direct hit! GR style

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

David Casseres writes:
> 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.

Sorry to say this but I always assumed that was obvious. The fact of
death from the skies at any instant, any place any time, so quick that
you would not even be aware of it completely fucks your temporal
bandwidth right down to the zero (the only step left is that last one
step beyond the zero into extinction). The amazing thing is that we
manage to continue operating within this farce of a civilization with
this sword of Damocles poised above our heads. But then what can else
can we do?  (Don't try to answer that question - its rhetorical - but
Pynchon has his characters give many answers from Slothrop to Byron
the Bulb to Katje, Pirate and Roger to you and your neighbour sitting
alone in the darkened cinema)

> 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?

See below re Slothrop's response but I find it mighty hard not to
suspect that Curtis LeMay didn't get a hardon when he got his hands on
those warheads. Doctor Strangelove is not so far from the truth. The
brightest of the physicists who built the bomb soon realized that MAD
was the only protection against nuclear holocaust (e.g. Szilard and
Bethe came to this conclusion in 1945) and that even then it was only
a matter of time before someone insane got hold of it. Things haven't
really changed much, have they?

And there were insane people in the military in both the US and the
USSR, not to mention elsewhere. But the only influential politician
who seriously proposed full scale nuclear war was Churchill and
luckily he was out of power (both in the UK and globally thanks to the
rise of US influence over the UK). Stalin never really had adequate
capability to deliver a major attack, certainly not comparable to the
retaliatory power of the US, and he was a wary general. Khruschev,
Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy (who got nearest of all of them to an
actual atomic war) knew they could never live with the political
fallout even if they `won' the atomic war. Later presidents (US and
USSR) knew they could not live with the atomic fallout. Reagan knew he
could bluff away with Star Wars because the Russians were already
admitting to themselves that they could no longer compete in the arms
race. (all the above gleaned from Richard Rhodes book `Dark Star' on
the development of the A-bomb).

> 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?

Slothrop's hardons are induced by Them, the product of indoctrination
rather than nature. Perhaps what this represents is the subversion of
the urge to reproduce (i.e. grow) replacing it with the urge to kill
and destroy, the death wish. Sterility was always a metaphor for the
nihilism of Them and represents one of Their most powerful weapons,
subversion of our creativity, furthering their own Death-obsessed
prodigality, squandering all that lush green potentiality.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of pleasure clos'd by your senses five