Chapter 3: Blackness as Deterritorialized Signifier
The schizophrenic nature of Gravity’s Rainbow has many political and social functions; it is within this context that we can use the novel as a satire and as a critique of a wide range of injustices. Now that we have a means to deal with the novel as it presents itself, we can finally open ourselves to the schizophrenic litany of its actual contents. Because Gravity’s Rainbow is such an expansive schizophrenic text, it is difficult to chose one issue or one set of signifiers that Pynchon deterritorializes in this way — everything is interrelated and everything constantly dissolves back in itself. And yet, if to understand the functionality of Gravity’s Rainbow as a machine, to understand its cultural inputs and outputs, I must tackle it in pieces, at the risk of creating an artificial totality or molar unity through oversimplifying the novel. This is the risk that any critic of Gravity’s Rainbow runs.
Critics have, by-and-large, shied away from discussing the issue of blackness in Gravity’s Rainbow. Eric Meyer does however introduce the topic in a valiant attempt to show the novel’s relation to the Civil Rights movement. Mayer points out that blackness is certainly a significant motif in Pynchon’s writing. Pynchon is explicitly obsessed by the racial constructs that enable colonialism, and spefically obsessed with the Hereros, the tribe that comprises the Schwarzkommando. Pynchon’s first novel, V. discussed the German genocide of the Hereros in Africa, and in Gravity’s Rainbow they return in a parallel but inverse role: instead of being killed by Germans in Africa, they are Africans in Germany killing themselves. Moreover, the signifier “black,” or, more frequently, “schwarz” recurs and echoes throughout the text; it is the motif that lures many readers into looking for a coherent whole narrative in the novel, just in the same manner as Slothrop is lured into looking for the Schwarzgerät, the S-Gerät 00000.
Characteristically, Pynchon’s political agenda is presented through a confusing and schizophrenic maze of signifiers — it would make a poor manifesto. The schizophrenic critique of blackness proceeds by way of the deterritorialization of the signifier “black” itself. I have adopted Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the words “deterritorialization” and “decoding” to describe the schizophrenic disassociation of the signifier from its content; these words describe the tendency of raw capital to escape its role in a structured capitalist economy (to create black markets, for example), and so by extension, they describe the tendency of the language that follows that line of flight to lose its usual set of meanings. I have argued that this process allows for a unique space of social and political critique; but now it is important to step into the text more fully and understand how the process of deterritorialization operates to open new ground for political understanding that is neither revolutionary nor reactionary. it is important that, according to Deleuze and Guattari escape itself is a revolutionary force.
In order to demonstrate the process by which the simple deterritorialization of a signifier can do the work of a political critique, I will have to go through a few levels of analysis to reach the purely schizophrenic, just as I have done in my more general argument about Gravity’s Rainbow’s regime of signs. This one will begin with a few important passages from the text which seem to lay the groundwork for a structuralist analysis of Blackness in the relations between the characters and between political entities. Although it may at first seem paradoxical, it is a schizophrenic move for Pynchon to lay bare the relationships between light and dark in such a straightforward way that I can easily formulate it into a structuralist diagram. The formation of these clear relationships between light and dark breaks down the seemingly impenetrable chaos of race relations in Europe. The novel does so by deterritorializing the signifier of darkness, specifically the signifier “Schwarz.” “Schwarz” ceases to signify a material thing (blackness or Black people), and begins to signify a relational construct, that, once understood by the reader, can be broken down and understood, allowing the reader’s own revolutionary impulse to make itself felt upon the text. Pynchon uses specific characters — most notably Oberst Enzian and Tchicherine — to occupy specific racial attitudes which are entirely relational, so that those attitudes are exposed and can be critiqued. Incidentally, the reduction of race relations to two characters is itself a schizophrenic process because it breaks down the molar social problem of “racism” into its segmentary parts — the individuals that racism effects.
However, the novel is too schizophrenic to leave its commentary on Blackness to a purely structuralist analysis; it is just that type of analysis that the novel resists at every turn. In this case, the easy structuralism of blackness is disrupted by Slothrop. In Slothrop, I argue, the signifier “Schwarz” undergoes another stage of deterritorialization, which allows a deepening of the schizophrenic process and thereby an implicit avenue of escape from the repressive social construct of racism.
