Gravity's Rainbow - Part 2 - Chapter 5: The Evolution of Control

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 2 - Chapter 5: Yaw Control, SG-1, and Imipolex G

Audio Available Here

We linger behind at The White Visitation for a bit, seeing the winter’s shedding that lay over the seacoast, the sweater laden office girls, visitors — all this beauty and normalcy hiding the Visitation’s purpose: to continue the oil and the fuel pumping onward through intricate pipelines, to maintain the weavings and secrets of the plots being kept in dark rooms. But we leave here now — Brigadier Pudding likely suffering from a bit of a stomachache — to return to the Casino Hermann Goering where we last saw Slothrop smoking the remnants of Katje’s cigarette.

Slothrop has been privy to The White Visitation’s plan, as we have seen, but he has felt entirely hopeless against it until recently. Now, he realizes that he may have some influence on how this all goes down: "You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures" (237). So, while Slothrop can’t influence Their plan, he can manipulate the people hired by Them. At the moment, in his dreams — or perhaps reality — he is being haunted by the ghost of Roland Feldspath, the same rocket control engineer who worked under Captain Blicero, spoken to by Carroll Eventyr in the minor séance of Part 1: Chapter 5. Back in Part 1, Feldspath rambled about the current nature of control and the inner workings of the free market — how no individual can affect the outcome of events or moments in the modern day but must only be subjected to them.

Here, we see a much grander development of this idea as "Roland has remained hovering over this Slothropian space" (238) in an attempt to enlighten him on Their methods of control. Since Slothrop’s entire recent existence has been under the light of the knowledge of the Rocket, Feldspath, being a guidance engineer, and guidance being a means of controlling something, now exists alongside Slothrop. He has been stationed "along one of the Last Parabolas" (238) — one of the final V-2 pathways during this war — to inhabit the person who would be taking up his research of control. That person, much to his disappointment — “Is this the one? […] Oh, dear. God have mercy" (238) — is Slothrop. The study of the Rocket is the new study of control, for the Rocket will now manage the markets, and ensure that "economic systems are merely […] a given condition of being" (238). Because of the Rocket’s ability to influence geopolitical events and economics and the personal inability for anyone but Them to affect its path, we will now see "an economy inflating […] uncontrolled," which will flow downward into "the secret rhymes of childhood," (238) the swing sets or children's fights on playgrounds, "blighted rainfall, […] across the lots and into the back streets, […] into the countryside, into the quilted dark fields and the wood" (238).

These means of control were once comprehensible to the human mind. They were just like those playgrounds where the pathways and radii of swing sets could be learned and calculated through quick grade school mathematics, where the mystery of lightning and thunder had been solved and thus became predictable, where the barrier of our knowledge and our understanding could be symbolized as the dark end of a forest path — a thing mysterious, but within reach. At one point, this forest could be penetrated; however, They have crafted a radius where “the forest could be penetrated no further” (239). The past, where barriers were passable, was a place “as wholesome as could be,” where “edges were hardly every glimpsed, much less flirted at or with” (239). Yet, They have broken past these edges, rebuilt the wall behind them and crafted a new form of control under the Rocket — namely, Yaw Control: a complex, nearly incomprehensible equation to calculate and explain the rocket’s path. The terms of the equation take into account inertia, air resistance, applied forces (which can be anything from wind to air pressure), the rockets assigned path versus its real path, a comparison between a rocket’s aerodynamics and gravitational center — all this to calculate the precise angle of a rocket’s steering rudders.¹ Control has been taken from something unchangeable but comprehensible, to something that can be manipulated on the most minute and incoherent levels, and only by those with the power to comprehend said minutiae. No longer do we live where those edges were not seen; we have been barricaded off behind these edges and are manipulated by the unseen rulers who have taken residence on the other side.

Yet, those on the other side are not people like Roland Feldspath, a man who purportedly understood these things. It was not him who developed these forms of control. He simply worked with Them to perfect them — set them in motion. It was higher powers who controlled intellects like Feldspath that really knew the means to this control:

If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised — none of them made the connection, at least not while alive (239).

