You never did the Kenosha Kid?

[Paul Mackin]

R:
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.

P:
Hope I am not being too harsh, but "what [I] propose" bears little or no 
relation to the rest of the paragraph? No one can reasonably object to 
your arguing your interpretaion,  but why do you need to imply that 
someone else shares it?







jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

>> 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
>
>