To begin with, I need to lay the foundations of the race relationship that the structure of Blackness depends upon; that foundation is itself an explicit potient political critique. The novel sets up a psychoanalytic and relationship of dependence of the European world on blackness. The novel gleefully mocks the simple American racist hate through mocking Major Marvy (whose open racism just makes him sound stupid, on many an occasion), and Old Bloody Chiclitz, whose idea of a capitalist venture is a line of racist toys — the “Juicy Jap,” a doll that you fill up with ketchup and “Shufflin’ Sam, a game of skill where you have to shoot the Negro before he gets back over the fence with the watermelon” (558). But there is a differentiation to be made between the racism implicit in European colonialism against the racism explicit in American slavery, and it is these European racial categories that end up defining the operation of Blackness in relation to the Rocket. In explaining why the tribal death of the Hereros is of concern to the colonists, the narrator of the novel says,
What’s a colony without its dusky natives? Where’s the fun if they’re all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining — wait, wait, a minute there, yes it’s Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it’s nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets…Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where can he fall on his slender prey roaring as loud ass he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in the softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as wolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis, and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as to ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts…no word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets…(317)
This passage is clear enough; Pynchon demonstrates that what is missing from Marx is the same thing that Deleuze and Guattari argue is missing from Freud: an analysis of desire. In delivering this analysis, Pynchon not only argues that the colonies are the realm of the indulgence of desire, he also illustrates what the desires of white men are — to “guzzle her blood with open joy,” all manner of bestial sex and violence. Colonies do not exist previous to European repressive society — they are created by the heavily socialization and repression of White European society. They are absolutely necessary outgrowths of a society built on “death and repression;” there must be somewhere for life, in an animalistic sense, to flourish. And so the colonies allow the stuffy repression of Europe to continue unharmed; without this release, those same desires might upset the stability of European society. The passage also illustrates the raw and unchecked power that Europeans enjoy in their colonies, and the brutal oppression that the natives are subject to. Note again that blackness, and the joys of colonialism, are linked with feminine sexuality: “dusky natives,” “receptive darkness of limbs.” Moreover, the European is assumed to be a “he” and the colonized subject a “she.” As I will argue when I discuss the Schwarzgerät, blackness is linked to femininity and whiteness to masculinity. These constructs that Pynchon uses to deal with race and colonial domination are not new; the terms of race and gender that Pynchon here uses have echoes throughout modernism, for example in Faulkner. That these terms becomes central to the character’s relationship to blackness, even when it is deterritorialized out of the direct realm of race, as in the case of the Scwharzgerät, demonstrates Pynchon’s commitment to the political critique inherent in this explicit passage.
But it is time to delve into the ubiquitous signifier of ‘schwarz,’ which will reveal the schizophrenic tendency of the novel to deterritorialize the signifiers on which those political oppressions are built. The critical impulse to shy away from a discussion of the Schwarzgerät is understandable; Slothrop’s search and the significance of that particular Rocket is one of the most deliberately convoluted and unresolved aspects of the novel, and an overemphasis on it could easily eclipse the novel and dissolve it into meaninglessness. I want to begin with a structural model of some of the main characters’ relationship to Blackness and the Schwarzgerät. But in doing so, I necessarily but artificially limit the scope and impact of the signifier of blackness and its relationship to the Rocket: I leave out almost all the characters of the book, main or otherwise, who are all in their own way segments of Pynchon’s schizophrenic totality built around the Rocket. It is for this reason that as soon as I build this structural model, I will begin to dissolve it, or, rather, to show how it dissolves itself. Through this dissolution, the signifier is stripped of its previous codes, and that deterritorialization, I want to show, is itself a politically significant act that allows for an escape from the all-encompassing binary of light and dark.
The prefix ‘schwarz’ seems to be attached to anything related to the rocket Schwarzgerät 00000, which seems to be the elusive object not only of Slothrop’s search through the Zone, but also of Enzian’s and his white half brother, Tchicherine. “Gerät” refers to the radio guidance system that the Germans used to direct the V-2 rockets, so a crude translation of “Schwarzgerät” might be “guided by black.” The Schwarzgerät was a single rocket that was commissioned by Weismann/Blicero to carry his lover/slave Gottfried, presumably to his death. The Schwarzgerät was also the only rocket to carry “the Imipolex G device” (292) which seems to have had something to do with Slothrop’s mystery stimulus x. There are four main male characters who are related to the rocket and each related to the other, in a structure that could resemble a familial relationship. Slothrop stands alone in his relationship to the Rocket, a relationship which was formed by Dr. Jamf in his mysterious “baby Tyrone” experiments. See figure 1 for a diagram I made of the Rocket Structure.
