Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 31.2: Untangling Webs, Severing Cords

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 31.2: Arrival at Putzi's, Slothrop's Breakdown, Solange, Marvy and Manuela, the Castration, Dreams of Bianca and Ilse

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In May of 1945,¹ Cuxhaven was captured from Germany by the Allies. So, for a few months, as we saw in the previous chapter, various groups of people had been coinciding and grouping up in this city for a bacchanalian party. In early 3.31, we had dancing, singing, and drinking at the alcohol dump, gambling on fights at the docks, drug dealing and drug use galore. And now, as Slothrop, Bodine, Krypton, and Shirley drive the Red Cross vehicle up to Putzi’s, we see an intensification of this all. The irony is that through Slothrop’s recent journey across the Northern German ‘Zone,’ we saw how the Allies had ‘freed’ the oppressed from the concentration camps only to send them on their way, without food, help, or anything at all. The excuse could be made that this was because the Allies were busy freeing other groups, conducting other operations, or even that they themselves did not have adequate resources to assist. But as we see, this really was not the case. For everyone who supposedly ‘couldn’t help’ is here at the celebration, everyone who is deemed to deserve it that is: "soldiers, sailors, dames, tricks, winners, losers, conjurors, dealers, dopers, voyeurs, homosexuals, fetishists, spies, and folks just looking for company" (602). As long as you were on the winning side — or hey, even if you’re just willing to give the winning side a little bit of that information they may be seeking — you were invited to Putzi’s.

"Springer is nowhere in sight" (602) despite today being the day that Slothrop’s discharge paperwork should have been coming in. So, Slothrop is slowly beginning to realize that all of this really could have been a setup. With this revelation, his mind also fractures further, seemingly invaded by messages from Them or perhaps just paranoid delusions that appear as such. These thoughts begin fully breaking him down. He is no longer just a wandering person or wandering mind, occasionally lapsing into the æther, but now his paranoia is fully fledged. Voices have made their home in his head, taking the symbolic multiple identity crisis Slothrop had been struggling with through his journey and turning it fully schizophrenic. The voices then lead him to sit in a closet, "chewing on a velvet ear of his mask" (603). He knows that there may be no escape from Their grasp for They have already made Their home within his body and mind.

Bodine finds Slothrop cowering in the closet. He brings him a masseuse named Solange to care for him. In a brief conversation with her, discussing how their meeting (Slothrop’s and Solange’s) seems too much like a plot put on by either Bodine or von Göll, Slothrop realizes that his branching ‘plot’ which led to this moment is not the only possibility alive within the Zone. His ‘holy-grail’ quest may have been one of many — Tchitcherine and the Zone Herero being another of course, but even these still could only be a few strands in the overall web. His, theirs, and whoever else’s are “more tangled even than Boston’s [transit system]” (603). So, he calms himself, knowing that the web is so irreversibly tangled — that everything he does at this point is likely either a part of Their plot, or that Their plot has been so nearly completed that anything he does is either pointless or just too late. He decides, once again, to “ride their kind underground awhile, see where it takes him. . . .” (603).

Once Bodine has set those two up, he goes back out to the party in search of Major Marvy who also happens to be here. He finds him coming out of the bathroom which is home to the ‘iron-toad,’ an object at the bottom of a toilet which, depending on who is controlling a rheostat attached to it, electrocutes whoever is pissing on it, sending the current directly up the stream into their urethra. Given this toad is at a party for the victors of the war and that Marvy is congratulating himself on only receiving a small jolt, it seems to just be another way for these men to congratulate themselves for overcoming some obstacle, going through the pain that is expected from it, and coming out victorious on the other side — or put in other terms: the people who follow Their orders to help run the war are very often a bunch of sado-masochistic weirdos hungry for the dopamine rush associated with pain and with victory, but who also don’t want too much of that pain.

Marvy, now overcome with that dopamine rush and the cocaine which Bodine acquired for him, wants to sleep with a prostitute. And despite Marvy’s very apparent racism throughout the novel — starting way back when he met Slothrop on the train ride into the Zone, where he said, talking about the Zone Herero, “They’re a childlike race. Brains are smaller,” (3.1, pg. 288) and a number of other far worse comments — he states that he wants a black prostitute. This is exactly what he, a part of the winning nation, is so easily able to get. It is not any true attraction to a race which he has worked to eradicate, but a pure expression of his dominance and power. The woman he is given is Manuela, who while she pretends to be Valencian, is really from Asturias — a region which almost a decade earlier had experienced a horrifying pillaging and destruction at the hands of a government which they attempted to revolt against. The revolutionaries were a socialist group who attempted to overthrow their oppressors only to be largely slaughtered in the process. So, Manuela, now without a country or a people, has had to bring herself into the world of sex work in order to survive. She has been exploited and used, like Marvy is doing now, by men who seek power over her or over the oppressed people of the world. Marvy, like the government who killed many of her people, gets exactly what he wants and begins to fuck her while she lays her “eyes anyplace but on his, aswing now through the interior fog, dreaming of home” (606). She simply attempts to think of any possible thing but this horrid man beneath her. While they fuck, he begins thinking of his desires, all bent on power and the desire to evoke submission. He despises the weak, the dark skinned, the poor, and finds a fetish in breaking them down. He is the type of man who They seek out to do Their bidding because of his power-hungry nature and his willingness to do anything to anyone.

