Going Down the Tubes

[Dave Monroe]

"Going Down the Tubes: Thomas Pynchon's Narrative Digressions into the
Realm of Sewage"

Kara Manning


Abstract: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is littered with scenes
of toiletry and figures of excrement.  While critics of GR focus on
the role of obscene language, few have explored his narrative
digressions into bodily waste, which reveal practices of excretion as
the key to understanding the violence of contemporary subjects. Moving
past eco-critics who outline the impact of sewage, Pynchon
investigates why we destroy the world with waste by allowing readers
to sink into the national effluent and to focus on that which we deny
in narratives of identity.  Thus, Tyrone Slothrop's journey down the
toilet of the Roseland Ballroom is not merely a comic adventure that
displays a complicit critique of wasting but also calls us to learn
about our subjectivity in light of the abject.  A student of Freudian
theory, Pynchon reveals that our violence lies in our obsession with
separating ourselves from the "organic," "natural" world.  Secondly,
he shows how we reiterate difference in a fecal and urinary bombing of
the environment, by saturating the "natural" world with our excreta.
Thirdly, fearing the power of the world united with excess to disrupt
a narrative of civilization's difference from "organic" matter, we
engineer order.  Pynchon also connects scenes of toiletry to the
construction of racial difference; an association with the excess of
whiteness creates multiple Others.  In order to alter this violent
process, Pynchon encourages us to plumb our sewage systems and to
explore our bodily digressions in order to find "freedom in the wastes
of the World" (588).


Thomas Pynchon's novels are littered with the multiple wastes of our
national body: crumpled paper and cardboard littering the streets, the
dead and dying who no longer work but haunt national healthcare
debates or discourses of war, homeless communities who live off the
leftovers of our major cities, and even human excrement. With the
W.A.S.T.E. system of The Crying of Lot 49, the mined and "wasted"
"natural" world of Vineland, and the numerous scenes of toiletry in
Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon refuses to ignore the abject and instead
invites us to dip into the stink of the western civilization's excess.
 These narrative digressions into detritus move past eco-critical
outlines of the violent impact of waste on our environment in order to
explore the subjectivity of contemporary execretors.  In short,
Pynchon asks why we are destroying the world with our waste.

As the title of this paper suggests, today I will follow the infamous
Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity's Rainbow as he goes down the toilet of the
Roseland Ballroom.  His journey into our underworld is not merely a
comic adventure that displays a complicit critique of wasting but also
calls us to learn about our subjectivity in light of the abject.  A
student of Freudian theory, Pynchon reveals that our violence lies in
our obsession with separating ourselves from the "organic," "natural"
world.  Secondly, he shows how we reiterate difference in a fecal and
urinary bombing of the environment, by saturating the "natural" world
with our excreta.  Thirdly, fearing the power of the world united with
excess to disrupt a narrative of civilization's difference from
"organic" matter, we engineer order.  Further, Pynchon uses the
metaphor of our sewage systems in order to outline the construction of
racial difference; an association with the excess of whiteness creates
multiple Others.  In order to alter this violent process, Pynchon
encourages us to plumb our sewage systems and to explore our bodily
digressions in order to find "freedom in the wastes of the World"
(588).  Finally, he encourages the reader to embrace the decomposition
of the self and to come up with ways of excreting that are not
violent, but instead allow the self to unite with "the flux of
excrement."  For Pynchon, both our attack on the environment and our
persistent delineation of racial difference stem from a "civilized"
subjectivity that seeks to bury excess in the bodies of Others.

In a scene preceding Slothrop's journey down a toilet in the Roseland
Ballroom, Pynchon explores the violent practices of erecting white
identity over and against the bodies of both Native Americans and
African Americans and later associates the construction of whiteness
with systems of sewage that push excess to the margins.  When the
government puts him under light narcosis, Slothrop travels to the
Ballroom and sees "white college boys" enjoying swing music birthed
from African American clubs and translated for the consumption of
Harvard students: he witnesses the production of whiteness as a
repetitive dance on top of the bodies of racial others.  British born
Ray Noble's "Cherokee" "comes wailing up from the dance floor below,
over the hi-hat, the string bass, the thousand sets of feet where
moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their dates, but
a lotta dolled-up redskins.  The song playing is one more lie about
white crimes" (63).  As Steven Weisenburger notes, Noble's song
praises a "sweet Indian maiden," imagines her "love [that] keeps
calling," and expresses a desire to "hold her" (54).  Yet, beneath
this melody of "love" is the history of Cherokee maidens marching
toward death or to a "wasteland" "reserved" for their occupation.
There is no "trail of tears" in Noble's hit, but only an erection
pointing through each verse at a body defined by its constant desire
for penetration.  From Slothrop's position as voyeur, he strays from
the narrative melody of conquest in order to uncover "a lie about
white crimes."  He begins to listen to the underside of the lyrical
identity and to hear the groans of the bodies excreted in a cleansed
narrative of history.[i]

