Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 25: Deceleration
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 25: Slothrop in Rostock, Dissolving Borders, Slothrop's Dream of Tavtivy, Ludwig and Ursula, William Slothrop's Ghost, the Fur Trade
Slothrop’s world is slowing. Events are shifting into a muddier pace; he falls asleep and wakes in dim light, dreaming of regrets or could-have-beens. There is no longer the sense of urgency for finding a solution, only the desire to escape and the desire to start over.
Still in the outfit stolen from Tchitcherine at Peenemünde, Slothrop awakes in Rostock, Germany — 50 or so miles (~80 kilometers) west of Stralsund, where we had last seen him walking off into the night after being dropped off by Frau Gnahb and von Göll post-Anubis heist (3.22). Having made it here, he is now only about 180 miles (300 kilometers) from his destination: Cuxhaven — where he hopes that von Göll will have sent his falsified honorable discharge papers. His place of wake is in “a burned-out locksmith’s shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost” (549). Various characters throughout the novel, Slothrop included, have been searching for a ‘key’ to the problems of the world, whether that be to just figure out what is happening to themselves or their Earth (such as Slothrop’s search for the Rocket) or to elevate themselves to become a part of the coming system (such as Pointsman or Pökler attempting to reach new scientific discoveries or even Slothrop participating in the Elite ‘rituals’ about the Anubis). The issue is that these keys are all distractions; like those in the ‘burned-out locksmith’s shop,’ they exist as symbols which may unlock the truth behind the answer one seeks, yet their ‘locks have all been lost.’ The keys have been set out before you act as distractions to the real issues at hand. We have been trained to see the first part of a puzzle and expect that it has a solution similar to the methods that are typical within that known realm. But those answers no longer lie behind simple locks and keys, they require alternative methods of thinking, necessitating one to seek the solution in ways one never would have done before.
Slothrop hitches a ride with a “woman driving an empty farm wagon” and observes the landscape around him in a way that reveals the natural spirit of the world: “ponds and lakes seem to have no clear boundaries” (549). As he begins disintegrating and ‘scattering,’ becoming more a part of the Zone than an actual individual person, his sensitivity to this type of natural phenomenon will become more prominent. The world, the countries and continents within, have been separated off with abstract borders bearing no real or tangible significance beyond lines on a map.1 Slothrop is currently seeing this on a smaller scale via the boundaries of bodies of water. But despite Slothrop’s minor revelation, very few people react or live according to the spiritual nature of the world; they react as if these borders control our lives and direction. So now, “The Nationalities are on the move” (549). The scene is reminiscent of Pirate’s opening dream (1.1) but now we see groups of varying ethnicities and nationalities making their trek homeward to their own borders from the German Zone, labeled with ‘pale green farmworker triangles’ which they were labeled with by the Allies who supposedly ‘rescued’ them but are now labeling them in a similar manner to how the Nazis labeled the Jews and other within their concentration camps. These nationalities are not being assisted, are not being guided home or given any sort of reparation for what they may have endured. Instead, they are freed from a certain death with nothing but the clothes upon their back and are sent on their way to rebuild. The food that could have fed or, if turned into vodka, at least entertained, these wandering souls, has instead been collected and utilized for the alcohol in rocket fuel. And as this group makes this journey, they believe they’ve been saved, possibly overlooking the fact that their subjugation, genocide, and oppression, is now being overlooked in favor of scientific information transfer and a dedication to ‘progress.’ This “European and bourgeois order” (551) is not destroyed in the sense that the bourgeois no longer exists, but in that Their power now manifests itself in different manners and strata. It is used for a different purpose entirely despite seeming the same, no longer there solely for opulence, but to reconstruct the natural world which Slothrop glimpsed into. This glimpse led him to the realization that these borders were of Their own making, allowing Them to become Gods in the process. This reconstruction is a combination of eugenics, a control of molecular, atomic, and subatomic particles, that of the cosmos, and the abstract borders They can draw and redraw, split up and set to war against one another.
