You never did the Kenosha Kid?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

> I think that, at very least, the notion that Slothrop wants to or is 
> actively trying to deceive anyone is a moot point.  Any deception the 
> subject might wish to perpetrate would be swamped by the distortion of 
> reality produced by the so called truth serum itself.  Besides,  the 
> fat lieutenant is pretty clueless at this point in the book about what 
> he might have to hide.

Don't disagree with any of this, however, Slothrop is paranoid and he 
doesn't know why he has been ordered to front at the hospital (20-1). 
I'd say that, even after just one session, although it's also 
reasonable to suggest that there have been more (which is where we come 
in on p. 60), he now has some idea of what the experiment is. He knows, 
for example, that he's being injected and asked questions, at the very 
least. And I'd also say that he's not particularly happy about it: 
suspicious, paranoid. So, whether he was really angling for a "Section 
8", as he tells himself when he is released (early -- why?) from the 
hospital (114), and whether Pointsman's conclusions are in fact 
accurate -- "Falsifications, distorted thought processes . . . the 
scores show it clearly: he's psychopathically defiant, obsessive, a 
latent paranoiac" (90) -- both these pieces of textual evidence support 
the idea that Slothrop was trying to mess with the experiment.

I actually think the ditty Slothrop invents (61-2) is a final 
admonition to his conscious self. He's telling himself to "snap to", to 
brace for the experiment (where they are going to "Tap my head and mike 
my brain,/ Stick that needle in my vein"), and try to hold firm to the 
plan he has hatched to stay aware of what's going on and resist the 
interrogation.

I think what you propose is correct, that Slothrop's deception is only 
partially successful and that Pointsman is on to him anyway, which is 
why he releases Slothrop early. The confessions don't provide any 
information to support Pointsman's Pavlovian thesis, so he's quick to 
cancel the sessions and debunk the results.

In the actual "confession" recorded in the text I think the truth serum 
does kick in as it's supposed to, even though Slothrop at first tries 
to deflect the interrogator's questions by splitting hairs ("Well no, 
not *see* exactly . . . "), by trying to pretend he's a Negro (which, 
in a way, is precisely what he and his college friends were doing back 
in the swing club), and then by appealing directly to them ("Come on 
you guys . . . don't make it too . . . "). But then the memory does 
break through.

Slothrop's sneakier resistance strategy starts to intercede when he 
makes the decision to plunge down the toilet. Everything up to that 
point in the interrogation has been a truthful recount of a real 
incident from Slothrop's youth, but there's a hinge-point there on p. 
63 where Slothrop is deciding whether or not to "follow" his harmonica 
into the toilet (I'm assuming he really did lose it back then in the 
Roseland Ballroom in the way he describes, but I don't believe he 
really dived into the toilet to retrieve it. It stayed lost.) The 
repeated question -- "Follow?" -- interrupts the flow of the account, 
and there's a deal of equivocation and sidetracking on Slothrop's part 
right at this point. There's a decision to be made, both back there in 
the toilet, but also in his drugged-out state in the hospital in the 
present.

I think there are two aspects or levels (at least) to the toilet trip. 
On one level, in the real time of the interrogation, in his 
conscious/semiconscious state Slothrop is deciding whether or not to 
force his mind to break away from the truthful, literal, surface 
recount of the incident in the Roseland Ballroom, in order to try to 
permit some of the Kenosha Kid stuff he has rehearsed and attempted to 
plant surreptitiously in his subconscious to interfere with his 
narration. If he says or imagines he dived into the toilet, which is a 
"lie", but which is something he wanted to do (but decided against) or 
thought about at the time, and thus in a sense is a legitimate aspect 
of the experience, then the narrative branches from what *did* happen 
to what *might have* happened. It branches from truth into fiction, in 
other words, and where there are no "real" memories to fill in the gaps 
of what occurred next then pretty much anything, including the 
(hypothetical) mind training re. "The Kenosha Kid" story and those 
grammatico-semantic sentence variations that have been "occupying [his] 
awareness" just beforehand, can come into play. On another level, to be 
able to do this, it might mean that deeper compartments of his 
subconscious will be unlocked, thereby laying open a Pandora's Box of 
the submerged assumptions, fears and neuroses hidden deep within his 
psyche, which, like the toilet dive itself, is probably somewhere he 
doesn't much want to go.

best