These engineers may have glimpsed what was beyond that Edge, maybe even connected their creation with what it would be used for. But this revelation was disguised to the point that none ever made the real connection. That is, until they reached the mystical realm of death: “another order of being. . . .” (239). This is why Feldspath is here, attempting to make some contact with Slothrop, for he not only knows the equation of control and how to manipulate it, but now, having reached out across the realms of the dead, he also knows its intended use.²

Slothrop’s education proceeds no longer just from members of The White Visitation, but from true bureaucracy — oil men and those who ran them. Hilary Bounce, a man who worked for Shell International Petroleum — the same Shell we see today on street corners or appropriating the lands and resources of many foreign countries, though at this time they were mostly helping nations fuel their own lusts for war — is the one who will come teach Slothrop about propulsion. Bounce is not one of the true higher ups — he’s just a company man through and through. Bounce reports to Mr. Geoffrey Gollin who himself reports to Isaac Lubbock, a man who, near the earlier side of WWII, "set up a static-test facility at Langhurst near Horsham, and began to experiment with liquid oxygen and aviation fuel” (240) to help fuel the rocket that would become the V2 — the same that would be directed with the equation of Yaw Control.

Slothrop and Bounce begin discussing the use of this rocket that Shell has been helping to fuel, Slothrop coming to the conclusion (perhaps by the help of Feldspath) of the absurd fact that Shell was contracted to produce the liquid engine for these rockets by London, and now London is seeing rockets land on them using the Dutch Shell transmitter tower to guide them. It seems that Shell may not be in this just to help the Allies win their war, but in reality, is helping both sides by selling this fuel and these engines to whoever will buy them so it can extract the greatest profit. Bounce himself — like Dodson-Truck’s weeping realization on the beach, though less dramatic — despite working for Shell, is just now coming to this revelation himself as he and Slothrop talk. Though, as one of the Proverbs states, "The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master," and Shell being about as immoral as one can get, its minor underlings will only see things as "a ‘wild coincidence’" (241).

Slothrop continues to study this rocket until he comes across a reproduction of a state secret "blueprint of a German parts list" that catalogs an A4 rocket specially fitted with an insulation device, which, after some research, "directs Slothrop to a Document SG-1" (242). When he asks the new leader at the Casino Hermann Goering — who has been supplying Slothrop with a near infinite number of A4/V-2 related documents for studying — for the Document SG-1, Wivern pretends he does not know what Slothrop is talking about, but goes off on a pretend search, nonetheless. While he’s gone, after looking further into this A4 documentation, Slothrop discovers another name: Imipolex G, but no cross checking of sources seems to verify an insulation device made of this substance.

So, just as he did with Dodson-Truck and Mucker-Maffick, Slothrop begins to devise a plan to get the information that he needs. He uses the same tactic that has been his own downfall and sets Bounce up with a woman "whom he’s noticed Bounce has an eye on" (243) so he can access Bounce’s teletype and message Shell directly for the information he wants. He receives the message back and then proceeds to get ready for the same party that he set Bounce and Michele up to go to — a party hosted by Raoul de la Perlimpinpin. This party is attended by people "linked by some network of family, venery and a history of other such parties whose complexity his head’s never quite been able to fit around. […] Old American faces from Harvard or from SHAEF" (244). These may be the same people living on the other side of that Edge — the ones who may not be able to work out the minutiae of Yaw Control but can afford to manipulate and work those people who can. And with Slothrop getting ever closer to the secrets of this group, an agent steps out of the darkness of night "and follows Slothrop’s cab out the winding dark road to Raoul’s party" (244).

---

Up Next: Part 2, Chapter 6

1. My understanding of the terms of the Yaw Control equation is largely due to this post:

Riewald, N. (2019, December 26). The Math Behind Gravity’s Rainbow (Part 2): Motion under the aspect of Yaw Control. Niklas Riewald. https://niklasriewald.com/2019/12/26/the-math- behind-gravitys-rainbow-part-2-motion-under-the-aspect-of-yaw-control/

2. Also (regarding this insane passage from pp. 238-239), a thanks to my friend and co-worker at my high school who is currently reading Gravity’s Rainbow. I mentioned I could not make total sense of this passage and so we both read in a number of times, discussed our thoughts, and came to these conclusions.