Those like Marvy usually win. But there is still random chance in this world — karma, if you believe in it. It turns out that Slothrop really had been sold out, and that Doctors Muffage and Spontoon are here to crash the party, ruining Marvy’s fun. But even worse for him, as he searches for his uniform so he can escape before they catch him with cocaine (for, at the moment, he isn’t quite sure who is raiding the party and thinks it could be standard military police), his uniform has gone missing. And the only thing he can put on is Slothrop’s left behind Plechazunga outfit, the outfit having been removed when Slothrop went off to sleep with Solange. Well, the raiders think Marvy is Slothrop given Muffage and Spontoon have been told Slothrop is wearing the pig uniform, and so they capture him, take him to the ambulance where the two Doctors wait and anesthetize him, all while he hopelessly tries to tell them he is not who they think.

We learn what the procedure was that the two Medical Officers were here to perform on Slothrop as they now perform it on Marvy: a full castration, described in uncomfortable detail. This must be looked at through two lenses: first, why Pointsman would want this operation to occur to Slothrop, and second, what it means that Marvy was the one to be operated on. So first, the reason why Pointsman would want this operation done on Slothrop is itself for of a couple reasons, the first of those being that Slothrop’s conditioning led the rockets to land wherever he had an erection (or that his erections were predictive of rocket strikes), and now that the war has been long over, any conditioning of this sort was no longer useful. The original conditioning was done specifically to form a bond between the organic and inorganic — between man and oil/plastic. But with that done, with the goal fully achieved now that the war has ended, Slothrop’s spiritual connection with the Rocket is more harmful than it is helpful. Its utter absurdity has led him to seek and thus discover what is being done to the world by the powers that be, giving him a will to disassociate from the institutions which have brought him to this place. The only way for Pointsman to achieve the destruction of this phenomena — thus, to sever America’s mindset from the reality of War’s true purpose — was not to reverse the conditioning (because when that was attempted, it sent many of those who were conditioned into the ultraparadoxical state) but to sever it entirely. Now for the second point: why Marvy? Well, it turns out that sometimes, karma does exist, and that randomness can serve the people well. While They have a power that cannot often be touched, They have created a web so infinitely tangled that it is nearly impossible for everything to go according to plan. It is similar to the nature of the malfunctioning pinball machines that Lyle Bland helped fix: while they are often preset to disfavor the player, sometimes obviously and sometimes subtly, a randomness does exist within them which occasionally allows the favorable outcome to be drawn out. And in this case, there could not have been a single more deserving soul for castration than Major Duane Marvy, testicles now “plopped into a bottle of alcohol” (609) to be sent out to Pointsman. While it is easy to despair in our sometimes-hopeless world, we have to remember that occasionally the villain gets their due, and that it is important to seize those moments to push forward.

Back with Slothrop: he lays next to Solange as he is “dreaming about Zwölfkinder, and Bianca smiling” (609) while Solange, who is here revealed to be Leni Pökler still alive, dreams “of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest” (610). The characters are connected once again through the Nightmare film, Alpdrücken — all their analogs in place. The two of them desire to save some innocent and pure soul on this Earth, but they see no stopping of the madness that has brought about both of these children’s deaths. Though, thinks Leni, perhaps death is the only thing that can save them: to ensure that “She will not be used” (610). But what kind of world is it where death is the only hope of escaping what those like Leni or Manuela have been subjected to because of the desires of rich men’s glory.

Finally, Bodine, still trying to help Slothrop escape this whole mess, asks a man named Möllner if any discharge papers have been sent here by von Göll. It turns out Slothrop has been fucked over once again; there is nothing, not even the mention of them.

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Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 32

The next chapter is the final chapter of Part 3! Been at this one for a long time now (since January) so it is incredibly exciting to be finishing it up. Thank you all for following along!

1. Which would have been a few months ago given the book is now in early August.