Gravity’s Rainbow — annotations and illustrations for page 203

Why here? ¹ Why should the rainbow edges ² of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden ³  itself—here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in dust ⁴ —rooms full of dust that will cloud the shapes of inhabitants around the corners or deeper inside, that will settle on their black formal lapels, that will soften to sugar the white faces, white shirt fronts, gems and gowns, white hands that move too quickly to be seen ⁵ … what game do They deal ⁶ ? What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect? “Fuck you,” whispers Slothrop ⁷. It’s the only spell ⁸ he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that. His whisper is baffled by the thousands of tiny rococo surfaces. Maybe he’ll sneak in tonight—no not at night—but sometime, with a bucket and brush, paint FUCK YOU ⁹ in a balloon ¹⁰ coming out the mouth of one of those little pink shepherdesses there  ¹¹… .

He steps back out, backward out the door, as if half, his ventral half, were being struck in kingly radiance: retreating from yet facing the Presence feared and wanted. ¹²

¹ Why…not?

Okay—this seems like a fair question. Let’s not be glib.

The question is Our Hero Tyrone Slothrop’s, via Pynchon’s oft-present free indirect style.

The where is the hotel room  of Our Man in the French Riviera. Slothrop is on “furlough” (not really, they—They—have his ass hard at work) at the Hermann Goering Casino.

Poor Tyrone returns to his hotel room after a picaresque run (and wardrobe shift: tacky/sexy Hawaiian shirt to purple toga to English army uniform) to find that “everything in this room is really being used for something. Different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Two orders of being…”

Two orders of being: I could riff all day (night?) on this, but I suppose we can boil it down to GR’s binary theme. (Or, for fun, because it’s Our Boy Slothrop—Visible/Invisible (“paranoia” is the gradation between that binary).

² The fourth appearance of the word “rainbow” in GR (barring the title, colophon, etc.). Another gradation, the rainbow, between binaries. An arc, a rise, a fall.

Double rainbow. Blind-sighted: False binary. Gradations:

(And music).

Cf. Genesis 9:11-16 (King James Version):

¹¹ And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.

¹² And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:

¹³ I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.

¹⁴ And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:

¹⁵ And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.

¹⁶ And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

Cf. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, Steven Weisenburger:

³ …the Taboo? The Abject? Another description of Gravity’s Rainbow…? Or do we just feel the meaning here? (Yes).

⁴ The imagery here—desiccation and paralysis, a taxidermist’s row in an old dusty museum—evokes the death|life binary.

⁵ The Elect (vs Preterite Slothrop). Our Dude TS has his own issues vis a vis whiteness (revisit his adventures down the toilet back during a night in Roxbury).

⁶ Recall we are in the Casino Hermann Goering. Recall GR’s themes of chance and fate, probability and statistics, zeroes and ones. Recall They.

⁷ This seems to me like another thesis statement of Pynchon’s in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Actually, fuck that hedging: A fuck you to the They is Gravity’s Rainbow’s mission statement.

⁸ Gravity’s Rainbow is full of witches, and maybe Slothrop is a lazy novice.

⁹ Cf. Ch. 25 of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye:

It’s hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world. It’s impossible.

¹⁰ Have you read Donald Barthelme’s 1968 short story “The Balloon”?

¹¹ A fascinating image, I think. Leave the rococo knickknack of the pink shepherdess alone a moment (perhaps it suggests erotic enticement to you, pervert preterite?) and attend to just how and where Slothrop intends to append this “FUCK YOU” sign—in a comic book speech bubble. The intertextual (do I mean metatextual—it’s hard to keep up) possibilities here bubble and boil. It’s as if Slothrop would rewrite his room (“Two orders of being”) as a comic book.

A page or two later, we find Our Guy Slothrop reading an issue of Plastic Man.

¹² Note here the halving of Slothrop, the text that cuts him—ventral. He’s in and out, facing a Presence but already half Absent. Is Our Savior Tyrone the one radiating the “kingly radiance” — or is he being radiated by it?—Or am I making too much of light?