48-54 The Problem of the Pavlovian Penis

[Joseph Tracy]

       Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out . . . a few feet of film run backwards . . . the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning . . . a ghost in the sky. . . .
        Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission. . . . But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize, shock, castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past “equivalent” and “paradoxical” phases—you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave . . . who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference, and, “I think,” Pavlov writing to Janet, “it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients.” Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecile—

Excerpt From: Thomas Pynchon. “Gravity's Rainbow.” 

The passage above appears( pg 49) without quotes, in separate paragraphs and without indicating it as the thought of either character. It appears as one of our authorial comments. Both paragraphs are different but both are about the confusion of stimulus and response. In Pavlov’s mind this confusion among patients is seen as the cause of madness. These 2 paragraphs are a justification of the way P is telling the story with Pointsman as a central character.  Together the 2 paragraphs also seem to pose a question about MAD( mutually assured destruction) as to whether MAD confuses the cure with the cause, and whether it acts as a ghost in the sky,  the manager of a hospital slated for destruction, a spectre circulating among the traumatized patients with a little rocket shaped injection to treat the pain, put the foxes to sleep. 

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