Gravity's Rainbow - Part 2 - Chapter 6: Commodifying Culture

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 2 - Chapter 6: Perlimpinpin's Party

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At parties of the Ivy League type, the punch will typically be spiked with a little booze. Given we are looking at the American 60s through the lens of the 40s, what better way to start than by spiking the hollandaise with some hashish instead. Among the affected are Hilary Bounce and Michele (the girl who Slothrop set him up with), and he watches as she is enamored by the IG Farben necklace he has on.¹ The fascination with careers that involve chemical and weapons manufacturing also seems to be all the craze at parties of the Ivy League type. It is among these partygoers that we see the major ideas of cultural commodification and a sort of Marxist economic analysis come to light.

Slothrop makes his way around the scene, observing a little bit of deviancy in every corner, until he comes across a man in a zoot suit, Blodgett Waxwing. Waxwing himself is named after the opening to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire,² likely just as an homage to Nabokov being one of Pynchon’s teacher but also calling to mind Waxwing’s talent for forging documents, just as the character within Pale Fire forged his own identity to dodge a political assassination. But more importantly, the zoot suit that Waxwing wore was a specifically designed suit popularized by black jazz musicians in the 1940s which was eventually also adopted by the black and Hispanic communities as a whole. These suits were later banned under the fake pretense of the suits being both a waste of fabric and also a purported sign of gang involvement by their wearers. In 1943, when these communities continued to produce and wear the suits, it led to full scale riots where white US servicemen began violently and bloodily assaulting zoot suiters and other black and Hispanic citizens not wearing the suits. There were (shockingly . . . .) no repercussions on the assaulters, and the arrests were only made on those who fought back. Therefore, the zoot suit has become a symbol of cultural and racial oppression in America and, therefore, in Gravity’s Rainbow. Since Slothrop is partly a representation of America, and since we have seen Slothrop’s costume switches before, he now asks Waxwing to procure a zoot suit for him.

But as Waxwing is off getting Slothrop’s suit, a plot is revealed out of the darkness of Perlimpinpin’s party (these Ivy League events hold secrets that have global repercussions). A few minor characters are introduced: Tamara, Italo, Theophile. To break down the plot (though, in all honesty, the intricacies of this plot are not entirely important): Tamara is using a future opium shipment “as security against a loan from Italo” (247). Italo, himself, owes Blodgett Waxwing money because Italo’s friend, Theophile, is attempting to sneak a Sherman tank into Palestine. However, Theophile himself is attempting to raise money since he will have to bribe certain officials to move this tank across borders. In order to raise this money, Theophile puts the tank itself “up as collateral to borrow [money] from Tamara” (247). But, Tamara, who has a loan from Italo (who owes money to Waxwing for the tank issue) is using part of that loan to pay Theophile. While this all seems impossible to understand, it can all be viewed below:³

However, the Middleman has not been heard from which leads down a few tracks. First, and least important, this means that Raoul is not getting his money back from Tamara which means Waxwing is not getting his money back from Raoul. More importantly though, this means Tamara cannot pay back Italo, who himself cannot payback Waxwing for the tank, meaning that Tamara (from the original unpayable loan from Italo) does not actually possess the money that she gave to Theophile to smuggle said tank across the border. On the scale of the novel, all of this leads to the insane conclusion (because who on Earth can keep up with these intricacies) that Tamara now owns the Sherman tank.

On a much larger scale, the point is not the intricacies within this random, absurd plot. The point is that it is a Marxist allegory for the use of imaginary capital in the war state. Money is no longer used as any sort of pure exchange for use-value, but is instead a promise of said exchange, meaning these promises can line up one after the other, piling on top of each other, some being used to fund the ones that are not even truly paid off yet. And so, if one of these proves to misfire, the entire cascade, which has been, on the surface, already paid for, begins to topple. This leaves Tamara in charge of the tank, Raoul in a sort of panic, and Italo eventually taking the tank from Tamara to an Undisclosed Location.

When all of this insanity piles up, it is bound to set the person at the center of it all in a state of insanity themselves. Thus, Tamara in her new Sherman tank breaks through the wall of Raoul’s party, “shrieking to denounce Raoul, Waxwing, Italo, Theophile, and the middleman on the opium deal” (247-248), and lets loose the cannon. (Slothrop’s lack of erection lets him know that it’s not the sounds that he is conditioned to. Though that leaves the question as to whatever else it could be).

Learning that the shot was a dud, Slothrop sees Waxwing come back bearing the zoot suit and a business card with an address in Nice, France. On top of this, Waxwing somehow knows that the whole Octopus plot was a fake, one set in motion to trick Slothrop in to believing that he was Katje’s savior. And with no explanation of how he knows this fact, Waxwing leaves, only for a final thought to spell itself across the page. Perhaps the zoot suits were not much different from the Sherman tank. The zoot suit was originally meant for an oppressed class who would later be assaulted for wearing them, the tank would be going to a country who would attempt to use it to free itself from oppression though would be blamed for using the tank to incite violence.

Slothrop’s new zoot suit “belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutiérrez” (249). Gutiérrez was one of the citizens violently assaulted during the 1943 zoot suit riots. His story is a common one: he came from an oppressed class; he expressed himself in a way that allowed the ruling class to single him out; he refused to give into demands to assimilate how the ruling class wished; he was physically beaten and brought down by the class he would not relent to; he was left crippled and the criminals who assaulted him were let free; the cultural symbol which he left behind — the zoot suit in this case — was gathered up by the oppressor (the Ivy League graduate, perhaps), scoffed at, and resold to the oppressors own kind as a sort of trinket to prove one’s worldliness, for despite all these awful occurrences, there’s “no harm turning a little profit, is there” (249)? Though, based on the current market — black market, normal market, or whatever — who knows where these profits will lead or who they will end up in the hands of.

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Up Next: Part 2, Chapter 7.1

Posted a day early since tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Next week I’ll likely be covering only the first half of Part 2, Chapter 7 since it’s a long one. Hope you all have a great holiday!

1. Remember, we have heard much about IG Farben so far. It’s development of kryptosam and its connection with weapons manufacturers in Part 1: Chapter 11. Laszlo Jamf’s connection with the company while he was experimenting on Slothrop as told in Part 1: Chapter 13. And their involvement in the dye markets in Part 1: Chapter 19.

2. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane” (Pale Fire, 33)

3. May God help me for my awful skills at making images like this. If anyone would like to make a better image, please feel free to do so and I will give you credit…