The Disgusting English Candy Drill

[Joseph T]

So assuming that this story of Hansel and Gretel  and the witches  
house of toxic goodies is important ,( and we find it elsewhere in GR  
as we may find themes from the Tempest and New Testament etc.  
appearing in ATD) perhaps it would do to follow that trail of stones  
a bit further.
Slothrop is abandoned in terms of parental care and delivered over to  
the experimental scientific age.  His penis /lifeforce becomes an  
needle registering the chemistry of V2 rockets.   Perhaps Gretel  
could be read as the English girls abandoned by the war. They are   
both left by a fire in the woods. Their arousal is not natural(as the  
rainbow penis/ earthcloud vulva) not their own, but a complicity in  
the experiment of war. It lacks authenticity, maybe even reality. But  
Mrs Quoad, the witch, is real, if in denial about the whole candy  
seduction, as the Germans and the allies too were implicated in  
denial. Perhaps Mrs. Quoad is Darlene, and typical of his encounters.  
If they were fantasies , why specificity of place?

Is the whole scene with the candies the point where Slothrop becomes  
aware of his complicity and  abuse. It summons a strange mix of  
memories of mother as addict to comfort who abandoned him, and  
pictures of the candies he is offered as instruments of war and mass  
slaughter? Is this where he sees his addiction to fantasy and tastes  
the debauched  relation of war and commerce and human desire and sees  
his own role and the ovens of his future.

In the story Hansel and Gretel escape. Hansel holds out a bone  
instead of his finger because the witch wants him fat and tests  
him .  Slothrop's bone is his seeming compliance, even his penis,  
while he keeps his life force which he begins to consciously  conceal  
from the white(v isitattion) witch. From then he begins to demand  
reality( as opposed to "purity " which is increasingly distasteful)  
from relationships, and starts on a path first of discovery ,then of  
direct personal intervention.

In other words I think  the story is that Slothrop sees his  
predicament, sees he  may not have a chance in a million , but  
chooses life.  Gottfried  and others choose fantasies of purification  
and thus the oven. Some of the witches end up in the oven too. The  
question  hanging over us at the end being have we loosed too much  
bad karma to escape the payback? Are we about to get a shove from  
sweet little Gretel?


On Mar 12, 2007, at 2:43 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> The Disgusting English Candy Drill (GR, Pt. I, pp. 114-20)
>
> http://www.olemichaelsen.dk/gravity.html
>
>> From a correspondent ...
>
>   Slothrop's suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous wine
> jellies and candies in that early section of Gravity's Rainbow seems
> to have a weightier meaning than previously noticed, involving many of
> the threads that center around Slothrop.  Indeed, it may a kind of
> lynchpin for the novel on a few major levels.
>   Slothrop's suffering is a metaphor, or perhaps a prefiguring, for
> what no-one (in the novel) knew for sure at the time: Millions of
> people (Polish, Jewish, Gypsy people, Christian German  homosexuals,
> German Communists, aged and infirm Germans, as well as aged and infirm
> Christians from the conquered nations) were being rounded up and
> forced, en masse, into gas chambers where millions perished.  It is a
> very deft treatment of what it might have been like to inhale those
> truly lethal toxic fumes, done under the cover of Pynchon's
> "Disgusting English Candy Drill," where Slothrop inhales merely mock
> toxic fumes generated by the "all-but witch's" candies.
>   To let us on to his intent he uses the word "holocaust" once,
> though not in the sense that it has come to be used since WWII, "his
> tongue's a hopeless holocaust."  This word, with some other buzzers,
> like "horrible alkaloid desolation" (the pouring of lye on the
> cadavers), and "pure nitric acid" (one of the poisons the breathing of
> whose fumes was truly lethal) are sprinkled around this episode.  It
> seems Pynchon wants us to carry the notions of the historical
> Holocaust, a disgust at how the people were killed, and how their
> corpses were disposed of, while we enjoy a tension-filled chuckle over
> the series of disgusting candies Slothrop eats and their various
> effects on him.
>   To further clarify his method, he actually describes the candies
> with their shapes being those of "hand grenades," ... "a .455 Webley
> cartridge," ... "a six-ton earthquake bomb," and a "licorice bazooka,"
> all instruments of murder.  He couldn't have been more explicit,
> failing to shape a candy guillotine.  The candies are all metaphors
> for political murder.
>   Mrs. Quoad has something to do with Slothrop's memories.  "I'm the
> only one with a memory around here," Mrs. Qoad sighs.  "We help each
> other, you see."  Slothrop thinks, "but this room has gone on
> clarifying: part of whoever he was inside it has kindly remained."
> She is a self-described "all but outright witch," and she will tempt
> Slothrop with candies, as might a witch in Grimm's fairy tales.
>   His girl of the moment is Darlene (her name from the same root as
> Darling, or Beloved) and Slothrop's mother's name is Nalline, a
> somewhat sound-alike to Darlene.  Except Nalline is a morphine-like
> compound.  There seems to be a lot of health and death talk among
> them, and we are reminded from the start (as they each shed a tear at
> realizing they have survived to have yet another tryst), that death is
> everywhere around.
>   After Slothrop's confectionery-torture at the hands of the
> mischievous Mrs. Quoad, "His head floats in a halo of (menthol) ice."
> And, "Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in
> the air."  At the metaphorical level, Slothrop (as we've known him)
> has died, killed by candies resembling weapons, emitting "poison and
> debilitating gases found in training manuals."  Slothrop's
> disintegration begins from this point.  It is now he begins his haloed
> and ghostly ascent to heaven.
>   The disintegration of the hero is a characteristic of one of the
> types of dramas set out in Northrop Frye's discussion of various
> genres, the Menippean Satire as you might have suspected.  So there
> are many threads combining in this section, itself being quite as
> dense as any similar section in the novel.  Pynchon alludes to the
> German "War Against The Jews," to Norman O. Brown, and Northrop Frye,
> as well as the Holocaust rememberers, without ever saying, "Slothrop
> dies now, and is resurrected, and begins on his Norman O. Brown path,
> in the genre-style suggested by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of
> Criticism."  Anyway, that's what seems to be going on.
>   And just for the hell of it, he has Mrs. Quoad (or some other
> sinister figure) peeking through a window (or glass door) at Slothrop
> and Darlene, while they are making love.  Slothrop spots this Peeping
> Tom and can't quite make up his mind if it is a little-old-lady
> voyeur, or an intelligence type operative who is assigned to keep him
> under surveillance.  If he can't make up his mind, is this a variation
> on Oedipa's never knowing if she knew or knew not?  Which leaves us to
> wonder if we got it, or not, whatever it was.
>   And the section ends as a rocket falls, which sexually arouses
> Slothrop, and the two lovers make the best of a bad situation and go
> at each other again....