Part 1 - Chapter 4.1: America, A Psychology
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow Chapter 4, Part 1 (Slothrop's Family History) (1/2)
The pressure around us lowers for a moment; rain clouds roll in; reality shows its face. We are approaching the zero line. Tyrone Slothrop is America and his sins are about to be washed away. He may hold the entire burden of our own historical atrocities on his shoulders, but that doesn’t matter at the moment, for he is not only the men who enacted these horrors, he is simply America itself. Us. The amalgamation of its history, myths, peoples; he is the White Whale and all of its incomprehensibility — the sciences and facts that form our understanding of it along with the vast unknown swathe of minutiae which create a being that inspires awe and confusion. The White Whale, however, is not only being sought, he is now also doing the seeking — seeking that which is hell bent on destroying him: the rocket.
Slothrop is our main character, briefly introduced here in Part One with a family history and a description of what nuances makes him up. First though, we see him arrive at the site of a rocket’s drop point for unknown reasons (so far) where he spies Pirate Prentice collecting mail from the dropped explosive. He is an American unlike nearly every other character in this novel, an outcast in a world where he cannot pass: there is "no chance for any American lieutenant to get a look, not today" (20). And what is he even doing here? He has come out purposefully to the bombing site to observe what occurred, and there is the immediate connection between his presence, the presence of the bomb, and something to do the with "that Minnesota Multiphasic shit" (21) — Slothrop (or America) as a canvas for "shit, money, and the Word" (28). Those three things taking on any number of interpretations — the shit being whatever garbage and atrocities we have left behind in our wake, money being the elite class’s capitalist greed which led to the shit in the first place, and the Word being all that has been told to us to make us believe we can lead this life too, or that the shit isn’t even there.
He ponders the bomb, realizing that "a lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry" (21). How, though, is 1944 beginning to already blur, the events being so stark and so near in time, and being events that would typically be unforgettable? Slothrop is a post-WWII/Cold War Era American despite him living during WWII. He is the outcome — the burden that was placed on the US and the mechanisms built within it. He is even America’s future (from the point of view of the story’s time period) on a search for what went wrong in the world’s past.
His first search is an internal struggle that stems from pondering the bomb — it is the look at how death was stolen from the individual. Where at one time we may have been able to come to terms with that most personal of experiences, hearing the final call, giving us a moment perhaps to prepare, even to escape if the possibility presented itself. But now we have "Them fucking rockets" (21). We cannot prepare for those; death precedes any sight or sound of what may occur: “‘You can’t hear them when they come in’” because “‘these things explode first, a-and then you hear them coming in. Except that, if you’re dead, you don’t hear them” (23). We will be there, and then we will not, and we will know no better from it. It has led to what the typical reader may call paranoia, but what is, in reality, a basic fear. For, paranoia is the terror of something that may not actually exist, whereas our modern world has now had to come to terms with the idea that our lives may literally be wiped out at any moment without our knowing.
His genealogy is briefly touched on (most of this will be discussed next week) as we see the earliest of Slothrop’s ancestors who is discussed as "the one William, the first transatlantic Slothrop, [who] crossed many ancestors ago" (21). He had likely come to America bearing the burden of the past world on his shoulders. Tyrone Slothrop’s, own burden has been handed down over the course of generations, now built into what and who he is, possibly having no idea of the burden he was given without his knowing or with no action on his part.