As Slothrop begins to hear the underside of the white history in
relationship to the Cherokee body, he also comes to a deeper
understanding of the racial dynamics of service and pleasure in the
Ballroom.  The dancers who "reel" and "roister" to the cleansed
nationalist rhythm also enjoy the pleasure of "two bartenders, a very
fair West Indian, slight, with a mustache, and his running-mate black
as a hand in an evening glove, [who] are moving endlessly in front of
the deep, the oceanic mirror that swallows most of the room in metal
shadows" (62).  Further, men tired from the dance, can visit the
upstairs bathroom where "Red" (a young Malcolm X) will shine their
shoes and sell them condoms.  While their "prep-school voices" resound
and their feet spin, the dancers are surrounded by African American
bodies flushed from the dance floor and into spaces of service:
bathrooms and kitchens.  Those who bear the marking of "white shit"
are segregated from the space of enjoyment, yet may return to pleasure
the white body in the reassertion of difference.

If Slothrop enjoyed evenings at the Roseland Ballroom with Harvard
chums before the war, he no longer experiences pleasure as he slips
beneath the melody of whiteness and begins to see the excessive bodies
on which "the lie" of difference is built.  His own racial identity,
once confirmed in dance with friends, starts to fade; "Slothrop can't
even see his own white face.  A woman turns to look at him from a
table.  Her eyes tell him, in an instant, what he is" (62).  Tyrone
Slothrop is a white man, a voyeur or spy, sent to witness the pleasure
of white subjects in a mad gyration to a cleansed early jazz music
devoid of political critique and therefore ripe for consumption.
Still, he is also a sinking white subject who feels "the mouth harp in
his pocket [revert] to brass inertia.  A weight.  A jive accessory"
(62-63).  The instrument, which inspires the identifying song of self,
becomes strange and heavy once he hears the sounds beneath the
narrative melody. Further, Slothrop, from his doorway position, comes
to see the ballroom from the position of a young Malcolm X, as he,
too, stood in awe of the racial dynamics of the Roseland.  Standing
with "Red" in the doorway, he can't "enjoy" the scene, but instead
experiences nausea; "upstairs in the men's room at the Roseland
Ballroom he swoons kneeling over a toilet bowl, vomiting beer,
hamburgers, homefries, chef's salad with French dressing, half a
bottle of Moxie, [and] after dinner mints" (63). The food served by
African American laborers can no longer sit in peace in Slothrop's
intestinal tract.  Along with his lunch, Slothrop loses his instrument
of song to

the loathsome toilet!  Immediate little bubbles slide up its bright
flanks, up brown wood surfaces, some varnished some lip-worn, these
fine silver seeds stripping loose along the harp's descent toward
stone-white cervix and into lower night . . . the low reeds singing an
instant on striking porcelain . . . then quenched in the water
streaked with the last bile-brown coils of his vomit.  There's no
calling it back.  Either he lets the harp go, his silver chances of
song, or he has to follow. (63)

The loss of the harp represents a letting go of white songs of
identity and an embracing of the excremental aria that turns harmony
into cacophony.[ii] Looking into the toilet and "following" his harp.
Slothrop hears an explosion of "Cherokee:"

all those long, long notes . . . what're they up to, all that time to
do something inside of?  is it an Indian spirit plot?  Down in New
York . . . "Yardbird" Parker is find out how he can use the notes at
the higher ends of these very chords to break up the melody into have
mercy what is it a fucking machine gun . . . shit, out in all kinds of
streets . . . his bird's singing, to gainsay that Man's lullabies. . .
So, that prophecy, even up here on rainy Massachusetts Avenue, is
beginning these days to work itself out in "Cherokee," the saxes
downstairs getting now into some, oh really weird shit. (63-64)

