48-54 The Problem of the Pavlovian Penis

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Great summary, Joseph. It's an oddly explicit section - actually depicting the kind of evil conspiring ( though rebuffed, here, by Spectro) that I said in a previous post isn't something Pynchon depicts on a larger scale (I.e. the military-industrial level).

There it is, again -- that word "depict," being hashed out in the Politics vs Art thread. Is it possible to read this section and not think of Mengele? Much more chilling than a scene depicting Mengele himself ( though a grueling and horrific scene that would be). Mengele alone implies: to destroy this horror, destroy the Nazis ( which we did, though Mengele got away scot free). To depict "our side's" Pointsman is to say: wherever there's power, there's a Mengele with twisted fantasies of control and torture of the innocent.

On a separate note, Pointsman's bus station fantasies call to mind the nightmarish opening train station sequence - this time from the point of view of the would-be oppressor.

Laura

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID

Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>I just had a birthday and a bunch of other stuff including an all day music jam and forgot I was up for a section( 48-54), so aplologies for my late arrival . 
>This is a key chapter which focuses in on the bizarre hingepoint of the GR plot line. Below is my summary. I will try to catch up wth other thoughts , but please feel free to jump in as you will, p-listers.
>
> To St. Veronica's hospital where Pointsman and Spectro (also a Pavlovian scientist) discuss Pointsman’s desire to have access to experiment with Slothrop as subject and we find with full clarity that Slothrop is somehow predicting the location and time of the fall of the rockets with his map of erections. Spectro says it can't be experimentally justified because there is just one subject. They wonder how Slothrop's predictive ability works, comparing phenoma of erection then rocket strike to  the arrival of a rocket first,  and then the rocket sound. We find Slothrop was also patient/ experimental subject of Laszlo Jamf. Pointsman wants same access to human subjects, reflecting Nazi medical experiments and known western experiments.
>The "hospital' takes in children, apparently survivors of bomb blasts etc. Some odd "therapy" is hinted at, possibly shock therapy. It is said that a thousand children are about to leave. Alive? To go where?)
>
>note:
> St. Veronica is a Catholic legend of a woman who offers Jesus a cloth to wipe his face on the way to calvary and the cloth bears the image( Ver I can = true image in Latin) of his face. This may be related to shroud of Turin but very sketchy what the source is. The idea though is an image showing the utmost in suffering and abuse born in the face of Jesus. It is interesting that Jesus face is traditionally almost hermaphroditic apart from the beard so both the feminine and masculine are conveyed.  In the novel St Veronica's carries a dominant sense of misery, sounds of wailing reminiscent of the screaming at start of novel- science in the service of scrying bones.-
>Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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