Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 13: The Blind Divisions
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 13: The Toiletship, Horst Achtfaden, Enzian's Interrogation
Within the head of one Horst Achtfaden emerges the Rücksichtslos (the Reckless), a sea vessel known colloquially as the Toiletship. It is a vision that arises from a similar source as Slothrop’s initial sodium amytal trip down his own toilet, though this time it is the Zone Herero, the ones run by Enzian, doing the interrogating. Achtfaden himself was a onetime engineer on the German V-2 rocket, and given the Zone Herero are both searching for the Schwarzgerät and attempting to build a rocket of their own, they have been scouting out former engineers to interrogate for information regarding the assembly of said rocket. These drug-induced hallucinations always lead toward thoughts of shit as the interrogated person begins mapping their own actions over that most base substance. It becomes an internal realization that their past actions manifested from that vile level as opposed to whatever their excuse may have once been.
This Toiletship represents a number of things: compartmentalization, hidden natures be they organic or inorganic, and a willful ignorance. It “is to the Kriegsmarine1 [what] the bathroom is to the house” (448) — a place where one can be completely separated from the rest of the house or the family during one’s most vulnerable state. Yet this is a hyper-exaggerated version of said subdivision. The Rücksichtslos was not the only Toiletship in the Kriegsmarine, it was simply meant to be the ‘flagship’ of numerous Toiletships. However, just as petroleum ran out in Zwölfkinder (3.11) and potassium permanganate ran out in the cocaine market (3.7) — all to funnel themselves into the creation of the V-2 rocket — so did steel run out in the building of this fleet. So only the Rücksichtslos stands, a sole Toiletship in a sea of ‘houseboats.’
Two men on the Toiletship, Charles and Steve, contemplate their lives spent upon it. There is the possibility that they will be bought out by General Electric, leading Steve to believe that GE will strand them out here for twenty plus years, taking him away from his fiancée. This leads into a little song known as the Buffalo Bayou. Both of these points, the GE acquisition and the song, serve as commentaries on the war market and industrial market now that WWII has ended — specifically on the coming war in Vietnam. GE would be a massive producer of miniguns which, like the Toiletship, would also be made of steel. So given the state of the steel market, GE’s acquisition of the Toiletship is simply a recycling of shit and steel in order to once again produce profit and death. Steve’s contemplation of never coming home may also mimic that of the GIs realizing that, in order to continue GE’s profit on the sale of these weapons, they too may never be coming home. It is more explicit in the song, where the seamen of the Toiletship are described just like the GIs sent over to Vietnam: “bright hornrimmed shoe-pac’d young fellas from Schenectady” (449). They have been taught a number that reduces the enemy to literal bugs, recounting the ‘mosquitos’ swarming them as they lay down ‘insecticides’ (i.e. herbicides such as Agent Orange) as well as calling for an entire genocide of the people. So, the ship serves also as a symbol for that timeline, going from WWII (via the German production and steel shortage) through the transition years (via the GE acquisition) and onto the Cold War (via the song of indoctrination and thoughts of exile).
Upon the ship, each sailor lived within his own latrine, each officer with one decked out in velvet, and each commanding officer with an entire suite dedicated to bodily expulsion. They luxuriated in the act of defecation among German music, opera, and propaganda — reveled in soiling the images of other nations’ leaders. It was a compartmentalized world — taking the vile and often hidden facets of life or war and rendering them ecstatic.
This entire vision of the Rücksichtslos, as stated, rose from the mind of the interrogated Horst Achtfaden (any true reality of the Toiletship itself does not truly matter, for its existence in the mind of a former Nazi and rocket engineer renders it to be real enough). It is revealed that “the technical spies of three of four nations [were] after him” (451) — those likely being America (Major Marvy), the UK (either the apparent Ian Scuffling or some other entity), Russia (Tchitcherine), and now being basically their own nation, the Schwarzkommando (Enzian). The fourth of these are the ones who have captured him, and though he envisions himself on the Toiletship, in reality, he is within one of the wind-tunnel testing chambers at Peenemünde. Achtfaden, still hallucinating, also begins contemplating numerous moments and ideas regarding his work as “an aerodynamics man” (452) on the V-2 project. We see the insularity of his projects, studying measurements specific to his field only, attempting to achieve certain speeds through improvement of aerodynamics, even mentioning specific works (Handbuch and Lehrbuch der Ballistik), authors (Ackeret, Busemann, etc.), and researchers (Prandtl, Nusselt, etc.) related to this field. On top of this, his job only related to getting the Rocket to brennschluss, and he had no clue what would happen as the rocket began to fall (this path would be left to another group of engineers, though it was the one that was likely impossible to truly control) or where it would land (yet another group of engineers).
Enzian begins truly questioning Achtfaden, asking him about the Schwarzgerät. Given the subdivisions of the work on the rocket, Achtfaden has no clue what this device was or was used for. Despite having likely worked at Peenemünde with Pökler, he was not transferred to Nordhausen2 and so did not know anything about the device let alone the differences between the two development sites. Even within his insular aerodynamic group at Peenemünde, he was subdivided into a specific job — “the shift in CG for a device of a given weight3” (455). There are subdivisions within subdivisions, code names for those who worked closely together so they would not be able to reveal anything about the others if a situation like this one were ever to occur. These compartmentalizations are likely why Achtfaden’s hallucination immediately went to a literal and exaggerated version of this: the Toiletship.
Achtfaden has one last memory before he reveals what the Schwarzkommando need to know. He remembers his friend, someone who may possibly know more than him, near the end of the development of the rocket. He recalls that his friend told him, “‘I couldn’t go with Braun . . . not to the Americans, it would only just keep on the same way” (456). This friend meant Werner von Braun4 having been moved from Germany to America via Operation Paperclip, forgiven for his war crimes in order to help another country achieve the same. And so Achtfaden reveals the name of this friend to Enzian: Klaus Närrisch. He is allowed to live, and the Schwarzkommando leave him, now onto their next clue to find the device they seek.
Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 14
The German Navy.
Remember, Pökler was transferred to the Mittelwerke in Nordhausen where he worked for a while before being chosen for a small, special team to work on developing the Schwarzgerät for Weissmann/Blicero.
This means that Achtfaden did technically do some of the aerodynamics for the 00000 rocket, specifically seeing the change of the center of gravity (CG) if the Schwarzgerät were loaded with a certain weight. It is important to note that the weight was just under 100 pounds, though I will not go into detail just yet for ‘spoilers’ sake.
From the epigraph to Part 1.