Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 20: Death for Death
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 20: The Rescue Party, Test Stand VII, Rescuing von Göll, Tchitcherine and Zhdaev, the Escape, Närrisch's Sacrifice
The group walks through Peenemünde on their mission to rescue von Göll. They walk into a storage shed where they pass “a single bulb [that] burns over the entrance” (506). Lone, burning bulbs have been seen a number of times throughout this story so far, the one that should be most easily called to mind being the bulb over Franz Pökler’s cot in the Mittelwerke which told him stories in his dreams (3.11). It is possible, even likely, that many of these bulbs are one and the same, somehow being taken and transplanted to alternate locations, always watching over the characters of the story. We still have some time until we really get to the story of the bulb itself.
As they continue on, Slothrop comments on the fact that he’s surprised that life still exists in such a decrepit location, but Närrisch mentions how they only cleared out the forest that needed to be cleared, and that animals still even returned to the cleared spots when the noise died down. This seems to be a common hope held among individuals like Närrisch: that despite what they had done and what they had destroyed, the natural world would be able to continue on and replenish. It is just as many characters have seen and hoped for during these past few chapters as they witnessed the slow process of the natural world reclaiming the built.
Slothrop also realizes that the news goes on without him. His mission has taken him throughout the Zone in order to witness how history and the geopolitical empire was being reestablished and rewritten. But the things he has seen have been events not recorded in history, and which would largely be considered ‘unimportant.’ What he has seen are the normal day-to-day doings of different class strata, the destroyed cities and factories that once stood tall1, the methods of control which would soon be utilized to a perfect degree — not a true major ‘event’ to be seen. But as they pass by this radio, Slothrop knows that the observations he has made along the way have now been working their way into reality and history itself — even being the main driver of the writing of history.
After some time, the group reaches Test Stand VII, the location where they believed von Göll to be taken. The plan for rescue begins fully forming. Haftung’s girls are told to become a distraction by dancing and singing in order to sexually distract the Russian soldiers while Slothrop and Närrisch make their way in to rescue him. The band (Haftung’s as well) decide to find their own entertainment by making their way into the forest to play their instruments and consume bananas, calling back to the first few chapters in which Pirate Prentice and Teddy Bloat consumed their bananas while singing a song.
They begin constructing Molotov cocktails to assist in the distraction which the girls will be conducting. And with these cocktails, the two make their way toward the stand — the Holy Center. A Holy Center would be the place where whatever the reader or watcher is observing, becomes ‘real.’ In this instance, the origin of the Zone itself. While the War is what caused the Rocket to form, the Rocket is what brought the People under Their control. It is the object and force which was able to wipe the existing world clean in order to rewrite how it all would unravel. So, the V-2’s original Test Stand is that true Holy Center from which the Fourth Reich would have emerged. And here are two individuals, an engineer of the Rocket and a symbolic representation of America (or the ‘American’) himself, attempting to rescue a semi-Elite Black Marketeer. It is even a bit on the nose if you really think about it, America and a Nazi working in tandem to save a man who could procure for them the object of the world’s very destruction. This too is just the start of it all: “Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime” (508) and with history passing by in the background, something such as America and the Nazis may very well often work in tandem for something such as this.
“Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter” (509) — when America decided it would not hold to its original intentions, when the people began seeking alternative means of pleasure if certain ones would not be allowed to them, when it was decided that the destruction of the innocent was worth it as long as America as a people would still have various mindless pleasures available to them . . . that is when America, or the West as a whole, would begin to fragment. It’s existence as a state or as a realm held together by some compass, whether it be moral or otherwise, is now falling apart just as Slothrop himself is thinning and scattering. As Mondaugen would put it, Slothrop and America’s ‘temporal bandwidth’ is waning. Neither of them has any perception of the past that formed them or the future in which they were trying to strive for — to save, even. Instead, all that mattered at this point was their ‘present,’ the mindless pleasures such as Pirate’s bananery or those viler ones that began Slothrop’s scattering in the first place aboard the Anubis. And as we saw, it is not just America, for upon the Anubis were Elites from all nationalities. The world is beginning to scatter, as well. Slothrop, here, even asks the German, Närrisch, “what are we[?]” (509).
So Slothrop, grail seeker of a grail which he could not fathom, is at the site of its birth. This is the Holy-Center, the birthplace of that symbol of destruction, of technology and weaponry made flesh, of the coupling between sex and death, but he cannot see it for what it is: “There is no good reason to hope for any turn, any surprise I-see-it, not from Slothrop” (509). He cannot see that this is the ‘Egg’ from which the 00000 and the Schwartzgerät were birthed2, that it is where that ritual calling the world’s death to fruition began. Slothrop’s ignorance is similar to Tchitcherine’s inability to find awe at the Kirghiz Light — a light that both represented the beauty possible in the natural world and the lights stemming from the atomic bomb. He could not find beauty in what already existed, nor could he find horror in what we have created, for he was desensitized entirely into feeling anything for the world.