Musicians, like Charlie Parker, enter into the harmonic, sing-song
tunes that fuel the dance of whiteness in order to blast the song into
chaos and to allow the voices of the dead as well as those removed to
the margins to reveal those who are excreted from the drone of
history.  Beginning with a tune familiar to audiences, the sax players
move away from the comforting lullaby in order to create "weird shit"
or to allow the excess of the lyrical subject to seep and to scream
through in a "dum-de dumming" called scat (63).[iii]  If the white
dancers swing in time with "Cherokee," there is also the possibility
that they might experience pleasure in the wild saxophones and further
become entranced with dancing in time with the speaking "shit" of
history.  They might bend over to become "all asshole" (as does
Slothrop) and to find pleasure in ruptured melodies that penetrate the
body, that make the self move and dance differently in a type of
ego-shattering (64).

Although Slothrop fears and attempts to avoid the movement of a song
of self into chaos, he has also experienced pleasure in the song
exploded.  He decides to follow his harp down the toilet "for the sake
of tunes to be played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to be
bent from the official frequencies" (65-66).  He longs to create a
melody of excremental whiteness; he yearns for a music birthed from
the underground and spewing forth from bathroom stalls.  Still, the
aural penetration and inspiration of the body by a Charlie Parker is
one thing, while the anal penetration of the body by Malcolm X is
quite another; "If Slothrop follows the harp down the toilet it'll
have to be headfirst, which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up
in the air helpless, and with Negroes around that's just what a fella
doesn't want, his face down in some fetid unknown darkness and brown
fingers, strong and sure, all at once undoing his belt, unbuttoning
his fly, strong hands holding his legs apart" (64).  This quotation
can be read as a paranoid fear of the power of the black phallus to
disrupt narrative of white power.  Indeed, Slothrop flees from "a
thick finger with a gob of very slippery jelly or cream [that] comes
sliding down the crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs
along like topo lines up a river valley" (64).  Even in his escape
down the toilet, Slothrop continues to differentiate between white
shit and "Negro" shit, until "there comes a godawful surge from up the
line, noise growing like a tidal wave, a jam-packed wavefront of shit,
vomit, toilet paper and dingleberries in a mind-boggling mosaic" (66).
 Here, all excrement becomes one in a wave that knocks Slothrop from
his ability to recognize difference.  The "cylinder of waste has wiped
him out, dark as cold beef gelatin along his upper backbone, the paper
snapping up, wrapping across his lips, his nostrils, everything gone
and shit-stinking now as he has to keep beating micro-turds out of his
eyelashes" (66).  Unlike his abandonment of self to the rupturing
sounds of early jazz music, Slothrop cannot entirely let go to this
experience of "weird shit."  Resting after the wave has rushed him
toward a city in the bowels of the earth, he feels a "Negro
dingleberry—stubborn as a wintertime booger as he probes for it.  His
fingernails draw blood" (67).  After the wiping away of self in an
excremental tide, Slothrop returns to a corporeal wholeness by
violently dragging the organic matter of the racially marked other
from his body.  So adamant is he that he worries not for the damage to
his own body as he desperately separates himself from excrement.

Yet, he does see that those who dwell in the city's sewage system
refuse this type of violent removal of excrement from the body and
instead enjoy the push and flow of excrement; they thrive in that
which others pick out from their bodies like Slothrop's now bloodied
"Negro" turd.  Slothrop "stands outside their communal rooms and
spaces . . . .  He can only feel his isolation.  They want him inside
there but he can't join them.  Something prevents him: once inside, it
would be like taking a blood oath.  They would never release him.
There are no guarantees he might not be asked to do something . . .
something so . . ." (67).  He is isolated from this community because
he feels compelled to separate himself from the organic flow of the
world.  Slothrop knows that joining the community would require giving
up his coherent identity for "something so" much like the confusion of
self found in the pleasure of jazz music, "something so" abhorrent and
yet so potentially pleasurable as uniting the self with the lubed
penis of Malcolm X, something so horrific and yet desirable as
becoming the Freudian child pierced again and again by the pleasures
of worldly stimulus traveling into his mouth, nose, and anus.

