Slothrop and the Rockets

[jbor]

----------
>From: MalignD at aol.com
>
> Slothrop, I believe, is slowly turning into Imipolex G.
>
> And as the plastic "[entangles] with [his] bones and ducts," he is bleached
> out, like Blicero, into the polymer's "brilliant transparency."
>
> Slothrop's disappearance is, then, not merely metaphorical: it is actual.
>

Yes, I like this idea, and had never thought it through as well as MalignD
has here. The textual corroboration is great. Though I like to think that
Slothrop's dissolution or dispersal at/from the end of the text (those
apocryphal sightings as a "complete" person in the "real" world --
"post-narrative", as it were, perhaps even "post-metaphor" -- playing kazoo
on Stones albums and striking a cultural dischord and whatnot) is an
affirmative gesture, I also agree that the fact that Imipolex-G had been
surgically implanted in Infant Tyrone's penis is enormously ironic. For
starters, his (and the reader's) fantastic and supposedly earth-shattering
quest to find the Schwarzgerat and thereby unlock the key to an evil
world-wide cabal perpetrated by some ominous "They" leads him back to his
own dick and his own dad, which is marvellous on a literal, let alone
Freudian, level. And, of course, the passing on of the Imipolex "gene" to
subsequent Slothropian generations is thus something of a foregone
conclusion, isn't it? The greater symbolic potency of this: that America's
"predisposition to plastic", say, trying for the least offensive euphemism I
can think of, was *always already* coded into its most precious flesh, that
America was just Europe's "experiment" all along, that the (founding)
father(s) willingly sold out to an "evil" European empire of Control and
Analysis which was supposed to be what they were "liberating" themselves
from in the first place; certainly seems to be part of Pynchon's message and
concern throughout _GR_ and the other texts as well.

Thanks.

best

----------
>From: MalignD at aol.com
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: On another note:  Slothrop and the Rockets
>Date: Tue, Apr 24, 2001, 3:41 AM
>

> On another note entirely--
>
> I think easily the most vexing and dissatisfying aspect of GR is Pynchon's
> denying the reader a solution to the mystery of Slothrop's erections, their
> relation to the rockets, and, later, of Slothrop's disappearance.  The
> "solutions" generally given are on the level of the textual and metaphorical;
> and I have no argument with them.  Further, as we all know, there are
> warnings throughout the novel that there will be no final twining together,
> that the raveling of the plot is in keeping with the entropic themes, etc.
> Nevertheless, I feel certain I am not the only reader who, at the level of
> story, has felt cheated, and wondered whether there indeed was an explanation
> buried somewhere within the book.  In fact, I believe there is.  I say
> upfront that this explanation is dismissable as crackpot, but it is for me
> (and perhaps for me alone), correct, and provides me the satisfaction I was
> previously without.  I offer it here.
>

snip