Leaving the Zone

I’m not really sure what went on, but we lost internet access in our apartment for a few days. Sorry for the delayed post. This will include the rest of In the Zone, and the book should be complete for Tuesday’s post. Kind of scary actually.

I want to start with this idea of “John Dillingerism” in the Zone. I think the first explicit reference to the gangster is in Säure Bummer’s deserted hideout, regarding the note Säure has left for Slothrop:

“Now ‘As B/4’ was John Dillinger’s old signoff. Everybody in the Zone is using it these days. It indicates how you feel about certain things…” (443)

Which is, I guess fairly benign enough – the disenfranchised Zoners glorify the larger-than-life persona and the devil-may-care attitude toward authority, not to mention his ties to the black market. But later in the Zone, after Slothrop and Närrisch’s rescue mission (more specifically, after Närrisch’s sacrifice) the plot is interrupted by a recounting of the circumstances of Dillinger’s death outside the Biograph Theater – something in that surely, about what waits “outside” the cinematic. We are told that “Dillinger…found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the movie images that hadn’t quite faded from his eyeballs.” (524) The movie was Manhattan Melodrama, wherein Clark Gable’s character, somewhat analogous to Dillinger, chooses the electric chair over life imprisonment. Thus “Dillingerism” in the Zone would be a choosing of the melodramatic, the Hollywood ending, over some kind of slow, government-sanctioned/-monitored death.

Perhaps more importantly, in that paragraph on Dillinger, there is also this certain homophobic discourse that I’ve noticed popping up in weird places. The officer in charge of his assassination is referred to as “bitchy little Melvin Purvis,” and that when he “lit up the fatal cigar, [he] felt already between his lips the penis of official commendation – and federal cowards at the signal took Dillinger with their faggots’ precision...” (525) At first, it was just unsettling: I didn’t really know what to do with this kind of language in a book like this. But then when the same tone and vocabulary showed up again in the very last section of Part III, it seemed a little clearer what was happening. In that last section, Clive Mossmoon and Sir Marcus Scammony sit and discuss the British operation in the Zone, and when the narrator makes his closing remarks, after claiming that a certain love could exist between men in the trenches of WWI, we are told that the “life-cry” of that love has “long-since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this last war, Death was no longer an enemy but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, the real and only fucking is done on paper…” (627) I think the connection is that this very aggressively homophobic discourse is the manifestation of a sustained pun on the idea of homosexuality as “one man fucking another man,” playing on the use of fucking to mean both ‘having intercourse’ and ‘treating unfairly.’ Therefore, “bitchy little Melvin Purvis” has less to do with a personality and more to do with his authority position and what he has chosen to do to another human being. It follows that when “homosexuality in high places” becomes an ‘afterthought’ (because we are told Scammony does literally engage in some form transvestism) and that the “fucking is done on paper” now, it signals a shift in the metaphor, or perhaps a departure from.

Scammory also tells Mossmoon that, “We’re all going to fail” (627) but Clive knows that this does not mean “the Operation” will too. Inside the Operation, the “self is a petty and indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness,” and that “there is no lower self.” These are the circumstances which are contrasted against the trenches of WWI, where “under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths…men came to love one another.” There is an immediate tie-in to the saving function of Dillinger/Gable’s “sudden” death. (“Die like ya live…all of a sudden.” 524) But there is also this idea of the “lower” self, an animal self in darkness, which (at least retroactively for me) is so integral to the black and white binaries that populate the novel, and to the omnipresence of shit (literal feces, and in other forms) in GR too, especially in that during Slothrop’s Puritan genealogy, “shit” (toilet paper) is one of the three uses of the paper his family produces, the other 2 being the Word, and money. I would say that this whole “lower self” thing is caught up in the fascination with Death, the cold truth that humans are mortal, animal things that die. That’s why Jamf advocates a move toward “the inorganic” (“Si-N” over “C-H,” 589): it is indicative of the German, or maybe just the corporate motions to defy death. This black animal fear that finds an image in shit, is also in a lot of ways what’s at the heart of the Schwarzkommando, and all the other “Schwarzphenomen” (Black phenomena, syndromes), and of the desperate primal racism many white characters exhibit (Marvy, Slothrop on sodium amytal, Tchitcherine, etc.) The most direct connections are probably when Brigadier Pudding unconsciously associates Katje’s feces with a black man’s penis, and when the Schwarzkommando are said to be analogous to the shit of King Kong. It is a humiliating encounter with mortality.

