Gravity's Rainbow - Part 1 - Chapter 2.2: Nixon as Lymphatic Tissue

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 1 - Chapter 2.2: The Adenoid

Audio Available Here

Post-breakfast, Pirate learns that the rocket he saw did not, in fact, explode. Instead, it was simply a vessel which carried a message that he is to go and retrieve. The parallel here — rocket to mail distribution — is quite similar to a major theme in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: that contemporary messaging systems have themselves been derived from methods of destruction and profit. For, our most contemporary version, being the use of cell phones and the internet, is largely based of nuclear weapons development itself. Without the need to create these annihilatory structures, we would not have the same information systems that we have today; along with this, these systems weren’t released to the public without some other nefarious intention held below the surface — one of the root causes of Pynchon’s themes of paranoia and mass surveillance.

On his way to obtain this message, to the symbolic site of destruction, we learn of a mystical ability that Pirate has which allows him to infiltrate the fantasies of others and resolve them however he sees fit (or, so he thinks it is how he sees fit). With that, the novel opens up into a variety of interpretations:

1. There is the initial possibility that the following series of events, and by that I mean the novel as a whole, will be our character Pirate managing the dream of Tyrone Slothrop as he tries to delve into the world of the military industrial complex’s vast series of control, profit, and production networks.

2. This novel is the world’s dream (i.e. the dream in the opening sequence in regard to the human population’s fear of annihilation) and an attempt to placate our fear through some absurd, complex, and often comic storyline (because what other way is there to placate that fear?)

3. If neither of these are true, which is just as likely as them being true, then we simply need to analyze the idea of fantasy management itself.

4. The possibility that 1, 2, and 3, or any combination thereof, are either a) all true, or b) that Pynchon is trying to get us to analyze the novel by making us question which one is true and which one is not, or c) both a and b (a again being any of the four combinations of 1, 2, and 3). Confusing? That’s the point.

So…

Pirate Prentice’s Fantasy Management 1: Controlling the Controlled

An analysis in regard to Prentice managing Slothrop’s dream basically requires a previous reading of the novel (light spoiler warning for this paragraph). So, I won’t touch on this one too much and will instead return to this idea in later chapters. That being said, it is important to remember this trait throughout the rest of the novel as a whole. To put it simply, what we have is a military intelligence officer attempting to find a way to manage the fantasy (the fantasy being the escape from the Military Industrial Complex’s evil, paranoia-inducing grasp) of a man who has been, since birth, under the control of the same military intelligence branches that Prentice is a part of. It is no wonder that, despite Prentice’s good intentions, instead of any resolution, Slothrop instead disintegrates into a crossroads.

Pirate Prentice’s Fantasy Management 2: The World’s Dream

Not much to say here, but what better way to attempt to solve the entire world’s paranoia of nuclear annihilation than delving into, what may be, the most absurd, terrifying, comical, sexually depraved, and complex series of events, only to end up getting nuked in the end anyways. The human condition in a post-nuclear world is wrought with fear and meaninglessness, so our mind is subconsciously finding the most obscure and roundabout ways to ward this off.

Pirate Prentice’s Fantasy Management 3: Bureaucrats on the Beach

We will explore this further in the following section about The Adenoid. But suffice it to say, even the military intelligence officer himself is being used by higher ups in the military intelligence office for their own benefit and plans. His gift, which could be used for good, is instead used for something a touch more sinister.

Pirate Prentice’s Fantasy Management 4: Postmodern Basket Weaving

While this aspect isn’t important to understand what Pirate’s fantasy management means, it does give meaning to the odd literary methods that Pynchon uses throughout the novel. Postmodernism as a literary movement has its roots in experimental styles where we see the comic mixed with the absurd, where we have interjections that seemingly make no sense and may sometimes actually make no sense (though, with authors like Pynchon, they do all make sense if you’re willing to look deeper), and where styles are often shifted around with little or no warning. Pynchon could clearly be showing us that the attempt to solve this novel through typical interpretation is facile and pointless. The novel jumps from genre to genre, mood to mood, and is peppered with odd interjections and anecdotes because the world has now been built the same way. We cannot even interpret our own place in the world or what is truly going on around us because of the vast waves of information and fiction that influence our lives — the television blaring terrible news, glowing advertisements and billboards on our way to work staring down at us while horns roar, our phone buzzing with messages, news pieces, app notifications, and so on. Hence, we try to interpret the novel through lenses one through three, but in reality, who the hell knows what is real and what is not. Who even knows if it matters anymore what is real and is not?¹

Keep these four possibilities in mind while reading.