I have arranged four terms in the shape of the constitutional square, a structuralist formation developed by Algirdas Julien Greimas in his book, On Meaning. In this square, each term gains significance in its oppositional relationship to the others. The horizontal lines signify a relation of contraries, so the fundamental relationship of contraries I use is between white and black: Blicero is white, his rocket is Black, Tchitcherine is white, Enzian is black. The vertical lines signify a relationship of implication, so the S-Gerät implies the existence of Enzian, and Blicero implies the existence of Tchitcherine. The diagonal lines are contradictories, mutually-exclusive terms. Tchicherine seeks to destroy the S-Gerät, Enzian’s existence in the Zone contradicts Blicero because he is a colonized subject that has escaped his colony and come back to the Fatherland; he is the return of the repressed subject in the Zone. All the human characters that fit easily into this structural relationship are male. This is because the erotobotization of the rocket tends to displace and replace feminine sexuality and even motherhood; the Schwarzkommando are the ‘children of the rocket.’ In this context, the erotobotization of the rocket is fundamentally dependent upon the construct of blackness. This gendered relationship to blackness was established earlier, in the narrator’s description of colonialism as a necessary sexual release to the deathlike White culture of Europe; Black is the subject of colonialist sexual deviance which allows the homelands to remain repressed. However, the construct of the Schwarzgerät places that blackness back in the heart of Europe within the War Machine; the War creates a state of exception in which that sexual deviance can be manifest within Europe — and so Blicero came back to Europe from his travels in the colonies when the War started, and constructed the Schwarzgerät, the rocket which brought Blackness into Europe. At this point the signifier “Schwarz” has already been deterritorialized — that is, removed from its literal meaning as the color black. We have no reason besides the name of the rocket to believe that the Schwarzgerät actually was black, and, indeed, it does not matter if it was, because the significance of the prefix “Schwarz” is not the color black, but rather a position in relation to whiteness in general and Blicero/Weismann specifically.
The first two terms of this square are Blicero/Weismann and the Schwarzgerät/Gottfried. I have chosen to treat Gottfried as a component of the Rocket; he is a functional part of the machine of the Schwarzgerät to the same degree that the Imipolex G device is. His function as a component of the rocket is to lend significance to the machine — he gives the Rocket a sexualized purpose; a vital function to the singularity of the Schwarzgerät, but only a component function. Therefore, we should understand that the second term of the square, the one directly produced by its relationship to Blicero, is the Schwarzgerät itself, including Gottfried. The Schwarzgerät is the seat of the signifier of blackness in this structure: it is the progenitor of all things Schwarz. However, it is also the progenitor of the tendancy towards the erotobotization of the Rocket in the novel; it is because of the Schwarzgerät that the Rocket is given its potent erotic content. Although the Rocket is obviously phallic — a fact which Pynchon touches on — the erotocism of the Schwarzgerät is primarily female, just as femininity and blackness have been shown to be linked in the colonial context. The Schwarzgerät is a womb that carries its human payload (Gottfried), but instead of birth it brings death — the blackness of death. But the femininity of the Rocket is not a benevolent maternal nature; instead it is a sign of Power; the ultimate subject and sign of White Male power. Blicero teaches Enzian that “Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature” (324). The function of erotobotization is not to produce love, but to enable the Men to break free of their need for sex so that they can become fully and independently masculine, in violation of their natural urges.
And yet, the Schwarzgerät was produced itself by Blicero, and it exists out of a fundamental need of whiteness for blackness, the same need that created the colonies. That is why I chose to point the arrow away from Blicero and to the Schwarzgerät term, instead of making it double-headed: Blicero produces and projects himself onto the Schwarzgerät, but not necessarily the other way. This reflects the power relationship of the colonized to the colonialist. And so, Blicero stands on the White side of the structure; his chosen SS code name “Blicero” is derived from “white death” in German (322), which is told to the reader just a few pages after the narrator has said that “Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression” (317). Blicero’s motivations are never made excessively clear, but he is driven by a need to express his power as a European subject, to take advantage of anyone less powerful than him in any way, whether it is his sexual exploitation of Katje and Gottfried or his manipulation of Pölker. As Enzian says about him, “The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water” (323). I have labeled the top hemisphere of my diagram “producers of war” and the bottom “products of war,” and yet I could have easily added those labels along the vertical axis as well, because it is never unclear who holds the power in the relationship of white to black: it is Blicero who commands the production of the Schwarzgerät, and they together produce the children of the rocket.
