direct hit! GR style

[David Casseres]

Andrew sez
>... 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.

Absolutely.  But Slothrop seems almost an antithesis of LeMay; there are 
many other characters in Gravity's Rainbow that I would have expected to 
tumesce at the proximity of a warhead.

>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.

I think you're right about all of that.  But I also think the idea of the 
hardon in the face of death (um, odd choice of words I guess) is so 
arresting and so full of potential connections that practically any 
analysis of it that makes sense at all has to be understood as part of 
the work, since Pynchon has doubtless anticipated a great many different 
directions in which the reader could go with it.


Cheers,
David