Slothrop & the Rocket

[Jane Sweet]

Bichin, as they say in Californication. 

Tchicherine has had a death bed
conversion [GR.704], only he's not a god fearing man now,
he's a death fearing, no, not fearing, Death denying man.
Only,
not that there is "life after death", but another opiate,
another comfort "in the dialectical ballet of force,
counterforce, collision, AND NEW ORDER (my caps)." Tch's
Theory of History, is "the cold comforts" Tch has  exchanged
for "a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage" of
Marxist opium, or Oneirine, a haunting denial of Death. 

To tie it back, we can say that the "other" 

(Tch. has an other, a half black brother, Enzian, the half
black "brother" of Slothrop)

 embodies or carries those aspects of human experience that
are either "successfully" repressed or to which human
consciousness has submissively abandoned itself. 

 Enzian is the "black version of something inside of himself
[GR.499] that Tch needs to liquidate, Exlax, oh, no, yes,
the intestinal oven where death is quite literally in life,
a situation we discover is reversed in the novel in
Slothrop's Schwartzphanomen, which as Tch says,
"choreographs [Slothrop]" with unyielding discipline and
control.  

"Mine's always trying to destroy me. We should be exchanging
those, instead of uniforms." [GR.513]

Herr Teufeldröcke wrote:
> 
> Mali's is farther than I have taken the effort to figure out Slothrop's
> penis in such a manner, and it's a very good job, particularly the
> theory of Shell's guidance beam.
> 
> I can't find where, but I remember that Slothrop thinks about his making
> up of that map that started it all, a natural Poisson distribution, just
> like the inaccuracies of the rocket. Although this suggests that
> correspondence between Slothrop's penis and the rocket arises more from
> the observer's perception (or desire, or paranoia), I do offer a pair of
> quotations that may support Mali's argument:
> 
> page 513--
>    "I'm serious. It's your Schwarzphänomen."
>    "Quit fooling."
>    "You don't even know about it. It choreographs you. Mine's always
> trying to _destroy_ me. We should be exchanging _those_, instead of uniforms."
> 
> page 752--
> Plasticman will lose his way among the Imipolex chains, and topologists
> all over the Zone will run out and stop payments on his honorarium
> checks ("perfectly deformable," indeed!).
> 
> (It may be significant that Pynchon writes Plasticman as one word -- the
> comic book uses two.)
> 
> Auf der anderen Seite, the first quotation comes from a very stoned
> Tchitcherine who if he really knows anything about it the information
> comes from the same sources driving Pointsman, and the second is part of
> Poinstman's realizing his failure, that _he_ is Plasticman, no longer
> real, that Slothrop has won.
> 
> Slothrop's problem may be that he is _not_ the schwarzknabe some would
> have him be . . . he wants to _live_ . . . he has to leave this world
> that clothes him so . . .
> 
> --
> Diogenes T.