direct hit! GR style

[David Casseres]

ray gonne sez
>... i can't help but
>refer to the cartoon accuracy of a short passage at the beginning:
>	What if it should hit <exactly>--ahh, no--for a split second
>	you'd have to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above,
>	strike the top of the skull. . . .

...which makes a great lead-in to something I've been wanting to raise.  
The last time I read Gravity's Rainbow, I was struck by something I 
hadn't really noticed before: the way the atom bomb hangs over the whole 
story, from the initial screaming (the very point, with the terrible mass 
above), through the mystery about the Kirghiz Light, through the stunning 
moment when stunned Slothrop reads about Hiroshima in a newspaper in the 
Zone (and m-m-maybe *that's* the moment when his character begins to 
disintegrate) to the final flash of the L.A. Light.

Pynchon is within the age-group that remembers the entire Cold War era, 
when the Bomb hung over us all 24 hours a day, supposedly held off only 
by the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, and it was often hard to 
believe we'd live out our lives without a nuclear war.  And one of the 
nightmare things about the Bomb was the feeling that it could hit *at any 
moment*, thanx to the new technology of the ICBM.  Though the sirens 
might wail, there would in effect be no warning: no approaching army, no 
headlines of doom, no public knowledge at all of whatever might lead to 
Armageddon.  We knew what had happened on the ground in Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki, after all.  After working on it for a long time, They were in a 
position to destroy humanity without the rest of us ever getting a clue.

Thus, the image of the terror-weapon that hits before you hear it coming. 
 In this proposed reading, it's *always* about to hit, it's only a 
question of how you feel about time.  And thus Slothrop, the man who 
*knows when it's coming anyway,* without needing to hear it.

And it gives him a hardon.  A hardon???  It seems pretty weird to get a 
hardon over one's impending obliteration.  Now of course this exegesis 
isn't in the book at all, and I'm way out on a limb, but I am now 
convinced that the Rocket is indeed the Bomb, and the famous 
don't-hear-it-until-afterward connects to that living doom, the Cold War. 
 So if Slothrop is the Cold War Man, why does he have this sexual 
response to the Bomb?

Yes, Pynchon tells us in some detail how he was conditioned to have just 
such a response.  But does it signify something else?  Is this cigar just 
a cigar?  I don't think so.  Is it just the animal reflex of the hanged 
man, as mentioned in Mason & Dixon?  Or is it higher, an actual erotic 
response to death itself?  Some of the women Slothrop responds to are 
certainly full of death, except there's that nice Darlene (do I have that 
right?) with the mum with the candy.  And though Geli Tripping is a 
witch, she's really about the life-force, she's the anti-witch to the one 
with the Kinderofen.

Pynchon is always telling us something about ourselves, our lives.  
Nothing gets the reader's attention like a hardon, and it's insisted on 
so persistently that it's structurally essential to the story.  Hmm, does 
poor Slothrop ever have another one after he reads about Hiroshima?  Help 
me out, foax.  What's up, so to speak, with Slothrop?


Cheers,
David