-

Back on the ground, we now see Pirate’s first scene of Fantasy Management (an elaboration of Point 3):

The human population is riddled with natural talents. Some excel at athletics or within the culinary world, once maybe in the realms of woodworking or navigation. Today though, our unique talents have been either culled and given off to the machines or honed only to further the ambitions of another sort of Machine. Pirate’s talent is revolutionary to the Firm because, at this moment in time, “healthy leaders and historical figures are indispensable” and “what better way to cup and bleed them of excess anxiety than to get someone to take over the running of their exhausting little daydreams for them,” because “‘You can’t run a war on gusts of emotion’” (12). Pirate’s talent is used to reduce the emotive capacities of world leaders or bureaucrats who help these leaders achieve their goals. He enters their minds, finds fantasies or worries that they may be fretting about — moral qualms that are causing them to suffer — and solves the issues himself, removing any sort of complex thought process that goes into their solutions (and, often involuntarily, coming up with a better solution to the Firm’s problem in the end.)

Dreams are there to help us cope and survive in the complex environment around us, and Pirate is there to take this process away, leaving the dreamer as a robotic shell better fit to assist the state, because they are no longer “suffering what they ought to be themselves,” and with that, it no longer “seem[s] to mat-ter if there’s daaaanger” (12). Just like so many other talents are used to further the same evil goals, our individuality has been farmed. We have been told we are special and that our abilities should not be simple miracles that are used for their own insular or humanistic intents but should instead be brought to a grander scale and help in the betterment of our world.

His first realization of his talent comes from another Joycean encounter — this time, like in Finnegans Wake, when our protagonist spies an odd old man, an HCE-like figure, perversely eyeing some girls in the park. HCE is the iconic Everyman whose existence, through the exploration of language, mythology, and creation, is proven to be far more complex and rooted in historical palimpsests than the world ever intended. So, if this singular everyman’s subconscious consists of such vast realms, what absurdities or horrors lie in the subconscious of the people or groups with more significant power — those who pull the strings or know the inner-workings of the state.

Pirate begins with assisting this everyman in relieving the stress and pressure from his life, and then the Firm finds use for him. They understand what this fantasy management could lead to in the grand scheme of things. Our example is a simple political bureaucrat who holds the fantasy of an Adenoid absorbing the life of London around it. It has a "master plan, […] choosing only certain personalities useful to it" (15). Why the Adenoid though, and what is it meant to represent?

The Adenoid is bureaucratic fantasy itself; it is a rampaging disease that must be calmed down (at least, to the external eye) to make things more orderly and simple. We want to keep on keeping on, but we don’t want you all to notice, so you can imagine them saying, at least. Right near the end of the novel, a Richard Nixon figure is described as "The Adenoid" (754). It isn’t a one for one analogy, Richard Nixon being a fleshy diseased mass (symbolically, that is — descriptively on the other hand…), yet, Nixon’s intent in the war on drugs to politicize, bureaucratize, and simplify, the poverty to prison to slavery pipeline is, in fact, the perfect analogy. Initially, this figure absorbs life, destroying cities, executing its master plan while the population looked on, but this is and was such an incredible amount of work (and work, nonetheless, that the general population will notice and hopefully cry out against) that the bureaucracy needs something simpler to focus on. What if we simply subdued the population with something that could more easily run amok, unnoticed? What if we brought in powders from some far-off country, rubbed them into the rampaging machine, and let their inherent properties subdue the insanity to a mere distribution process, then proceed to profit and incarcerate based on this new scheme? Our world of exploitation would then require less thought. The police could take the blame for arrests and killings, the jails for the poor conditions the criminals were subjected to living in, the employers for the low pay that led them to these levels of need², the drug dealers for providing this substance in the first place (not to mention the countries which distributed it to us), but no one would look at the bureaucratic machine that brought these processes together. It is no longer rampaging through the streets absorbing every facet of life it could — instead, it is silent, still, unobtrusive, yet its plan has worked its way, like an unseen ember, into the new world.

1. Well, it does matter. That’s another major point of the novel. But They prefer you to maintain that sense of nihilism because if you don’t think it matters, then you’ve already lost the battle.

2. As they all should be. But don’t stop looking once you find this out.

---

This section is a ton of theorizing. I have nothing to base my assumptions on than my own interpretation (which is going to be how I go about analyzing about 80% of the novel, at least), so I’m genuinely curious to see what people think about this. Any other interpretations of The Adenoid sequence? Or of Pirate’s exploited ability?

Up Next: Part 1 — Chapter 3