Gravity's Rainbow - Part 1 - Chapter 11: Hidden Messages

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 1 - Chapter 11: Kryptosam

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Laszlo Jamf, first mentioned in Chapter Eight as one who had Slothrop as a subject, is now shown to be a member, or at least in some way connected to, IG Farben, a company which utilized concentration camp slave labor to produce synthetics, rubbers, and plastics in WWII, and would go onto be the creator of Zyklon B, the poison used in Hitler’s gas chambers, and a plethora of other destructive chemical chemical weapons, poisons, and dyes.¹ However, here we have Jamf’s, and thus IG Farben’s, development of Kryptosam, a “proprietary form of stabilized tyrosine” (71) which would allow the sender to hide a message which could only be decoded through the application of seminal fluid.

The message received here is the one that Pirate retrieved from the rocket, the one that Tyrone Slothrop witnessed shortly before the tangent into his family history. It comes with a picture of Scorpia Mossmoon, Pirate’s former lover, in specific lace, stockings, and shoes that are all a part of a very specific fetish he has told no one about. Somehow though, They know of it. They have delved into the deepest sexual desires of Pirate’s mind and have used them to further his inclusion, devotion, and coupling with whatever plan they have in mind. It is the sexual gratification combined with the image of the person he desires the most, and then with that fetish that lies at his core which is now paired in his mind with a new plan — one which we can likely guess who the target is.

They take great pleasure in knowing, looking into, our deepest fantasies. They have record via whatever surveillance systems we may be unaware of (or even aware of) that can so easily be used against us. And the product that hides that hidden message, like most products within this novel, have roots in quite nefarious groups. Even with the brevity of the chapter, the link between sexual desire as a mechanism to persuade people on Their desired tracks stands at the fore. But, as Pynchon ends it with, why do we fall for this, forfeit any human desires we may have, just to go along with the plan? It seems that They know the most effective way to break our convictions.

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Quite a short chapter (shortest in the book) so I don’t have a ton to analyze! Nonetheless, the use of one’s primal sexual urges to further one’s devotion to the cause is quite the interesting little tidbit that’s included, especially with the origins of the substances used within the odd ritual of decoding. Plus its a good break from all that happened last chapter.

Up Next: Part 1 — Chapter 12

1. There is a lot of interesting history here. First, that Bayer was a part of IG Farben. Bayer being the creator of heroin itself, going onto develop numerous female birth control methods which would be recalled due to anything from faulty devices to death. They would support Nazi Germany, assisting IG Farben in their creation of chlorine gas weapons and Zyklon B. In the 80s (though this surpasses the publication date of the book, it is still important to understand) it would sell HIV-tainted blood clot medication. And more recently it has merged with Monsanto, the creator of Agent Orange. Secondly, IG Farben’s use of slave labor to create a gas that was then used to kill the same slaves who were used by the company to help produce their products (similar even to how Werner von Braun used Jewish slave labor to produce rockets, which we’ll get into further in later chapters).