Gravity's Rainbow - Part 1 - Chapter 20: Not So Random After All
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 1 - Chapter 20: Pointsman and Gwenhidwy's Walk Home
Like Pointsman’s erect penis, The White Visitation’s Christmas party is at full force. He is thinking deeply of the possibility that he will soon have complete control over Slothrop, possibly without the knowledge that he is under control. This idea of domination over an individual, the ability to glean every bit of information off of them to lead to an intellectual climax (The Nobel Prize), is paralleled by Pointsman’s little oral tryst with Maudie Chilkes in the closet. The fact that he ends up climaxing has virtually no bearing on his enjoyment of this act — but what he does notice is how she “takes the pink Pavlovian cock in as far as it will go” and the “small ladylike choking sounds” (169). For it is domination that really gets Pointsman going. While he may think that the climax (the sexual or the intellectual) is his end goal, it really is those steps leading up to it.
Pointsman leaves the party with Thomas Gwenhidwy, the two final keepers of The Book. Despite Gwenhidwy being a part of this sect of a military intelligence agency, he does seem to have an inherent sympathy for the Preterite. They discuss “blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews speaking dialects you never heard” (170) and while Pointsman can’t seem to fathom how groups who endure so much pain can push onward. Gwenhidwy believes that these people all stem from the same oppressed stock, and that our suffering is an occult connection that tethers humanity together, allowing us to bear the suffering that Pointsman cannot fathom one bearing.
On their way home, they see the remains of a V-bomb and the destroyed lands it left behind. Gwenhidwy observes and tells Pointsman that “‘this great me-teoric plague of V-weapons, is being dumped out here, you see. Not back on Whitehall, where it’s supposed to be’” (171). Whitehall is known to be the central area of government in the UK, so Gwenhidwy is pointing out that though this rocket distribution may seem random, it is clearly missing the target. Every bomb being dropped is on the Preterite, not the Elect. They seem to be purposefully used to cause terror among the populace, or as Pynchon says earlier in the novel, the act of violence and death is simply a means to hide the real purpose of war — the Markets — and targeting an area like Whitehall would be hindering these said markets.
Gwenhidwy describes the homes of the oppressed — always being condemned to a specific tract of land that will be easily accessible to assault from the outside (or as often happens, from the inside). For, it is often attributed to how the city simply develops, cordoning these oppressed groups off to areas that they survive in. But it’s not that: “The people out here were meant to go down first” (173). Yes, the rockets are in fact falling in a Poisson distribution; and yes, that distribution does indicate a randomness. But that randomness is purposefully zoomed in to a specific tract of land — where “the poor are found below” and where “the poor must live inland” (172). If we zoomed out, that random distribution would appear as a target scattered over a certain few square miles. This is not random at all. Whether Slothrop has a thing to do with it due to his sexual adventures is irrelevant, because they all land within the vicinity of the preterite — the poor. They are the targets of mass violence to draw attention away from The Market. And the bugs — the Christmas bugs — crawl out stumbling from their homes, only for “The crying of the infant [to reach] you, […] nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see…” (174).
Up Next: Part 1, Chapter 21, the final chapter of Part 1!