As he moves westward among this mass of people, he strips the insignia off of Tchitcherine’s uniform in hopes that he will be less noticed. But it doesn’t matter in the least, for these travelers have one goal in mind: to leave this place and return to whatever sense of normalcy may be left in the world.
Outside of Rostock, Slothrop settles down and has a dream of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, his old officemate at ACHTUNG (1.3) and companion at the Casino Hermann Goering (2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). Slothrop was set-up at the casino (and it was really a ‘set-up’ done by the White Visitation) with Tantivy and Teddy Bloat, the latter of whom was far less sympathetic to what was being done to Slothrop, while Tantivy even went as far as breaking down in a bathroom stall and confessing to Slothrop that he had reservations about the plot, thinking that this was, in fact, a set-up meant to extract whatever they could from him (2.2). Tantivy went missing shortly after the confession only for Slothrop to later on, right before leaving the Casino for Zürich, find an Tantivy’s obituary in a conspicuously placed newspaper (2.7). It is unclear if the obituary is real or if it is another set-up meant to send Slothrop further on his journey and into paranoia (though it doesn’t matter, for either way, it does send Slothrop out into the Zone).
But back in Rostock, Slothrop has this dream of Tantivy returning to the world as a spirit, gracing both Slothrop and Tantivy’s family for a few moments of respite from their journey. Tantivy states that he has always been ““ ‘ “Here” ’ ?”,” (552)2 leading Slothrop to ask if he was right, that Tantivy did not actually die and that the obituary was fabricated. But he has; he is now acting as a guardian angel of sorts. Slothrop wonders if he himself will return after death to watch over someone, knowing or sensing that his time is coming near, hoping he will be able to protect an innocent soul to make up for the evil he has contributed to or participated in. But Tantivy states he is not Slothrop’s guardian. Slothrop’s dream subconscious punishes him because his waking mind refused to look at what he had done: the dead body of Bianca. He knows he does not deserve a guardian.
He awakes again, this time in a rocker on an abandoned farm. As he walks on, the spirit of the world continues to reveal itself to him just as the borderless lakes and ponds did. Now, “Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees” (552). He is realizing that the human derived definition of consciousness may not be an all-encompassing one. These other living creatures do not act or react in the ways that we do, but they live, grow, adapt, sing; they create art, beauty, and poetry in their own way. And yet Slothrop’s family — or, symbolically, America’s genealogy — has committed mortal sin of murder. They have raped and killed these forests of living beings in order to process them and profit of their sale. Slothrop’s and America’s history is built off of the death of the natural world as a gateway toward profit. So, when Slothrop, in the present, asks the pines what he can do to atone, they respond, telling him that as a sole individual, the only thing he can do is assist in destroying the ‘operation’ by contributing to the death by a thousand cuts. They state that the “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you” (553). No, this one act will not save the forests or the world; all it may do is cause a mild annoyance. But if everyone, a Counterforce of Preterite even, were to contribute minor acts like this to the cause, maybe something could be changed.
Slothrop makes a number of wishes on the evening star. He wants safety, peace, for those whom he has loved to be alive, for fantasies to come to life, for the rockets to stop falling, for the bare necessities of a decent digestive system, and for clothing that will last long enough for him to reach his goal. And another wish, seemingly out of nowhere, is a hope for Ludwig to “find his lemming and be happy and leave me in peace” (553). Ludwig was a boy of eight or nine whose lemming, Ursula, had recently run away and who Slothrop had found sobbing in the countryside while looking for her. He is worried that Ursula had run over a cliff, given lemmings have a notoriety for committing mass suicide by doing as such. This is partially a myth, though they do accidentally do so during seasons of migration. Slothrop, perhaps seeking to act as the guardian angel whom he could not spiritually be, travels around the Zone with Ludwig looking for Ursula. Ludwig’s love goes beyond the bounds of standard rationality, leading Slothrop to believe he was simply suicidal. But maybe, something Slothrop has not been considering, this is similar to the butchered innocence of Ilse or Bianca now manifesting itself in a child’s simple love for his pet. His love and willingness to die for Ursula was as natural an act as the lemmings’ accidental mass suicide. It was a byproduct of their inherent nature — what should be. Not suicide, but the absence of a fear of death — the focus on love, life, connection, the spirit, the Earth.