Blicero’s relationship with the Schwarzgerät produces his spiritual progeny, Enzian and Tchicherine. These two brothers live within the text in explicit opposition to each other. First, Tchicherine comes from the origin of the White world — Russia (for example, Caucasian means from the Caucasus) — and he is an agent of colonialism even within his own country — he spent much of his career imposing a new written alphabet upon the Kirghiz tribes, who had no type of writing at all. He and his government had invented a new alphabet (the New Turkic Aphabet) for the sole purpose of imposing it upon these tribes. This type of linguistic colonialism is strongly reminiscent of the regime of despotic significiation that I discussed earlier in the context of Deleuze and Guattari: a despotic political power imposes written language upon a socius so as to impose the rule of law upon it. However, this is only by way of illustrating his thoroughly White origins — in the action of the novel, he himself is one of the despotic entities who holds power in the Zone: “The little State he is building in the German vacuum is founded on a compulsive need he has given up trying to understand, a need to annihilate the Schwarzkommando and his mythical half-brother, Enzian” (337–338). Pynchon never really gives Tchicherine any more concrete motivation for this need; it simply makes sense given the structural relationship to the rocket that he was locked into by his birth.
Enzian leads a group called the Schwarzkommando, a group composed of Africans — Hereros who had been under German colonial rule in South-West Africa — who had been included in various rocket battalions, accumulated knowledge about the rocket, and, in the Post-War Zone, coalesced around the ideal of the Schwarzgerät, using it as a semi-religious icon. The Schwarzkommando is loaded with the weight of signification in the novel — just as Pynchon discusses the colonies as a vital construct in the White consciousness, so the Schwarzkommando seems to bear the tremendous load of oppositional thinking in the Zone. On both White sides of the War, the Schwarzkommando were imagined and invented by filmmakers and propagandists before their reality was known. The German filmmaker von Göll made a film imagining the Schwarzkommando during the war, and then became convinced that his film had brought them into being. This conviction informed all of his subsequent movies — they became more important than just fictions: “’It is my mission […] to sew in the Zone seeds of reality. The historical moment demands this, and I can only be its servant. My images, somehow, have been chosen for incarnation” (388). And this “megalomaniac” assumption is not necessarily false; if we are to believe Pynchon’s explanation of colonialism, the same set of impulses and repressions that created the circumstance for the real Schwarzkommando as also created the film that von Göll made. Moreover, von Göll’s films do manufacture reality elsewhere in the book: the rape scene of Greta Erdmann conceives both Bianca and Ilse. But the Schwarzkommando cannot have been entirely von Göll’s invention, because on the English side, the folks at PISCES/The White Vistiation had made a low-budget propaganda film with actors in blackface who imagined Africans running around with rocket intelligence. The realization that the Schwarzkommando are real sent Edmond Treacle over the edge,
[…] screaming “Giant ape? I’ll show you a giant ape all right!”
Indeed he would show the critter to many of us, though we would not look. In his innocence he saw no reason why co-workers on an office project should not practice self-criticism with the same rigor as revolutionary cells do. He had not meant to offend sensibilities, only to show the others, decent fellows all, that their feelings about blackness were tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about putrefaction and death. It seemed to him so clear. . . why wouldn’t they listen? Why wouldn’t they admit that their repressions had, in a sense that Europe in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic has lost, had incarnatated real and living men, likely (according to the best intelligence) in possession of real and living weapons […] 276–277
Europeans in the novel have such a deep-seated need to construct an entity like the Schwarzkommando that they become absolutely convinced that they did actually construct it. In this passage, Treacle, via the narrator, shows the reader that the nature of European repression inevitably results in an expression of Blackness. This passage is reminiscent of the passage more explicitly about European colonialism that I discussed earlier, but the Schwarzkommando are men, and so Treacle replaces the link between blackness and sex/femininity with a link between blackness and shit. The passage follows close on the heels of the discussion of King Kong, and it is that giant ape which is referenced at the beginning of the passage. The connection between King Kong and the Schwarzkommando is revealing — clearly there is the racist implications of comparing African men so easily to monstrous apes. But just as King Kong was brought from Africa to America in order to feed a distinct cultural need, so were the Hereros brought to Germany, especially in the eyes of von Goll and PISCES, who each think that they brought the Schwarzkommando into existence. King Kong is entertainment gone wild through the streets of the city, the uncivilized dark beast that threatens the core of civilization; in the eyes of von Göll and Edmond Treacle, Schwarzkommando are exactly the same — the fictions that they created ran away from them into reality. The members of the Schwarzkommando are products of the system of German colonialism, which is itself the product of the sexual and social repression of European society, the result of a need to act out, to rape the world — seen in this light, the Schwarzkommando are a return of the repressed European culture. They must exist, given the circumstances of Germany and of whiteness in general. This is why they exist simultaneously in cultural forms and in reality; in both forms they were manufactured by the White subconscious need for Blackness, that is, for shit, for sex, for violence.