When Slothrop and Närrisch finally find their way into the Test Stand, they immediately run into Russian soldiers who have taken over the site. In a comical, cartoonish, and far too coincidentally easy manner, the two of them manage to scare off the soldiers while attaining their weapons for themselves. With these, though it likely would not have even been necessary to have them given the ease at which they continue through the site, they finally find a room holding von Göll who has been drugged, like Slothrop had been numerous times, with Sodium Amytal.
They rescue von Göll and fear for their lives as they run with him down the partially lit hall. However, their fear is somewhat alleviated when they run into Zhdaev, the man who kidnapped von Göll in the first place, with none other than Vaslav Tchitcherine. Since Slothrop and Närrisch get “the drop on them,” (512) the two Russians decide to surrender and proceed to give them their uniforms. This is yet another uniform for Slothrop, yet now because of his ‘scattering’, instead of climbing up some sort of social or class-based ladder, his coming uniforms will often (though not always) seem random, out of place, or without any clear meaning. Nonetheless, the insane and comedic antics continue when Slothrop forces Tchitcherine to pretend to be him while he pretends to be Tchitcherine — Slothrop even going as far as to mouth words to oncoming Russian soldiers while Tchitcherine (now tied up with Zhdaev) actually vocalizes them from the background. Given both of these men have been parallels from the start, we are now seeing that this disintegration that Slothrop (and likely also Tchitcherine) is experiencing is not only making him a parallel but nearly making him one and the same.
Somehow, they manage to get out. Otto and his new girl, Hilde, arrive in Zhdaev’s vehicle, and the lot of them load Springer up. They drive off, allow Springer to vomit — making him feel infinitely better — rendezvous with the chimps and the girls and the tuba players, and even make it back to the shoreline. But despite everything up to this point going unbelievably perfect to a literal degree, none of it truly matters if the final step did not go according to plan. And here they sit on the shore, waiting for Frau Gnahb, to arrive, far past the time when she should have been there, with the Russians coming fast on their tail. Närrisch proves that he is not one of Them. While he believes himself an Elite and while among certain people he may, in fact, be ‘elite,’ there is a massive disparity between what he is and what those who control him are. For a true Elite would never sacrifice themselves for another. Yet here he goes, saying “‘Lebe wohl’” (514) — ‘farewell’ — to der Springer, his friend, as he runs up to beach, ready to sacrifice himself to save someone whom he loves. When Frau Gnahb finally makes landing on the shore of Peenemünde, when the group hears Närrisch holding off the attackers via rifle fire, Slothrop happens to reexperience an empathy and willingness to save an other. That slow disintegration pauses for a moment; he is ready to put his own life on the line to bring back Närrisch. But he is hauled onto the boat and driven off. Even with our world’s disintegration, the most evil countries or those who live within them hold the desire to save and protect. Whether or not it is possible to do so, it is that desire which allows the world to hold onto some semblance of self that may reside somewhere within it.
The perspective switches back to Närrisch for what we can only assume are his final moments. He sits in a drainage pipe, “down to the last tommygun of his career, foreign and overheated . . . and blisters on his hands he won’t have to worry about tomorrow” (516). Sure, after he had helped create the Schwarzgerät there were numerous opportunities to make something different of himself. But von Göll promised him the thing that everyone now wanted — fame, pleasure, sex, wealth. “Who could blame him” (516) for taking that offer? He too wonders how far this Schwartzgerät project would go or was planned to go. For his work on it was one thing, but all these nations following and seeking it after the fact are another. This obsession with the mechanization of flesh and the sexualization of death are not just for the War; instead, they have woven their way into the world itself, and Springer, von Göll, whatever he may want to go by at this point, is one of the vessels to bring it out into modern society. Instead of glory or pleasure, this desire has brought him into imminent and premature death.
Klaus Närrisch pictures the life he had chosen compared to the life that was offered. He had chosen variables, A and B, one a predictable payload, one the ability to control an uncertainty. A would be that payload whose goal would be to be transferred from one point to another, the object which the Schwartzgerät was designed to carry. B would be the thing Närrisch and his coworkers were there to design: a method which would alleviate any uncertainty in order to ensure that payload would be transferred. So, he viewed his purpose in terms of variables, constants, variables with subscripts and variables unknown. He believed: “Wasn’t that life more decent than gangstering?” (518). Well, if A was the payload, and as we know, the payload is ‘death,’ then B is the control to lead us there. So, B-sub-Närrisch is approaching, growing. His immanent path toward death is here. He has sacrificed himself for what? A Death for more death?
Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 21
These ‘destroyed factories’ will become very relevant in the next chapter, 3.21.
Note: It is not where they were launched, but where they were designed and created.