Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 9: Three Brothers
Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 9: Tchitcherine and Džabajev Smoke the Hashish, Slothrop's Second Sodium Amytal Interrogation
Tchitcherine drugged and captured Slothrop (3.7) and is now here, smoking some of the hashish he stole from him with Džabajev, “a teenage Kazakh dope fiend […] who combs his hair like the American crooner Frank Sinatra,” (390) and who also happens to be Tchitcherine’s new sidekick. While Džaqyp Qulan was his sidekick in the Kirghiz regions during the distribution of the New Turkic Alphabet, Džabajev is the sidekick here in the Zone. He asks Tchitcherine why he only took so little of the hashish and Tchitcherine responds, saying, “‘I only took what his freedom is worth to him,’” (390) which likely means that Slothrop was made to believe he was being allowed to go free, only for a price. It was just another way to give Slothrop the illusion of his freedom.
And yet, Tchitcherine does feel bad about all of this, for he sees the good in Slothrop and the similarities between them. Thematically, we know that Tchitcherine is to Russia as what Slothrop is to America (and as what Enzian is to Africa). They are representations of their nations and their nations’ people who are interacting with and reacting to the changing geopolitical climate surrounding them, are expressing their desires and fears on a country wiped nearly clean, and are in search of the object which they believe will come to destroy the world or that already has. While Tchitcherine obviously isn’t reading into the symbolisms and parallels in the novel he is a part of, he does clearly see himself in Slothrop — even in that penchant for dressing up and changing one’s identity. They are almost as much brothers as he and Enzian.
The reason Tchitcherine captured Slothrop was to extract information from him since he had heard an American was here searching for something in the Zone, just as both Tchitcherine and Enzian are. To extract this information, Slothrop was thus put under sodium amytal as he was by The White Visitation when he was sent into his fever dream of the Roseland Ballroom (1.10). What Tchitcherine learned was that Slothrop is looking for the Schwarzgerät just like Tchitcherine knows his brother, Enzian, and the rest of the Schwarzkommando, are. But Slothrop was not just speaking of the color black/schwarz in regard to that which he is searching for. He also began coupling “‘schwarz’ with some strange nouns” such as “Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream” (391) similar to the other perversions of black/schwarz we learned about earlier in his life: Schwarzvater and Schwarzknabe (3.1). Tchitcherine ponders what this prefix could mean given its usage over such broad realms. Could it be the desire for creation like a chemist attaching a carbon atom onto a molecule? And if it is carbon being tacked on, could these words then be receiving the addition of carbon themselves? Carbon as oil, coal, smoke, or death? These synthesized forms of the word (synthesized as in tacking black- onto words such as -woman) are all being used in the context of this new order surrounding Slothrop’s conditioning and the Zone with its rocket-God. This would render normal objects (men, women, children, dreams, etc.) into variations that are now produced with the goal of extracting or producing these forms of carbon for the Rocket — which are used to synthesize man and machine, the world and death.
Geli was the one who initially reported Slothrop’s presence in the Zone (3.1 and 3.4) to Tchitcherine, also likely telling him about Slothrop’s interest in the Schwarzgerät. Tchitcherine is confused given Slothrop not only has yet to uncover “a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence,” (391) but that he does not seem to report to any higher power at all — none of those rocket scavenging groups like SPOG or TsAGI. Instead, he is simply the American who needs to know ‘why’. This device was hidden from him through all his trainings and learnings on the V-2 (largely in 2.3 and 2.5), so he is not interested in the ordinary hardware. On top of this, the rockets fell in tandem with his sexual encounters, and this hidden device was made out of the same substance, Imipolex G, that was used to condition Slothrop’s sexual response as an infant. So, his search is not, like the rest, to procure the Schwarzgerät or any other V-2 intelligence for his own good or for the ‘good’ of their nation, but is to understand what has occurred to him, why it has occurred to him, and what it means for his past, present, and future. This is why he travels those same lines as the rest, following the fallback of the units tasked with firing V-2 rockets “from the Hook of Holland all across Lower Saxony,” (391) ending at what is known as the Lüneberg Heath — a gorgeous open plain of shrubland in Lower Saxony which will reappear at the end of the novel.1
Interestingly, Tchitcherine’s reporting should be going back to TsAGI, and to some extent it is. But the person who he is truly reporting back to — TsAGI merely being a cover — is “Malenkov’s special committee under the Council of People’s Commisars” (391). Also known as a leader in Soviet Industry. There should be no surprise that military industry is taking precedence over all else. To get this information to Malenkov’s committee his best bet is to continue tailing Slothrop. Plus, his self-imposed task, along with rocket scavenging efforts, is to find and kill Enzian, his brother, who he believes Slothrop will come in contact with again given both their interest in the 00000. Therefore, if he follows Slothrop, he can kill two birds with one stone: both literally killing his brother and finding the hardware he needs.
All of this can come later though. He and Džabajev may as well enjoy their hashish and their high while they can. Tchitcherine wishes situations were different so that he could share the moment with Slothrop as well.
Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 10
“Will you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait there for your Director to come?” (3.8, pg. 390).
No notes on this one