Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 17: Silhouettes and Silent Cities
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 17: Gretta Erdmann's Past, Blicero at the Heath, the Imipolex Orgy
Greta begins her story, just as Morituri began his.1 Slothrop has come to her to appease her fear, telling her that Bianca is not dead, like she believes — that she is simply in hiding and that Slothrop has not laid a finger on her. So, as he is finally allowed into Erdmann’s room, he is also allowed to learn more about her past. Erdmann has possessed innumerable identities, none of them her own, just as Slothrop has been forced to take on numerous identities himself. As an actress, she has always been told who to be, and this trait likely followed her into the real world as well. Could it be that the identities placed upon her led to her manifestation as the mass killer at Bad Karma, as a genocidal nation itself? Maybe she was never meant to become something as such, and just as Rollo Groast was found, watched, acquired, and used by Them, so was she. For, according to her, there was no ‘she.’ Erdmann was simply a fusion of identities placed upon her.2
She was a cowgirl. A rider of “an American horse named Snake,” (482) the same horse who Crutchfield rode in Slothrop’s Roseland Ballroom dream that led him on his Westward expansion (1.10) and that Tchitcherine rode as he spread the New Turkic Alphabet (3.5). Since Snake has been seen as a vehicle to both these men on their journey for the forced Westernization or colonization of the world, the fact that Erdmann rode the same horse further verifies her place in the coming global genocide project (the Fourth Reich), especially given she played this role in Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko, or, White Sands, New Mexico: the site of the atomic bomb testing. The precursor to an act immeasurably evil compared to what humanity had ever done, yet an act that would be forgiven and justified in the history books.
Her next identity has her snuggling up to a corpse, placing words in its mouth, imagining what it would tell her of the land beyond. As a bringer of death and a proprietor of coming genocide, she gives the afterlife a feeling of ease, bestowing upon the dead a sense of comfort to be far from the “distant rumbling, the implied silhouette of some explosion, conducted here through the earth overhead” (483). She is giving false validity to the death that will be brought on because of the war, giving the dead solace in the fact that they would not have to experience the further horrors of the world. As if it were preferable to be ripped from this world with no consent.
We then see her with Max Schlepzig riding in a tub down a river, though much of the film is directed using their body doubles. We have already seen Schlepzig (the man and actor who Erdmann believes impregnated her with Bianca in the opening scene of Alpdrücken) have a ‘double’ in Slothrop (given Slothrop’s attainment of Schlepzig’s identity from Säure in 3.7). Here we see that figures such as Erdmann and Schlepzig have parallels all over the Zone. They are not special cases that only exist in themselves but are an archetype. They stem from the “Jugend Herauf! (a lighthearted pun, of course, on the then popular phrase ‘Juden heraus!’)” (483) — the two phrases respectively stemming from the ‘rising youth’ of the national socialist party (the Nazis) which itself stems from the German phrase for ‘Jews out.’ They and their doubles are out here enabling the outcomes of the war. So, where Erdmann may be Slothrop’s version of her archetype, who is to say that there is not another for someone else who we haven’t met.
And even her daughter, Bianca, is a double. Erdmann sees Bianca in Gottfried, “the young pet and protégé of Captain Blicero” (484). These two both also have doubles in Ilse, Pökler’s daughter, who had seen Gottfried at Zwölfkinder and who sought a happier home just as Bianca did. Importantly though, it also appears that Erdmann knew both Gottfried and Blicero, making all of these characters not simply archetypes and parallels, but acquaintances as well. They are the same people and archetypes, funneling in and out of the places where decisions are made.
Thanatz, as death, maybe even a parallel for Blicero, read their scars. He placed a mystical reading over their suffering, giving them false solace in the pain that they had suffered. Like Blicero, he takes pleasure in the marring of flesh and has rendered this marring to be something holy and symbolic. Flesh has been alchemized in the zone to merge with steel, coal, and plastic, and sacrifices of the original flesh must be made in the eyes of the Elite.
“There would come to her a single vision” during her abuse, “The Eye at the top of the pyramid” (484). She knows that despite her being an actor who furthers Their goals, she is only that: an actor. Never a director. The director is that all-seeing eye, the symbol that every American sees on US currency, their vantage and face hidden in plain sight. This vision came when she and Thanatz were at Schußstelle with Blicero at the final moments of his insanity — Schußstelle being the place where we saw him with Katje and Gottfried (1.14) and where Katje escaped before being hired by the White Visitation and thus finding Pirate and Bloat at their flat. As Erdmann and Thanatz walked out among the forests where the launching site was located, they noticed that all they walked upon was the remnants of a bombed-out city. They witnessed nature’s reclamation of mankind’s destruction only to return home to see the insanity of the demon who had caused it. And yet, even if they do bat an eye, they still follow his lead.