But although they were born out of this system of repressive European domination, the Schwarzkommando are a subversive organization that pose a danger to white power in the Zone. Like the escaped King Kong running through the streets of New York, the Schwarzkommando are a source of terror and hate to the White structures of power that are struggling to assert themselves in the power vacuum that the Nazis left behind. That is why Major Marvy hates them so much, and expresses that hate through familiar American racism. It is also why Tchicherine’s superiors in the Russian government approve of his desire to destroy the Schwarzkommando, although it may or may not be his own personal motivation. However, the primary method of rebellion that the Hereros use is notably passive; the Hereros resist German colonialism by committing tribal suicide, both back in Africa and in the Zone — by refusing to reproduce. As Pynchon says, “What’s a colony without its dusky natives?” (317). This is the only method of resistance available to them: “There is no outright struggle for power. It is all seduction and counterseduction, advertising and pornography, and the history of the Zone-Hereros is being decided in bed” (318). But this mode of resistance depends on the repression of Enzian’s own people, especially of their women. They haven’t just stopped reproducing spontaneously; instead, Enzian’s crew bikes around finding pregnant women and forcing them to have abortions, reproducing the repression that they have learned from being subjects of it: “They have learned their vulturehood from the Christian missionaries” (519).
But despite the apparent inescapability of the white power system, Enzian is one of the only characters that seems to believe in the possibility of real liberation (him and Billy the Bulb); he utters perhaps the only genuinely optimistic line in the novel the first time he meets Slothrop. He asks Slothrop if he is really a war correspondent:
“No.”
“A free agent, I guess”
“Don’t know about that ‘free,’ Oberst.”
“But you are free. We all are. You’ll see. Before long.” (288)
And he says it again, much later in the novel, to Katje, on their first meeting: “’I told Slothrop he was free, too. I tell anybody who might listen. I will tell them as I tell you: you are free. You are free. . .’”(661). The entire tone of this second meeting is one of weariness, of having been made obsolete, and so Enzian repeats his old messages. As I read these passages, there are two ways to interpret Enzian’s sentiment. The more cynical interpretation is that he delivers this message of liberation because it is what is expected of him given his role within the White power structure; he leads a group of disenfranchised Africans, and so White power would necessarily expect him to be a political leader, intent on gaining liberation for his people. And so he tries to fill that expectation, at least nominally, on the surface. It is just another way of providing people like Blicero the guilt which they thirst for. Especially by the time he says this to Katje, it sounds like he is just repeating and repeating again a phrase learned by rote, deprived of meaning. A less cynical reading takes the line in a more existentialist sense. Although both Slothrop and Enzian are in the control of the White or paranoiac power system, they are only the subjects of that system because, at some deep level, they choose to be. Enzian is telling Slothrop that, at a preconscious level, they assume the roles that have been cut out for them by Power; they have internalized those roles, and that is why they appear not to be free. But if Slothrop could decondition himself and reprogram himself from the bottom of his subconscious upwards, perhaps he would realize that he was free all along, and that he was only controlled because he let Them control him.