Perhaps because Slothrop won't abandon his ego-identity in order to
join this community, he is given a vision of the old West that
reconfirms his initial insights into the racial dynamics of the
Ballroom and that reveal the "traditional American tune" of the
violent erection of national identity.  Moving past the communal
spaces where bodies shift and sway with the flow of sewage, Slothrop
discovers Crouchfield, the "White Cocksman" who does "it with both
sexes and all animals" (69).  Crouchfield's song is Noble's
"Cherokee" in that he erects his identity through the splayed and open
body of racially marked others and through animal bodies associated
with a wild, unruly environment.  Still, this vision of Crouchfield
does not indulge in lyrics of love but instead shows "a shootout . . .
bloody as hell.  The wind will be blowing so hard blood will glaze on
the north side of the trees" (69).  Thus, the eroticism of Noble's
song is revealed in an erection that like a gun asks for the other to
behave and then eliminates the body that won't submit.

This experience of the old West takes place in the Red River Valley
and thus brings the reader back to the moment in which Malcolm X makes
Slothrop crack into a river valley: the moment in which "Red" claims
Slothrop's body.  Like the imagined music of Charlie Parker that leads
the white listener into pleasurable rupture of standard melody of
self, Malcolm X's body makes Slothrop into a valley in which he might
experience the story of a movement westward through a different lens.
"In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his
face, each of the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the
connection he's traveled all this way to see" (71).  This, then, is
Malcolm X's gift to Slothrop: the ability to see a "home on the range"
as violent erection of whiteness through a subduing, removal and
murder of a Native American other.  Further, Slothrop comes to
understand race as a "scar" created in a battle of differentiation.
Malcolm's sweet thrust sings to him, moves him, and leaves him
wondering about the pleasures in letting go of his erection and
letting the voices and bodies of others emerge from the toilet and
rush into him.[iv]

This is, of course, how our encounter with Slothrop ends; he abandons
the self to the world in an excremental scattering. Reflecting on the
earlier scene in the Roseland Ballroom, our narrator imagines a place
where there is no difference between "Shit and Shinola," no way to
distinguish bodies that are allowed the privilege of excretion and
bodies that must labor in "shining" the shoes of excretors.

Well there's one place where Shit and Shinola come together, and
that's in the men's toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place
Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet . . . .  Shit is
the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe
but the stiff rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's warm and
private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate.  That's what
the white toilet's for.  You see many brown toilets?  Nope, toilet's
the color of gravestones, classical columns or mausoleums, that white
porcelain's the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death.  Shinola
shoeshine polish happens to be the color of Shit.  Shoeshine boy
Malcolm's in the toilet slappin' on Shinola, working off whiteman's
penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit and Shinola. (688)

Here, Pynchon shows how the white subject makes a coherent self
through the flushing of "organic" excess, in the burying of "shit" in
a tomb.  Further, Malcolm is the "turd" who must be confined to labor
for his "sin" of wearing the stain of excess.  Still, Pynchon imagines
Malcolm's labor as returning excrement to the white subject:

It is nice to think that one Saturday night . . . Malcolm looked up
from some Harvard kid's shoes and caught the eye of Jack Kennedy . . .
.   Did Red suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just
enough to let white Jack see through, not through to but through
through the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop's shoes?   Were
they ever lined up that way—sitting, squatting, passing through? (688)

What if the white subject didn't see "through to" erect his difference
in the shine on his shoes, to recognize self in opposition to a shiny
blackness?  Without seeing his face reflected out to him, he might
relinquish his hold on identity and become the excrement the he so
adamantly wishes to push to the margins and bury.  Tyrone and Jack
might focus on the parts of themselves lost to the toilet grave; they
might follow themselves down the drain and into the grave of identity.
 They might revel in anal play with Malcolm, all three men pushing
into the bodies of each other and avoiding the violence of
narcissistic reflection.[v]

If Slothrop's scattering involves "passing through" the toilet grave
and opening up for others to pleasure one site of his decomposition,
it also requires a reunion with the "natural" world.  "He likes to
spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies
lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain, getting
to know shrikes and capercaillie, badgers and marmots" (623).  No
longer able to distinguish the self from a racially marked other,
Slothrop refuses to wear garments as armor against potential invaders.
 His body becomes a picnic for ants and butterflies; he claims furry
mammals as his closest acquaintances.  Without acting as hunter,
without a personal pesticide, he gives up the fight with the "organic"
and finds pleasure in the porousness of his body open now to worldly
stimulus.[vi]  This penetrated subject who revels in the body as hole
and enjoys the multiple ways in which the world might pass through him
is Pynchon's ethical excremental subject.

