Gravity's Rainbow - Part 2 - Chapter 3.2: Hilbert Spaces

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 2 - Chapter 3.2: Stephen and Katje's Departure

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Slothrop and Stephen Dodson-Truck are still on the beach as the sun is setting. The latter, now drunk from their game of Prince, begins to confess certain things about who he is and why he is here. He begins with his marriage to Nora Dodson-Truck, member of the Psi-Section at The White Visitation, lover of Carroll Eventyr. She has left him in nearly every way except legally, partially due to his impotence and partially because of his disinterest in doing anything about that lack. This lack of virility, to Them at least, created a sense of naiveté surrounding anything other than his sole objective, his work — virility being a signifier of power and power being a signifier of the ability to do anything outside of one’s insular realm. Because of this belief that They held, there was a belief that Stephen was harmless and would be able to do whatever job They gave him — in this case, to observe Slothrop as he “learn[s] the rocket, inch by inch” and “to send in a daily log of [his] progress” (216). They hoped it would not come to this — his admission of the plan. But alas, Slothrop’s proxy war game, a game that They invented in another sense, proved successful as it always has been, breaking through that fixated mind.

But there is something else that Slothrop sees behind this confession. Something Stephen has been holding back. Something concerning . . . Slothrop’s penis: The Penis He Though Was His Own — which as we know has been the subject of conditioning in regard to certain stimuli on said penis when he was an infant. So, it is clear that this response to the rockets stems from that age, and it is clear that his sexual reaction to his recent lessons on the rocket result from that same moment in his childhood, but what is it that connects all of this? What stimulus was provided that led to his involuntary reaction, to his penis rising out of his own control?¹

But in the meantime, as both we and Slothrop ponder this question, our perspective falls over to The White Visitation where Carroll Eventyr and Peter Sachsa are “floundering in the swamp between worlds” (217) in attempt to make sense of the Lübeck angel. And in this contemplation and floundering comes a man named Sammy Hilbert-Spaess whom Eventyr begins to conduct another seance on — Hilbert-Spaess being a reference to the quantum mechanical concept of a Hilbert Space: “The term ‘Hilbert space’ is often reserved for an infinite-dimensional inner product space having the property that it is complete or closed. However, the term is often used nowadays […] in a way that includes finite-dimensional spaces, which automatically satisfy the condition of completeness” (Griffiths, Hilbert Space Quantum Mechanics).² All of this signifies the uncertain bond between realms in the infinite possibilities between worlds. There is, therefore, an unseen connection that Paraguay and Stockholm have, that the angel of heaven and the war-torn country of Germany have, and that, though it goes partially unsaid, Europe and South America may have, as well. This swamp between worlds is the unseen or unspoken factor that connects facets of our modern existence — the disintegrating German Nazi state and the emerging Fourth Reich.

They are in the room where PISCES members work in Twelfth House, “the address behind Gallaho Mews,” (217) conducting said seance. As usual, Eventyr does not experience these interactions or conversations directly, but instead, like us realizing and contextualizing those notions of geopolitical Hilbert Spaces, experiences them in a historical context, where literal realities become obscured by Their power over objective context, by translation, and by the transformation of time. The Hilbert Spaces may become apparent — we will see that Fourth Reich rising out of Germany’s disintegration — but, due to these specific conditions, we will never come to realize their actuality (for instance, how did Sachsa die? what matters lead to his passing? what caused him to be out there that day? and what political implications did it all hold?)

These Hilbert Spaces do not only exist in the present, tying together Eventyr, Nora Dodson-Truck, Stephen, and their realization of these European/American connections. They also expand toward the past with their own parallels: Sachsa, Leni Pökler, Franz, and the revolution which Leni lost Sachsa to — revolutions for freedom and a release from oppression which ended up being put down by fascist militants, similar to the fight against the Third Reich which was only a pathway to a neo-Reich. It is all a recirculation of the same events, occurring over and over, worsening at times, remaining the same at others, but without ever witnessing a downgrade — instead being obscured in some invisible cloak which wraps its way around that which lies in our sights. And without that object in our line of sight, these instances will continue to circulate: the militant with the club will forever be approaching us, bearing a power far greater than they should ever have been allowed, ready to strike us down once again.

Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck “vanishes from the Casino. But not before telling Slothrop that his erections are of high interest” (220-221). Katje, angry, storms into the room, yelling at Slothrop for having ruined the plan. She realizes what he has done and needs to know the information he extracted with his war game. Slothrop, sensing danger, copes with this in the only way he knows how: sex, and in this case, quite aggressive sex (perhaps there’s a side to the average American we haven’t seen just yet).

She then tells Slothrop to recite the “boundary-layer temperatures” (222) as he gets dressed, setting in motion his encyclopedic knowledge of the rocket, similar to Ishmael’s knowledge of the Whale. And if we map one symbol over the other — the Whale being a clear metaphor for America, and the encyclopedic passages mimicking the search for some sort of sense within that country’s existence and formation — we now see the Rocket become the new symbol of that nation (or of the modern world, at least). Slothrop’s exploration through the vast information surrounding the rocket precedes his actual search for the rocket itself, similar to how Ishmael’s knowledge precedes the search for the whale itself. So, he lists them off: “flight profile in terms of wall temperature and Nuselt heart-transfer coefficients, […] methods of computing Brennschluss, […] equations, transformations . . .” (223), just as Ishmael described to us the skeleton and sperm of a whale, the methods of painting or hunting one, and its various other minutiae.

All this talk of “‘That A4 rocket’” (224)³ gets Slothrop going again, and he and Katje once again retreat to their room. Though, it is not all sex between them and, as they leave their room to walk along the beach — that same beach on which Stephen broke down and confessed to Slothrop — it is revealed that she will be leaving, too. When Their purposes are served, or when those sent out to achieve these purposes begin to show one too many human characteristics, they begin to prove more of a danger than any assistance and so must be brought back. Especially if that characteristic is love, affection, or sympathy for them who They believe deserve none. So, upon his awakening, after one last night together, she is gone.

He smokes her last cigarette.

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Up Next: Part 2 — Chapter 4

1. Sorry, you’re not getting an answer just yet. Wait for a few chapters perhaps…

2. Griffiths, Robert B. Hilbert Space Quantum Mechanics. Carnegie Mellon University, 2014.

3. Keep in mind throughout the novel that A4 = V2. They are different names for the same rocket.