Gravity's Rainbow - Part 1 - Chapter 5: Unseen Tethers
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 1 - Chapter 5: The Minor Séance
A flickering flame takes count of life entering the building, lit in a room where the living and the dead interact, where loved ones come back for a few last moments of bliss. Soon it will go out. Thankfully, not for good just yet.
Within the room, a multitude of people sit waiting or watching — every sect of life and profession: those in fancy clothing who may not even work, those with laborious and categorically masculine jobs. No matter what they do on the outside, how they may appear or conform, they are still here for the same purpose: to question death. Still here to hold onto those remaining threads that have not been stolen from them yet. For today they are at a séance, where one Carroll Eventyr, through the control Peter Sachsa, acts as a medium to help the living communicate with the dead.
They are talking to Roland Feldspath, once control and guidance engineer under Dominus Blicero — Blicero, a name to remember, being represented as the king in the realm of death. Roland’s wife Selena listens on as he discusses the concept of control. Control is no longer external; it is not an outside force which all the sufferers see plaguing them. Now, “For the first time it was inside” (30). It is a part of the system itself, like a fully functioning limb, something that was not there before, but is now so built into the workings of our society that we would not know life without it. He calls to mind the market. At one time, Smith’s coined “Invisible Hand” is what ran the markets — an unseen body which manipulated them to best impact the individuals purportedly benefitting from it. While that may be the argument for a capitalist free market, it is not how things necessarily work. They work from the inside now, for themselves, creating their own “logic, momentum, style[.] No one can do [anymore]. Things only happen. A and B are unreal” (30). The market has created a form of control that we must now accept, not because we are being forced to, but because it is all there is and we know nothing different.
(This séance may be odd, but it is setting the scene for quite a bit. These characters will all come back in more importance, and we will see why the séance is so important in further chapters. So, take note.)
As Jessica Swanlake, “a young rosy girl,” is introduced as a part of the group in the room, a rocket flies across the skies above them, vibrating the earth and their shelter, putting out that flame that connects the living with the dead — another instance of the dead no longer existing, our death not being ours. As she waits for her lover, Roger Mexico, she starts chatting with Milton Gloaming, one of Roger’s friends. He begins to categorize and describe the words spoken by the spirits through use of complex statistical methods — even further specifying based on the type of person or the person’s condition. A reversion to fields of sciences and maths once again misses the point entirely — They do not want these discussions of the neo-Invisible Hand and its internal control mechanisms as common knowledge, so why not hide the true purpose of the word behind numbers and equations. All we really learn from Gloaming is that the word death is the most often spoken word at these séances. But in war, what else would be the case?
Roger is not there because he is currently meeting with Pirate Prentice (Roger being another member of the same cohort) to go over some sort of microfilm which will be learned about later. And it appears that Pirate is, in fact, being used to Their purpose, for They will use just about anyone, even those they secretly despise and reject, to attain their goals. They perpetrate a vicious cycle where, at times, the oppressed will actually enable their own oppression because there is no alternative to survival. And though Pirate is not necessarily one of the oppressed, his unique talent and ability is purposefully being exploited to enact their form of control. For him, it isn’t even that there is no alternative, but they have created a world in which his desires — those for trust, love, understanding, and the good stuff — are all that he has. What else could he do in this scenario?
The whole “plot” becomes even more obscured to those actors running it. No one can trust each other; no one knows who knows what; “There are too many circles to the current operation” (34). The system is overburdened with both pointless and purposeful layers, too much information being hidden away of which one source cannot divulge to another, too many aspects which are likely built into the system to confuse and to distract. Each member is a go between connecting different functions of the overall plan so that the network remains obscured. However, given the multiple perspectives seen so far in these first five chapters, we can see the network’s roots. We have Bloat microfilming “something” (which we see in Chapter 3), getting it to Pirate being they are in the same flat in Chapter 1, who then gets it to Mexico (here and now in Chapter 5), who finally brings it home to PISCES, an intelligence organization housed in a building known as “The White Visitation” (in later chapters). And one man is at the center of this all, the microfilmed man himself, Tyrone Slothrop.
If this single wartime plot seems convoluted, what about the entire structure of the international war itself with its “intra-Allied surveillance schemes […] governments in exile […]” and getting even more specific the “Free French plotting revenge […] Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers […] summer anarchisms […] some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End” (34). Everything is convoluted to maintain control — so that They ensure no one can break out of their invisible tethers and that few even know those tethers exist. But you will always have that odd freak, a possible savior, who sees behind the pulled curtains. Because as Pirate “notes that with each film delivery, Roger’s enthusiasm grows,” (35) he also realizes why. Because Roger sees the pattern unfolding.
Even through all this, each character has their own minor struggles, which although minor, are touched on to show the types of things we really should have to focus on in this world — not the mind-numbing conspiracies and oppressions placed on us daily. Instead of focusing on the next bomb, the absurd web of transfers of who knows what piece of evidence, we should instead be focusing on love, lost love, holding onto those we care about, wondering if a friend is getting along the same or better than we are. But unfortunately, in this world, if all else fails — if we cannot get the girl: “Well, thought Pirate, guess I’ll go back in the Army . . .” (37).
The reason I end on that note is because in the next chapter we will see how the people who see behind the curtain (i.e. Roger) are taken off the path of doing anything about it. Chapter 6 is a great one, so stay tuned for that!
Also, I’m still holding to one post per week, my update last week was more to relieve myself of the obligation in case I needed a week or two off. Currently feeling good about where I’m headed with these analyses though.
Up Next: Part 1 — Chapter 6
I'm digging the Art. Also the article is a great gloss on the text: this is what happened, and although Pynchon's language is knotted, we are capable of reading it and holding it--You (and therefore We) are up to it.
"And one man is at the center of this all, the microfilmed man himself, Tyrone Slothrop."
What makes the whole institutionally interconnected, Power-backed entity a paranoid fiction, rather than perceived reality? This idea that it could be only *about* one man. Such institutions as the FBI and NIH do not exist solely to determine and interpret a one person; they do it for all of us. And yet, for all of us, it is all only about one person: ourselves. The revealing fiction is in the intersection of all of history that makes Tyrone Slothrop the primary focus of: as a child, a sexually abusive Pavlovian training by some jive-ass motherfucker, ongoing manipulation from afar by said Jamf's jilted protegee Pointsman, a surveillance scheme in which Teddy Bloat photographs and which is transmitted by graphene cylinders that arrive, presumably from Germany, via rocket, as well as the main topic of study for almost everyone employed at The White Visitation; subject therefore to being spied upon in the Astral plane by one of Blicero’s engineers as interpreted by Peter Sascha, whose narration is in turn subject to Milton Gloaming's basic statistical analysis of language as well as integrated into Roger Mexico's probability distributions. That one man's body could bear the weight of all these different schemes is what makes him paranoid. And yet isn't the same true of all of us, to some more or lesser extent? We are all only the products of public/private enterprises.