This inherent nature of the suicide of the lemmings leads Slothrop’s mind to wander and hallucinate William Slothrop’s ghost — William being “the first transatlantic Slothrop” (1.4, pg. 21) who we heard of long ago during Slothrop’s original family history (1.4) — whispering to him as he searches for the lemming. William comments that the lemmings’ penchant for suicide parallels Jesus’ act of casting the demons out of two men’s souls near the Sea of Galilee, then sending these souls into a herd of pigs leading the said pigs to plunge and drown in the sea itself. This fact is then compared to William Slothrop’s own history3 where he and his son John raised pigs in the Berkshires. William loved the carefree nature of pigs; however, he hated the fact that his raising of them would always lead to a betrayal of trust and simultaneous slaughter. It could be said that these pigs, through trusting humans, were committing a form of subconscious suicide, possibly similar to how the lemmings would not purposefully run over the cliffs, but because of their inherent nature, would do so anyway. Could this also then be compared to Jesus himself, trusting the disciples which would thus lead to his own death at one of their hands? There are all these tangled webs of trust, betrayal, death, and suicide. But the one thing that is clear to Slothrop is that there is very rarely one true point of evil as long as we are not looking down the throats of the Elite. The pigs may be slaughtered, but their bodies will provide food. Jesus himself may have sent another group of innocent pigs to drown, but it is only to save a town’s lives from demons who had infiltrated it. Even Judas Iscariot, however evil he may be presented as, could possibly have doubted Jesus’ place as the true Messiah, thus leading to his sin. So, these are not subconscious suicides that are led to by pure acts of unfettered evil; they are deaths brought about by one of two things. Each of these betrayals leading to death are caused by the Preterite acting either out of necessity for the maintenance of themselves and loved ones or having been driven to act a certain way because of how the world around them was built.
And this leads Slothrop to recall Squalidozzi, the Argentinian Anarchist in Zürich, stating that "maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up" (556). These acts of death are inherent in many creatures for reasons unknown, but for many, it is due to the natural necessity of this act built into class and power structures. This memory of Squalidozzi forces Slothrop to come to a realization that the coordinate point he should have been seeking out was not that of the Schwarzgerät’s location, but of a historical branch point which would have allowed the Zone to be rewritten as a society that did not depend on the Elite/Preterite structure, instead of the current rewriting being one that only exacerbated that system. And it is not only memories that trigger this realization, but the present search for Ursula as well. For he sees in the way that Ludwig seeks her, in the way he shows off pictures of her in her youth, how much love he has for another individual — how his own act of love is not one to push forward these ‘inherent’ acts of death or suicide, but to save us from them. If this search leads to his own death, one would imagine that he would say ‘so be it’; his suicide would be one of compassion and love, something natural that was not born out of a lust for more.
We finally learn that at some point, Slothrop will lose Ludwig, never to truly find out if he does end up finding Ursula. But before that, they come across a girl selling black market furs who Ludwig initially believes has a dead lemming with her. It turns out that this specific fur was a gray fox which does alleviate his despair but shows that death is inherent not only in a system based on pure Elite/Preterite power structures, but also within a free-market capitalist system. It is just as Slothrop realized earlier: how his family, and many like his, had also committed this murderous act on the forests and trees of the world. Both the free market and black-markets (which necessarily exist within a free-market system) require death to cycle and to profit. In the end, it bears little surprise that these black-market products are being transferred to the most stereotypical representation of America, Major Duane Marvy, back again.
Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 26
This is a concept largely explored in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (which I will be writing about after I finish Gravity’s Rainbow, so stay tuned for that). That novel (along with Against the Day and V.) act as thematic and historical prequels to Gravity’s Rainbow, showing how the Elites and classes in power were able to construct a world that allowed the events of WWII and the formation of the Zone to occur so readily.
One of my favorite pieces of punctuation in literature (which I had to add to).
Which, it should be noted, also parallels Thomas Pynchon’s family history being that William Pynchon lived a somewhat similar life.