As for Slothrop in the Zone, I think something big begins with the Anubis, although the symbolism is of course, diluted enough to avoid static meaning: Anubis is the Egyptian god who escorted the souls of the dead to the underworld, so one is first inclined to say that the orgy-ers, specifically Slothrop, are being “escorted” into the realm of the dead, i.e., the Zone. It’s all well and good until he falls off – are we supposed to extend the metaphor here? Is this another form of preterition, a “passing over” for Slothrop? Does he “escape” Death here? I don’t necessarily think so, because it also marks the point when Slothrop starts to dissolve into the Zone – because of Tchitcherine’s uniform, he’s taken for a Russian officer, when he returns to the Anubis from the Otto, Procalowski doesn’t recognize him (539), a stray pig cannot tell him apart from a real pig, etc. When he meets up with Andreas at the rocket site, he even relinquishes his role as “quester” by supplying Andreas with intel as opposed to receiving it. (572) I think if anything, Slothrop is sort of “infected” by the Death on board the Anubis, even literally, in the form of the (alleged) hanging corpse of Bianca in the dark furnace room, his as of then, last sexual encounter. It’s sort of mystifying too that over compared to the number of times Slothrop has sex in the first 100 pages, it is over 100 pages from the time he has sex with Bianca till his next sexual encounter, which is in fact, with Ilse Pökler’s mother (Ilse and Bianca of whom it is said “How can they not be the same child?”).

Somewhere in there is also the episode with Ludwig and his lemming, Ursula. That Slothrop helps a German boy chase a pet with a genetic death-wish is blatant enough. But during that passage, there is a little aside about William Slothrop, Tyrone’s ancestor who wrote the book On Preterition, which “argued holiness for God’s second sheep [the Preterite].” (565) He was immediately accused of heresy and driven from the Massachusetts Bay colony, and this follows:

“Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back…” 565-6

This seems like a pretty straightforward representation of [at least one of] Pynchon’s aim[s], to like you said during Lot 49, go back to that moment before an historical event, right before it becomes inevitable, and think about the other possibilities and what happened to those possibilities before they were lost. I guess this particular fork is between marginalizing the “Preterite” and sympathizing with them, a long-term result of this specific catastrophic choice being the rise (and brutality) of the Nazis?

Last major topic here: Enzian in the Zone. He remains mostly invisible except for that short section in which he, Christian, and Andreas are out looking for Pavel, Maria’s husband (Maria being Christian’s sister). But there’s that crazy passage here about the “Fungus Pygmies” that Pavel encounters when he’s hallucinating on synthetic gasoline, creatures that exist on the “other side” of the line between gasoline and water in the emulsion. That line is identified as an “Interface” (capital eye) and the interface is said to be “a long rainbow, mostly indigo.” (532) This rainbow is the interface between the “cellular aristocracy” and the “wastes” (a reference to both the Elect/Preterite binary, and also to “waste” as in shit). I think it’s fair then to see the titular rainbow as an interface as well, and consequently, not unreasonable to see this interface as between other forms of Elect and Preterite. But I know that there is a stronger rainbow image to this effect in The Counterforce, so I’m going to put it aside for now here.

For now, the more important aspect of this section is that Enzian, when he sees Christian raise his gun, has a Zonal epiphany: “Suddenly, this awful branching: the two possibilities aready beginning to fly apart at the speed of thought – a new Zone in any case now, whether Christian fires or refrains – jump, choose –” (533) To say that a new “Zone with a Capital Z” can be born like this, is to characterize the eponymous Zone as another point at which divergent branches could be seen to exist, before one is established in/by history – just like that American fork Slothrop identifies in William’s history.

Well I think that will be it for now. Tchitcherine becomes aware of a counterforce in the Zone (621) but can’t see “the Light”… only the Finger pointing to it. But ironically, Pynchon’s little symbol is using his middle finger to show us…

Matt