Still, with both these horrifying paranoias and generational burdens, Slothrop is able to find some sort of happiness and connection in the world. While it does appear to be a purely libidinous pleasure that he takes part in— and to a large extent it is — he still is able to find the beauty of human companionship, sexual or otherwise, within it. Even others around him do not put his past times up “to the usual loud-mouthed American ass-banditry” (22): he is America, but he is not the stereotyped bigheaded pleasure seeker. He simply seeks something, any sort of pleasure at all, to keep a barrier up between him and the horrors of the world. The colors on the map appear to solely represent how he feels emotionally with these girls rather than any code about how they rank (though, how he feels, as we may learn, may not only be up to him). There is not explicit misogyny or perversion on his part, only the desire of “snuggling for warmth, blackout curtains over all the windows, no light but the coal of their last cigarette, an English firefly, bobbing at her whim in cursive writing that trails a bit behind, words he can’t read. . . .” (23)
Tantivy, military intelligence officer and friend of Teddy Bloat, suggests to Slothrop, given Slothrop’s general unease and bewilderment of the rockets, that he should go check out some of the sites where they have dropped (which, if you’re not familiar with the novel, is the origin of Slothrop’s quest within the main sections of Gravity’s Rainbow, and it should be noted that one of the too common intelligence officials, part of the group who is spying on him, is the one who gives this suggestion). The initial outings in his survey of bombsites are what led to the beginnings of his nihilism — wiped his emotive capacity down to what much of the population today faces — what America has itself been brainwashed into thinking of foreign and domestic crises: that we have no control over the situation and that someone out there trying to kill us, the embodiment of evil, is untamable and cannot be stopped. He goes out, witnesses charred and battered remnants of city districts, sees the casualties and blank faced survivors and begins “praying […] for life to win out. But too many were dying, and presently, seeing no point, he stopped” (24). His nihilism eventually proceeds to such an insane degree that his idea of a “good day” is to find “a child, alive, a little girl, half-suffocated under a Morrison shelter” (24). It calls to mind many mass shootings where a good day is when there are survivors, or low numbers of casualties, and that the survivors, children or otherwise, can still themselves find hope and give us that “Shirley Temple smile” (24). The simplest way to get someone to admit defeat, to cease any form of attempted change, is to make them lose all hope.
Next week I’ll go more into the second half of Chapter 4 which, whereas this half gets into America’s psychology via Slothrop’s, goes more into how he is America from a historical perspective.
Up Next: Part 1 — Chapter 4.2
On "Slothrop's" family lineage, which Ruggles clearly wants to establish early on, there's a good summary of the real Pynchon familty tree in the article "Pynchon's Politics" by Charles Hollander: https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/article/id/2395/ . I'm sure everyone knows that Willian Pynchon was a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and also founded Roxbury and Springfield. The family house is discussed at length by Hawthorne both in The Scarlett Letter (I think) and the House of Seven Gables (I think -- maybe it's just one of the two)?
Where it gets fun is that Pynchon & Co. was a major American stock brokerage firm in the 1920s, led by George M Pynchon, who bankrupted himself and the whole family on Black Thursday, October 24 1929. The bad investment was a film company, Fox Film and General Theaters, in which they were co-investors with Chase Securities Corporation & Chase Bank. Upton Sinclair wrote a whole book about the Fox Films Affair, "Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox" (1933), https://archive.org/details/uptonsinclairpre017746mbp.
By April 1931 the firm was suspended from the New York Stock Exchange, and the estate of George M Pynchon was sold at public auction. George M Pynchon killed himself in 1940, three years after our Thomas Ruggles was born in 1937.
Then, I can't tell if this is related to the stockbrokerage, but: "One Mrs Helen Delany Pynchon made news in 1931, saved from a jail term by the beneficence of her former employer, mining engineer Raymond Brooks, when she was convicted of robbing him of $45,000" <--I need to research that.
His father, Thomas Sr. (our author is actually Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.), was apparently not on George's side of the family and didn't have much to do with the Fox Film scandal--though they were related--but the whole family name had been tainted, and the family found itself somewhat estranged from the east coast elites they had been associated with for hundreds of years. Thomas Sr. was an industrial surveyor and engineer, and was Supt. of Highways for the town of Oyster Bay, where his son, went to high school. This would keep him in close enough to the elites of the Hamptons, but still separate...
All that to say, Yes, Slothrop Is America, but also he is one who is nonetheless out of favor with his own country. He is self-aware of his Americanness, but alienated by it after a long family history of complicity & hucksterism.
I'd like to toast Tantivy Mucker-Maffick. He's a good bloke and very sociable.
The whole family was bankrupted and under a cloud of scandal, a cloud that was still very present when our Thomas Ruggles Pynchon was born in 1937. O