leaving chapter 4 but not sex and death

[Joseph Tracy]

A bit of self indugence here, because I was hoping for more response to the death/sex theme since I am sure others have more thoughts on this.  So I am reposting the 'notes' part of my Chapter Summary with some revisions to my first attempt at the topic.

   Notes:    The chapter makes a powerful connection between sex,( the hunger for life and continuity and physical comfort/ pleasure/ecstasy) and death.( If evolution has a progressive quality towards self awarness and memory, death is essential to that process, just as sex is. In death the individual life is necessarily lost for the strength and survivability of the species, in sex the individual freedom is lost for a kind of continuance of the family). We see that  Slothrop's sexual appetite is aggravated by death’s inevitability.  Throughout the novel I find something more complicated and paradoxical than an opposition of life force and death. TS’s ancestors' gravestones' take on a  comic tone even as his sense of dread and inevitable judgement grows .  The use of Emiy Dickinsons weird death comedies reinforce this paradox.I live in Vermont but was born and lived many years on the west coast. Here, one is likely to find small abandoned cemeteries on any long traipse through the woods. The varied tone of the gravestones is very accurate for New England.

There is an opposition between Slothrop’s boldness with sex and the the reticence of the English characters so far. This makes sense in historical context. The Yanks had the advantage of not expecting to remain in the area, of fresh energy from a newer culture, and in GR  Slothrop is not bound by secret allegiances and fears of compromise. He is surprised by Tantivy’s shyness.  

TS's background  makes a family connection between shit, money, and The Word which is to continue as a theme with definite parallels to the sex, death, organic chemistry, Pavlovian conditioning themes.

The image of chuch spires as rockets is potent. It seems to contain the idea of launching the individual toward immortality through a phalllic form of carefully guided worship. The notion is deeply patriarchal and  in the chapter sits at odds with Slothrop’s uncontrolled imagination of English women. For Slothrop the women are like a different universe with different stars, who offer both a freedom to fall from expectations of controlled behavior and a way of experiencing the world that is life affirming, ecstatic, pleasurable, though probably ultimately irresponsible too and impossible as a lifestyle.        In the church spires and rockets   and their implicaton of approved and guided erections and directed flight, the guidance system, the control mechanism becomes critical to this mindset. The ultimate objective is to defy gravity completely, the idea being to escape this world of death and organic chemistry, to evade slippage, collapse, falling, death, returning to zero. There is the sense here that Slothrop isn’t sure he is buying any version of this dream; Everywhere he looks, all around him he is seeng that  what went up is coming down with a vengeance. 


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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l