Reading

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Another Slothrop-Gottfried connection:  p.469-470, where Slothrop finds himself inside his own cock:  "He is enclosed.  Everything is about to come, come incredibly, and he's helpless here in this exploding enterprise... red flesh echoing... an extraordinary sense of waiting to rise..."

This could easily be a description of Gottfried in the rocket.  It happens when Slothrop's having sex with Bianca, and there's a tie-in between the three as abused children, and all children whose futures are compromised by The Bomb.  

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: János Székely <miksaapja at gmail.com>

>
>Having just re-read GR for word-by-word (not for the second time) something
>struck me. I don't know if anybody has noticed or written about the
>following.
>
>Close to the geometrical center of the book there is a well-hidden,
>comically-camouflaged passage about the USS Badass missing the hijacked
>U-Boot. The two courses intersect in space but not in time* because* Bodine
>has laced the coffee in the Badass mess with "a massive dose of Oneirine".So
>the psychotropic effect of Jamf's drug turns into physical reality in some
>unexplained way.
>Now both Imipolex G (a polyimide) and Oneirine (an indole) are Jamf's
>inventions, both are aromatic heterocyclic compounds and their monomers are
>rather similar. Even the smell can be the same. The combined presence of
>Imipolex G (responsible for sexual arousal) and Oneirine (responsible for
>the time-modulating, delusion-turned-into-reality effect) could account for
>both Slothrop's map and the closing two subchapters, where, if we stick to
>narrative continuity, the same rocket which was launched with Gottfried
>inside in 1945 returns sometime in the Nixon era. (There is an explicit
>parallel between Slothrop and Gottfried as the latter "knows" the smell of
>Imipolex. "It was in a room when he fell asleep so loing ago, so deep in
>sweet paralyzed childhood," suggesting he was also conditioned in a way by
>Jamf. Slothrop also recognizes the smell. But that might be also the smell
>of Oneirine.)
>This is not an explanation, just a "closing in on", not forgetting that the
>description if the  "Oneirine haunt" can be easily applied to Pynchonic
>fiction itself etc., starting new cycles of interpretation.
>
>János