Greta finishes the story of her past with the final moments she had been with Blicero. To her, “Blicero was a local deity” (485). He had achieved godhood. His final plan, as has briefly been alluded to before, involved Gottfried and something ‘resinous’ (plastic-like). Their final scene was at the Lüneberg Heath — the launch site of the 00000 rocket that was loaded with the Schwartzgerät.3 The Heath is the location where any remaining iota of Blicero’s humanity was lost — where he had changed from man to animal to monster, a werewolf who howls at the sky. He has come to believe that this world is “the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land” (486). Borders no longer existed to him, but not in the sense of geopolitical freedom. It was in the sense that the world was his world, one which he could eradicate and control. Like Odysseus, he would travel from white spot to white spot, from island to island, on his way home. All this in the hopes that the rocket he would fire from these locations would bring his solidification as a God. When Erdmann left with Blicero, they arrived at a petrochemical plant which mapped onto the Tarot’s Tower, or ‘Castle,’ just as Blicero mapped Erdmann onto Katje. And as she watched him transform from a ‘man’ into a monster before her view, seeing “the wrinkled wolf-eyes” going into their “animal north, to a persistence on the hard edge of death,” and “running on nothing but ice, or less,” (486) he still somehow was not the epitome of evil. He may be the name recorded into history books — the villain at the top — such as Hitler, or Himmler, or Goebbels, but there is always higher. Always someone who does not present on the face as a malicious or insane monster. These men will arrive in “black swirls of limousines and staff cars,” will be known as “important men,” (486) be well versed in film and art and all things aristocratic. They will have that sheen of white death staring at you through eyes of capital and wealth — through the ability to move around with ease and luxury, not launching the rockets, not falling into insanity, not even making the orders. Just knowing that the world’s events have been set out before them to ease Their burden. Knowing the rockets would be launched, when needed, for Them and Them alone. They would always bear a smile. One of these men was seen before, Generaldirektor Smaragd, who Leni Pökler saw as a witness to Walter Rathenau’s seance (1.19) and who was a known representative of IG Farben. These are the men in power — not the leaders of the war, but of the industries and companies and multinational corporations which the wars help fuel. These men go off with Blicero to discuss, as Slothrop — the listener of Erdmann’s story — realizes, the S-Gerät. Erdmann accompanies them and sees the device and the substance which makes it up as a sort of living plastic: “It looked to me like an ectoplasm” (487). The men truly did view this plastic, this polymer, as a living thing. It was something they both worshipped and lusted over. As they began to use Erdmann for their own sexual purposes (perhaps a ‘sacrifice’ akin to the flesh sacrifice Thanatz read the scars of — something to give the ‘new’ flesh validity), they moaned the names of plastics: “‘butadiene,’” and Erdmann only heard the reality of it all, “beauty dying” (487). She was dressed in a suit of Imipolex G which felt alive, because to some extent, it was more alive than many other plastics. She learned to love it. The feel of the plastic replaced her and the men’s standard sexual lust with something more erotic than the flesh itself. And finally, after the orgy — after innumerable amnesiac days — she was left out in the rain to find her way to Thanatz at Swinemünde, for little did she know, the war, on the European front, had ended. Her journey to Swinemünde is the same journey that Slothrop had found her on, and the same destination that the Anubis now made way for. The beginning of this journey held the ringing sound of silence, one that could only be truly experienced in those spaces where cultures, histories, lives, and traditions, had themselves been muted eternally.
Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 18
Each paragraph of this chapter’s analysis will cover a ‘part’ of the chapter itself — AKA, where the breaks occur. Just so it’s easier to follow. (Sorry about how long the last paragraph is because of this…).
The initial merging of her identity is with Gretel, giving her a parallel to Katje given Katje’s place in the Hansel, Gretel, and the Witch analog with Gottfried, Katje, and Blicero (1.14).
Reminder for first time readers: the Schwartzgerät was the plastic object made of Imipolex G which many scientists, Franz Pökler included, helped make alterations on a V-2 rocket for so that said rocket would be able to hold the device. This rocket which housed the Schwartzgerät is known as the 00000 and is what Slothrop, Marvy, Enzian, and Tchitcherine are all looking for within the Zone. It was launched at the Heath by Blicero. This plan somehow included Gottfried (though, at this point in the novel, it is unsure how so).