assumed that this choice is made by some form of facilitation [my emphasis] in the pathway that has been excited." Young, however, finds preferable the idea that "learning occurs by the elimination [my emphasis] of the unused pathways," a hypothesis that bears a strong resemblance to Pointsman's idea of "spot's of inertia."
One further point of significance, which links both sources of the octopus in Gravity's Rainbow, is the observation by Young that because the "octopus's central nervous system is less completely centralised than that of vertebrates" it "might be said to 'think with its arms.'" The idea of the octopus as "all brain" is certainly reinforced in Hokusai's image. That science and technology ("the brain") represent central thematic concerns in Gravity's Rainbow is well documented. Yet the implications of the assault upon the female by "the brain" are an area that has so far been completely overlooked.
Source: Christine Turier, "Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow," in Explicator, Vol. 50, No. 4, Summer 1992, pp. 244-46.
