Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 18: You Shouldn't Be Here
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 18: The Storm on the Anubis, Slothrop Searches for Bianca, Overboard
Slothrop has been aboard the Anubis — the vessel of the Elites — and has heard the stories of numerous of its riders: two separate pasts of Greta Erdmann, some of Ensign Morituri’s life and work, Bianca’s wants and dreams, and tidbits of various non-riders within these stories. Now, the stories done, the Anubis is in dire straits. Waves and storms toss it to-and-fro, though its captain seems to be unphased. The nature of the universe around them even seems to be warping into something unnatural with the daylight having “been declining for too many hours” (489). It is the New World calling out to Slothrop that he is breaking emerging laws of nature: being present and participatory in an order that should be barred to him.
These phenomena give Procalowski some hope that, given the ship is attempting to make way toward Swinemünde and the Russians are attempting to prevent this entry, the storm will provide cover. It is even pondered, though it is unclear by whom, that Vaslav Tchitcherine could be one of the Russians looking for the ship. Despite Procalowski’s nonchalance, many of the riders are showing varying degrees of stress. This changing in the world’s order is causing a number of the former military men’s PTSD to reemerge, the partygoers’ drunken stupors to end in vomiting, the aristocratic women who once laid out on decks and tanned to now lay cold and drenched by rain. It is a feeling none of these Elite should have to worry about anymore, but the ‘world’ is trying to set things right, get Slothrop off the ship, and reset Their path forward.
At the moment, Slothrop is more troubled with his search for Bianca than anything. He knows she is in hiding, and although he has promised Erdmann that he would find her, it seems he is more concerned with atoning for his sin. His search for her is simultaneously plagued by other thoughts regarding Erdmann’s recent story: that of her, Blicero, Imipolex G, and the Schwartzgerät. He has realized that the initial revelation of an ‘S-Gerät’ during his V-2 research at the Casino Hermann Goering with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Hillary Bounce, Teddy Bloat, and others, was not coincidental. They had put him onto the term knowing that it would be something he could not put aside — that he would follow it to the very extent of his ability. And finally, he begins to tie this all together:
Imipolex G is a synthetic polymer, a plastic that is both erotic and utilitarian, that even feels and acts at times like human flesh. This plastic was used for two things — by Laszlo Jamf to act as the stimulus on Slothrop’s infant penis which would cause him to become erect, and by Blicero (and his engineers like Franz Pökler) to create the Schwartzgerät, a device that would be put into the 00000 V-2 rocket and launched for some still unknown purpose. So, he believes that the rocket has been following him, that its entrance into his vicinity would lead to his erection, or that, given he has been sent Beyond the Zero and into an ultraparadoxical phase (1.13), his erection called the plastic, and thus the rocket, to him. So, symbolically, he as a representation of America, has been conditioned to serve as the lightning rod for all things that the 00000 and Imipolex G could represent: war and death, the personification of plastic and machinery (going as far as giving it a life and soul, even worshipping it), a lust for control and subjugation, levels and compartmentalizations of power, and numerous other ideas discussed previously.
This paranoia, this mistrust of everyone who he has met — each of them having led him astray or led him on a narrower and narrower path tower the Schwartzgerät — is taking away his humanity and emotion. He has lost this all. He has, with each changed outfit, even lost his own individuality — his own self. So, it should be no surprise that he has attempted to seek this new life aboard the Anubis, participating in the blood cult of the Elite. He is numb, unalarmed, barely even a person at this point.
The ship becomes invisible to any watchers and rides through the tidal waves of the storms. Slothrop has visions of Elites from ages before this one: a countess, those who slaughtered and displayed bodies of Jews and Leftists, and pedophiles. And then he sees her, though he convinces himself he does not. He sees Bianca standing on the edge of the ship, eyes closed, ready to jump — jumping, falling. He cannot tell if it is reality which he watches, or a figment of his own imagination. And he too, as if he was led to this spot both to witness this and experience it himself, was attacked and thrown overboard, just as the storm, the New World, and the Fourth Reich would have wanted. In the water, he sobs, adding nothing to the ocean; his suffering and sadness is a mere statistical fuzz among the aggregation that has been experienced by all these past years. The tears do show one thing though. While he has lost much of it, there is still some humanity inside of him, but it is being stripped away bit by bit as his journey goes on.
Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 19