What better way to break a bottle on the bow of our blog than with a post about an attempted interracial gang rape and subsequent escape through the business end of a toilet into a magical subterranean world? In what is easily the most surreal episode of the novel thus far, we get to follow Lt. Slothrop through a series of events that are hard to make sense of. The section is Part 1, Episode 10 (pp. 61-72). The episode seems to be a drug-induced vision. Slothrop is administered Sodium Amytal in what appears to be a controlled experiment in a hospital. This drug is widely known as “truth serum,” though it has been discredited since it would often give subject false memories, which is exactly what we have here.
The whole episode is framed by a play on the phrase, “you never did the Kenosha Kid.” Wonderfully ambiguous, the Kenosha Kid may be a dance, a cowboy, or even Slothrop himself. The first mention of KK is a letter written from Tyrone Slothrop with a mailing address of Kenosha, WI. Slothrop inquires: “Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?” The reply simply states, “You never did. The Kenosha Kid.” The phrase goes through several different permutations. The device serves to show Pynchon’s playful use of language. Without ever really tipping his hand as to the true nature of the Kenosha Kid, Pynchon uses this whole passage like a kid uses monkey bars. It’s fascinating to see the meaning shift slightly at times and radically at others as he changes the punctuation and emphasis to different words in the phrase.
There’s something distinctly postmodern about this. If the moderns set out to illustrate the difference between the sign and the signified, the postmodernists sought to completely destroy the connection between the two. The Kenosha Kid is practically an exercise in divorcing words from their meanings. It really fits with the themes of the novel so far. In the same way that the V2 rockets cause dissonance and confusion with the people of London, so does the Kenosha Kid with the reader. The KK is a maze that I’m not sure we’ll ever get out of, much like this brave new world with weapons that you only hear after they kill you.
6 comments:
hey i like this post it is nice. Hey I am the First person to post a comment. Awsome. Hey Matt and Jason you guys are going to have a great blog with great posts. Keep it up.
I've met very few people who have even read Gravity's Rainbow, and even fewer who understood it. It is a difficult read, but an amazing work.
I was really struck by your use of the still photo from the film "Trainspotting" (I think that is where it is from, anyway) because the first thing I thought of when I saw that film sequence, was the part of the novel where Slothrop dives into the toilet to retrieve the harmonica.
Nice review.
Nicko
thx for the blog and the invitation to discuss this interesting book. so i just read this chapter for the second time, and i've read each previous chapter/section/7box at least twice. what strikes me immediately is the blatant sexual innuendo of the entire work so far: V-2 Rockets, bananas, the rape of Slothrop.
when i read this chapter, i imagine Slothrop as a kid in some kind of pedophilia situation... him on probably the giving and receiving end over time and how he ventures into the shithole of his past to uncover ambiguous memories that shift in the half-light of the tunnel. bits and pieces of recollections merge together with this theme of the Kenosha Kid who somehow got away...Slothrop being both the kid and the pursuer.
with the timing of the V-2 bombs aligned with his conquests, the Kenosha Kid (heroic Slothrop) escapes the blast intended for him while all the time expecting the destruction of his guilt from above... before he even knows it's coming... or sadly, not :(
Might be time to update the blog.
Trump says, "I don't kid". Then he did Kenosha.
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