Slothrop stands in opposition to the White Cocksman Crouchfield or the
military machine of the U.S. in its approach on Hiroshima, which is
also explored in the novel. Throughout the narrative, he cannot
sustain the erection of identity through a wasting of the body of an
enemy; instead, Slothrop finds unexpected arousal on the sites where
cohesive identity is challenged or where he encounters "droppings of
the Beast."  In the bathroom of the Roseland Ballroom or even in his
early encounters with the devastation of the German bombs in London,
Slothrop experiences desire at the revelation of the Other's phallic
turd; he sees the "sky, beaten like Death's drum, still humming, and
[his] cock—say what? Yes lookit inside his GI undershorts here's a
sneaky hardon stirring, ready to jump—well great God where'd that come
from?" (26) This unlikely erection is what makes Slothrop horrific for
other military personnel as Ned Pointsman notes, "There can be no
doubt that he [Slothrop] is, physiologically, historically, a monster"
(144).   For if more were to desire a closeness to the excremental
body that is the Other, war might cease to exist; instead, adult male
subjects would pass through each other without harm in an effort to
share an original pleasure in scattering and being filled. Pynchon
asks through this depiction of Slothrop, what if the subject refused
to let go of its excess and began to experience pleasure in his
connection with waste?  In an enjoyment of floating in the wastes of
the world, Pynchon suggests we might "be restored to the Earth" and
"find freedom" (588). Through a joining with excess and recognizing
the self's perpetual decomposition, we are free from the battle of
differentiation, the battle that requires the renunciation of
pleasurable penetration by multiple worldly others.  We are free to
live decomposed.[vii]





[i]See Kyle Smith "'Serving Interests Invisible': Mason & Dixon,
British Spy Fiction, and the Specters of Imperialism."  He argues,
"Gravity's Rainbow utilizes the spy genre's uncertainties to reveal
the imperial Self as the true enemy, and to show how the imperial Self
constructs various Others using its own fears and fantasies. The enemy
in GR might be termed variously the Raketenstaadt, the West, corporate
America, the imperial Self, or the State.  The encompassing, and yet
most specific term to describe this is Whiteness" (187).  I concur
with Smith's assessment and stretch this argument past "fears and
fantasies" to the process whereby white excrement comes to stain the
body of the Other.  Still, for Smith, Pynchon does not offer any
alternatives to this imperial movement of Whiteness.  Instead, "in GR
one of the strategies to oppose whiteness is to make it visible both
by bringing attention to the way it structures reality and making
visible the Others it ignores" (191).  I counter this claim by
asserting that the construction of whiteness does not "ignore" the
bodies of the Others, but constantly concerns itself with "wasting"
the Other.  Smith concludes that "the use of strategies of the spy
novel in Pynchon's texts convey attention to the crisis of
representation . . . they do nothing to represent the invisible any
further than to show how Whiteness tries to prevent forces from
existing it cannot control" (195).  I insist that Pynchon does offer
the reader an alternative ethical position: refusal to waste the body
of another through violent excretion and instead a focus on making the
self unite with its waste.

[ii] See Christopher Ames "Power and the Obscene Word; Discourses of
Extremity in Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow'" (Contemporary
literature, volume 31, No.2 (Summer, 1990, 191-207).  He writes, "Any
reader of Gravity's Rainbow must notice how dramatically Pynchon
dichotomizes the world of his novel—from the capitalized collective
nouns of "They" and "Us," "Elect and "Preterite," "Force and
"Counterforce" to the subtler oppositions between zero and one, war
and peace, and technology and waste.  The axis that divides humanity
in Pynchon's novel is power.  No other category so clearly grasps the
essential division, the true war, that separates the antithetical
parties.  The equation epitomizes the dynamics of the privileged
discourse of power; the language of the powerless takes the shape of
obscene statements of profanations" (193).

[iii] See Ames, C.  " . . . the essential force of scatology and
obscenity—the exposing of what should be hidden, the voicing of what
should be silent, and the association of those forces of the
oppressed.  Obscenity's capacity for shock, deface, or disgust grants
its meaning as transgression.  Obscene grafitti, which appears in
several contexts in Gravity's Rainbow, foregrounds several of the ways
in which obscenity represents the language of the Preterite . . . .
Yet by its very nature it defaces, communicates through an illicit
medium.  It is characteristic of the social margins that expression
comes to be conceived of as the defacing of existing structures"
(199).  While Ames sees the power of obscenity to "deface existing
structures," I argue that Pynchon's ultimate goal is not inversion; he
does not look for a language that will perpetuate a system of violent
excretion whereby those who enjoy association with whiteness might be
eliminated.  If his focus is not inversion (or transgression), he
presents a character who desires a closeness with his own excrement,
not for the sake of revolt, but because he finds something so
pleasurable in that contact that he is driven to become one with his
waste.

