BtZ42 Scene 10. Down the toilet.

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu May 19 06:06:39 CDT 2016


   1.  "Use of sodium amytal during WWII"
   <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bulge/filmmore/pt.html>. *Battle of the
   Bulge - program transcript*. PBS. Ben Kimmelman, Captain, 28th Infantry:
   The assumptions were that this would have some kind of cathartic effect,
   the sodium amytal, which the men called *blue 88's.* You know, the most
   effective artillery piece of the Germans was the 88 and this was *blue
   88s*, because the sodium amytal was a blue tablet.

Once again, we have an example of possible memory wipe-out, possible wiping
of the mental slate clean, it is said about this drug. Pointsman goes all
the way all the time.

That verbal vaudeville from the narrator? a Marx Bros-like scene in brief
and linguistically. Like a frame for the whole chapter despite its
continued exploitive horror? And this " he gave us in fiery letters across
the sky all the words we'd ever need, words we today enjoy, and fill
our dictionaries with" We get the allusion but the satiric sarcasm of the
second half?..'enjoy'
and "fill our dictionaries with"....P extending this allusive observation
to his theme of war words that displace our real life?
Without this war, our dictionaries would be very different, without being
full of our world-wide state of siege words?

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 6:16 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Although Pointsman was unable to convince Dr. Spectro that experimenting
> on ONE human subject would yield statistically significant results, somehow
> he's gotten his way. Spectro has been using sodium amytal therapeutically
> to help traumatized soldiers recall and speak freely about the traumatic
> event that catapulted them into catatonia or whatever psych malady they're
> suffering from, as happened in britain during WWII.
>
> http://io9.gizmodo.com/5902559/what-truths-does-truth-serum-actually-reveal
>
> "Psychiatrists during the World Wars saw some soldiers with acute shell
> shock who either had great difficulty speaking or were unable to speak at
> all. Earlier barbiturates *were* used during therapy, but since it did
> not completely incapacitate a patient as much as they did, sodium pentothal
> was an ideal drug to be used in programs as an anti-anxiety drug which
> allowed the soldiers to speak and to eventually recover from their
> experience - provided addiction was kept at bay and their psychiatrist was
> conscientious. These programs, during which the drug was injected and the
> scientist asked questions, were surprisingly progressive, in that the drugs
> wore off and allowed the soldier to go back out into the community, instead
> of taking long stays in a psychiatric facility. The idea was to remove
> inhibitions, including fear of reprisal, and let the soldier talk, then let
> him recover and go back out, fully integrated into the community."
>
> Slothrop is summoned to the Abreactions Clinic of St. Veronica's and
> treated (subjected to) truth serum treatment - by Pointsman or Spectro? Not
> clear.
>
> They, or rather, THEY -  apparently know something of the work of Dr.
> Laszlo Jamf (as comes up in the next section). Is the goal to take him back
> to his babyhood, when Jamf experimented upon him with Imipolex?  Pointsman
> is still trying to scry the cause-effect relationship between Slothrop's
> erections and the V-2 rockets. As we come into the episode, Slothrop is
> already in some sort of induced, dreamlike state, in which he ruminates on
> variations of the Kenosha Kid. Not clear why he's asleep, but …."the doctor
> leans in out of the white overhead to wake him and begin the session." At
> this point he's injected with sodium amytal (or is it an additional
> injection?).
>
> The point of the injections is to get Slothrop to answer whatever
> questions are posed to him uninhibitedly.He's first asked about to continue
> talking about something that came up in the last session - so there've been
> multiple times - revisiting a memory about finding himself alone in a
> bathroom with a Negro, and all the white-boy paranoia racing up to the
> surface. But Slothrop doesn't seem to be talking here; he's turned inward.
>
> Falling down the white ceramic toilet is safer than facing the menace
> lurking in "the white overhead."
>
> Slothrop travels back to the past - not his babyhood, which is probably
> what Pointsman wants - but maybe to the genocidal past of America, ushered
> in by the song "Cherokee" - "one more lie about white crimes." He
> encounters the White Cocksman, Crouchfield, and his Afro-Scandinavian pal
> Whappo. Surely a prescience of Weissman and Enzian, whom we haven't met
> yet. Crouchfield does it with both sexes (check!) and dreams of doing it
> with a rattlesnake (which seems like another prescient vision of Kerkule's
> snake dream - snake with its own tail in its mouth - which inspired his
> understanding of the structure of the benzene ring. Whappo wearing
> bandannas brightly dyed with benzene-synthetic colors.
>
> So, in effect, Pointsman has his answer: There's no cause-effect
> relationship between Slothrop and Weissman's V-2 rockets. Rather, it's more
> of a yin-yang forward-backward relationship mediated by the [unknown]
> missing variable: Imipolex, which apparently creates a bond that defies
> space and time. The melding of the physical and the metaphysical, as, in a
> way, Kekule's dream.
>
> Lots of theories out there about all that discussion of "one." I see it,
> in part, as a refutation of the zero-one binary, along the lines of
> one-is-many (no background in Eastern philosophies, but guessing this must
> be floating around there). And despite Spectro's insistence to Pointsman
> that one subject doesn't constitute a scientific study, Slothrop has become
> the ONE subject. All you need is one.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: Mark Kohut
>
> Sent: May 18, 2016 9:09 AM
>
> To: pynchon -l
>
> Subject: BtZ42 Scene 10. Down the toilet.
>
>
>
> Fowler gives us this as a way to talk about it: "This scene recounts
> Slothrop's narcohypnotic "descent" down a toilet and into a sewer, a
> surrealist nightmare. Since this episode makes explicit use of several of
> the novel's most important code-chains....."
> Tease out some code-chains or summarize first if you want.
>
>
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