GRGR(12) "Plot" comments, questions (1)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Plot summary, clues, questions and comments: chapter two of
GRGR(12), GR.V.269--278 

"PLOT" Fantastic and Comic Parody On the threshold of the
Zone. 


Whitsun by the Sea, but Pointy, feeling a bit megalo, must
show self-possession in this time of Crisis, even if he is
obliged to go relax. When Victory exploded with joy maybe
the ghost of his dog Gloucester stood on his hinds and
announced, "Now is the winter of our discontent," Perhaps,
like Wicks, Pointsman wakes in the middle of the night
"convinc'd that 'twas he who has been haunting [Pavlov]."
Mr. Pointsman, left alone like lonesome Pavlov. Perhaps he
argued with Pavlov, "don't you know there's a War going on?"
Like Shakespeare's Gloucester of Richard III, Pointsman has
"slipped into a l'etat c'est moi frame of mind."  


No time to party-up down at the Square, maybe get into a
Yank's Navy uniform, grab a gal and be snapped into Life. I
wonder if anyone even tried to persuade Pointy to go to the
V-E festivities. When the celebration spilled into "The
White Visitation," did anyone even bothered to offer him a
drink? No. It's peacetime now and Pointy is in deep shit,
Kaje's shit is killing Old Man Pudding and there's been no
word of Slothrop for nearly a month. Weisenburger sez this
confirms the chronology: Slothrop slipped free in late
April, "nearly a month" before this remark. Sounds right?
No, Pointy will not be able to drag this drunken band into a
meeting and take charge with arrogant artfulness and the
Blavatskians are off on a pilgrimage to Divine Wisdom. Here
Pynchon parodies the eccentric crank, unduly zealous. While
all around him are celebrating victory, Pointy can think of
nothing but Slothrop and funding his project and  "Pointsman
has blundered."   

It can get real expensive sending people on peeping toms.
Here the comical and fantastic merge with the parodistic, as
we meet Pointy's pair of comical gumshoes, Harvey Speed and
Floyd Perdoo. They have found nothing of Darlene, No Jenny,
No Sally, No Cybele, No Angela, No Catherine, No Lucy, and
the little bit of Mrs. Quod they have found is "a flashy
young divorcee."  The old Mrs. Quoad, a witch of sorts,
stuffed Slothrop full of prewar Jellies, Rothschild,
Bernkastler Doktor, Patriotic Candies. Slothrop, will write
to his Mom, "they aren't like us," and remember, that Mrs.
Quoad is the one with a "gaft at he Ministry of Supply,"
where Churchill's son-in-law, Duncan Sandys has an important
position, and an office at Shell Mex House. Why does Pynchon
create an "Anglo-American" team? Perhaps these two are a
comical parody of the elaborate intrigue the Allied
governments are involved in? Perhaps, as is often the case,
the dear reader is again in Pointsman's position. In any
event, they go skipping obsessively like Munchkins (another
big clue, is the film changing from black and white to
color)  into "the erotic Poison" and are "so infected with
the prevailing fondness out here for Mindless Pleasures,"
that they seem to be tripping on something, or everything
but Slothrop's girls. Fowler sez, "The original title of GR
was Mindless Pleasures, the only positive and
non-destructive ones, and Speed and Perdoo are benumbed with
Their colorless, odorless nerve-gases, with only an odd
intimation-the face of a victim almost 'seen' on the surface
of a cantaloupe, for example (270/314) to recall them to
their mission of checking out Slothrop's sexual scores."
Ever been in field of ripening melons? The intoxicating
emanations from Mother Earth's fecund bounty replenish the
soul with the sweet breath of life returning. "It's
beautiful, says, Perdoo, and Speed picks a fantastic melon,"
turning it to show him as the face of threatening girls are
roughly turned by villains," and in "whose intaglio net now,
as among craters of the pale moon, a face is indeed
emerging, the face of a captive women with eyes cast
downward, lids above as smooth as Persian ceilings." Now the
two tangled in confused fantastic comedy, "like being called
on to, to justify eating an apple," slam into another dead
end, Speed suspects that the American lacks mental
stability, and is left to pay the exorbitant bill of these
mad adventures, which he will pass on, to Pointy's dying
budget. Now their own mothers are joined as a temptress and
seems to float on "these wrecked seas," drawing the two soft
boiled shamuses into her aura, sinfully tickling their
guilty memories, reminding them of Pointy's projest-(SEZ
WHO). Next a combined thought "in the guise of clown," "that
Might," Fowler says, have appeared to them would have warned
'the two soft-boiled shamuses' that They are altering the
evidence." (Note, on Wdnesday, I'll try to make some sense
of  Jose Liste Noya's "Mapping The 'Unmappable: Inhabiting
The Fantastic Interface Of Gravity's Rainbow") Fowler says,
"the image of the moray eel falling from the ceiling
(267/316) takes us back to a child's first terrors. Joint
(Dennis) is obviously one of Their operatives, and They are
very interested in suppressing PISCES." Is it obvious that
Joint is one of Their operatives? He's from Shell.   In any
event, Speed and Perdoo call into question what might have
been the  "established" "facts" upon which the narrative so
far has rested-the identity of the two Poisson charts. It
seems all names on Slothrop's map are false; has Slothrop
like Adam, renamed everything? Or has he, like god, invented
everything? It seems that the "identical" charts, the Gospel
and Creed, of Pointy's religion and central mechanism of the
novel's plot are lies. This discovery is an application of
Murphy's Law and Godel's Theorem. No formal system, not even
those of Behaviorism or of GR it seems, can be coherent and
complete. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

And as these formal systems seem to collapse, the system of
the War, seems to collapse as well, the War now degenerating
into an inter-agency, inter-Allied fight for information
about the rocket. "Zurich teems with Soviet agents
rounded
up von Braun and 500 others
What if they get a hold of
Slothrop?" As the War shatters, the repressed returns. The
dreams and secret terrors of the world come into being. The
mind hat has imagined King Kong and Operation Black Wing
brings the Schwartzkomando to life. So the Freudian Edwin
Treacle argues: 

He had not meant to offend sensibilities, only to show the
others
that their feelings about blackness were tied to
feelings about shit, and feelings about putrefaction and
death
.Why wouldn't they listen? Why wouldn't they admit
that their repressions had in a sense that Europe in the
last weary stages of its perversion of magic has lost, had
incarnated real and living men
dead father who never slept
with you Penelope, returns night after night to your bed
"
and we are reminded of Penelope and her father's ghost, the
dead father conspiracy of the War, as now Pynchon is
plunging us deep into Freudian returns and sexual deviance. 
The repressed returns when control is lost, the War is
losing control, or is it? Pointy too, here, center stage,
about him are the cast-Roger and Jessica, Katje Borgesius
and Dennis Joint-each not knowing what Pointy has in mind
for their future, is losing control, "Pointsman is
hallucinating, He has Lost control." It is only by creating
oneself as the rational analyst Nayland Smith that one
create Fu Manchu. Fu Manchu is a desire of control writ
large. "Yang and Yin," which the voice whispers to
Pointsman, have never been separate. To suppose they have,
has been Pointy's Hallucination.