[iv] See Stefan Mattessich.  Lines of Flight:  Discursive Time and
Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon.  Slothrop may be
Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal subject who is "no longer a
centered subject structure in a rationalized world but a field of
force, experiencing its own self-identity as a spatial coextension
with an intrinsically hallucinatory 'outside.'  It does not lack the
objects of its desire because those objects fall within the field it
also is by virtue of it inclusive unity, which is why the positivity
of that desire manifests itself in terms of 'desiring–production,' a
production of production itself according to the 'law' of an identity
between production and product." (137)  I agree with Mattessich that
Pynchon is critiquing a masochism: "Ths masochism of this passage is
nearer to its standards form than its 'visionary reconfiguration' (by
Deleuze) and designates quite distinctly an axiomated condition of
being: caught in the identificatory meshes of a familiarized desire,
impersonating power and the law in a mode of a perpetual insufficiency
(attempting to kill the father who never dies because desire is
usurpative in nature), addicted to a commodified exchange that
promises 'comfort' and delivers the docile subject, the masochist here
represents the (male) type of social repression.  He is oppressed by
the difference between his desire (fantasy consumption and
consummation) and his own production (by men of power who 'define' him
as self-alienated)" (153-154).  Pynchon writes (I think) against
masochism as this subject longs for punishment by the law and a
continued differentiation between self and the master/father.
Instead, he formulates an ethical subject who becomes waste, not as a
type of punishment, but in a worldly embrace, an overwhelming organic
orgasm described by Bersani as "ego-shattering."  I think I am in
agreement with Mattessich and the difference between our arguments
lies in focus.  "The process of de-voiltion that can be traced most
clearly in the destiny reserved for Tyrone Slothrop could be said to
mirror the text's own de-voilition, the movement of its
deteritorializaion that verges on breakdown, silence, even a kind of
autism" (157).  While he outlines the ways in which the text
dissolves, I look at the body that falls apart and becomes waste.

[v]John F. Kennedy is important to Pynchon here because of his
participation in WWII in the Pacific theatre.  As the novel ends with
the bombing of Hiroshima, Kennedy becomes the connection between the
old west and the bombing of the Japanese.



[vi] See Madeline Ostrander, "Awakening to the Physical World;
ideological Collapse and Ecofeminist Resistance in Vineland."  She
writes, "The novel problematizes all ideologies based on binary
thought.  Instead, it points to a reclaiming of the material, the
natural, and the bodily as a form of resistance.  In its attempt to
integrate the rational and spiritual with the natural, Vineland's
narrative resembles an ecofeminist reconstruction of experience.  It,
like ecofeminist thought, points toward the equal and mutual roles of
nature, the body, the material, and the feminine with the spiritual
and rational in forming human experience" (122).  It would be fruitful
to explore the connections between Pynchon's multiple wastes found
throughout his oevre: The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Mason & Dixon,
etc.

[vii] On Slothrop's final scattering "As some secrets were given to
the Gypsies to preserve against centrifugal History, and some to the
Kabbalists, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, so have this Secret of the
Fearful Assembly and others found their ways inside the weatherless
spaces of this or that Ethnic Joke.  There is also the story of Tyrone
Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own
assembly—perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's
assembly—and there out to be a punch line to it, but there isn't.  The
plan went wrong.  He is being broken down instead, and scattered"
(738).  " 'Dying a weird death,' Slothrop's Visitor by this time may
be scrawled lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some
human being out on the road, 'the object of life is to make sure you
dies a weird death.  To make sure that however it finds you, it will
find you under very weird circumstances.  To live that kind of life. .
. ." (742)

"Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent
personae of their own.  If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's
present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering."
(742)

"Listening to the Toilet"—This section begins right after Slothrop's
vision of the bomb moving towards Hiroshima.  The bomb's impact is
compared to a shutting off of the other's toilet and "hosing the place
out."  War is revealed to be a process of eliminating the Other's
capacity to waste or to disallow the movement of waste out from the
Other.  This discussion of the toilet is littered with the
interjections of Japanese as the bomb moves in to take their lives.