The Schwarzkommando are black, but their name is a reference not to their color, but to the rocket, the Schwarzgerät. Already, the signifier “Schwarz” has become deterritorialized from its usual meaning in order to become an operator in a relational construct. “Schwarz” has meaning only in relation to whiteness in general, and specifically to Blicero, who is the progenitor of all the other terms of this Rocket Structure — as the white ranking officer in charge of the Rocket, he is the ultimate power over the Rocket and all its followers. Blackness only means what he allows it to mean, and so it is only through his whiteness that Blackness is allowed to bear any significance at all. Even the gestures of revolt that the Schwarzkommando make — their attempt at tribal suicide — only are allowed to be gestures of revolt insofar as Whiteness in general (and Blicero specifically) defines them and allows them to be revolutionary. The statement “What’s a colony without its dusky natives?” is written from the White perspective — Blicero needs his native women, and taking them away through genetic suicide is, then, a meaningful gesture of revolt, but depends upon the very White power structure that is oppressing the Hereros. This is the operation of the despotic regime of signification, where the despot determines the significance of all around him, and the relational structures of meaning begin to seem absolute given the incredible power of the despot.
Therefore, what is needed in this equation is a line of escape from the power of despotic signification, a line of escape away from Blicero’s power to create. I would like to offer a reminder that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the schizophrenic escape has revolutionary power, even if the schizophrenic himself is not revolutionary. Here is where the paranoid-schizophrenic Tyrone Slothrop enters the picture. I have chosen to put Jamf and Slothrop in the center of my diagram instead of on the outside, not only because I wanted my diagram to look like Slothrop’s depiction of the A4 as seen from above, but because Slothrop lies at the chaotic intersection of the relationships of the Rocket; he breaks them down into their component segments and neurotically, schizophrenically lives all of the impulses and desires that form the more clear relationships that the other four characters have to the Rocket. He was not born into a relation with the rocket the way that Enzian or Tchicherine were, instead, Dr. Jamf conditioned him to be sensitive to it; he was the despotic authority that gave the Rocket the particular meaning to Slothrop, but the problem is that Jamf is dead, and it is impossible to know what meaning Jamf programmed into Slothrop. The mystery stimulus x is lost to time. And even if we did have access to the mystery stimulus, we would not know if Jamf had conditioned him to the mystery stimulus, or de-conditioned him past the point of zero to make him inversely or paradoxically conditioned to it. This is the ultimate stage in the deterritorialization of the signifier; we are not sure what either the signifier or the signified actually is, and we do not know what the relationship between them might be. And yet, there is some powerful relationship between Slothrop and the Rocket, Slothrop and darkness, Slothrop and sex and shit. All of the drives and desires that are implicit in the Blicero/Tchicherine/Enzian relationship to the rocket are present, often in a twisted and masked way, in Slothrop’s mystifying relationship to the rocket. I have argued that through both his sodium amytal sessions, the reader is clued in to Slothrop’s deep subconscious reliance on race as an oppositional signifier; well before the war, he was conditioned not by Jamf but by his own homegrown Americanism to be frightened of African Americans, to the point where his subconscious would flee from them, even down the toilet. Yet, by the time that Tchicherine interrogates him using the drug, Slothrop has internalized the signifier “Schwarz” and is attaching it to every word he can come up with; a demonstration of the degree of deterritorialization that signifier reached in his head — it could be attached to anything, its meaning was omnipresent and thus unspecific. Slothrop’s relationship to the Rocket, and to the Scwharzgerät in general — and thus his more subliminal relationship to darkness — is the one steady, driving force of the novel.
Slothrop himself has an intense relation to the signifier of Blackness, both in terms of race and in terms of the Rocket. Pynchon is very careful to illustrate that this relation is mostly or entirely subconscious; it only comes out in full form when Slothrop is under the influence of Sodium Amytal, a drug that is used on him twice in the novel for interrogation purposes. The first time, early in the novel, reveals that Slothrop has not escaped the influence of the American racial attitudes that he must have grown up with. It is in the “Kenosha Kid” episode when Slothrop is put under the influence of Sodium Amytal by PISCES. Slothrop recounts a party in the Roseland Ballroom in the late thirties that is dominated by African Americans. It is important to point out that Slothrop’s presence at the party itself casts some light on his relationship to African Americans; while he is not comfortable, at least he interacts with them, not a common thing for the son of a well-to-do Puritan family of capitalists. The party is divided between the black faces, who are on their own turf and provide the party itself, and the whites, who have come to ‘slum it.’ Slothrop drops his harp down the toilet, and down he goes after it. While he is head down in the toilet, two black men come up behind him and try to rape him. The entire scene, is, of course, recounted by Slothrop under the influence of Sodium Amytal, and so I think it is valid to read the episode as a creation of Slothrop’s unconscious — even if the events actually did occur in fictional reality (which is irrelevant). Critics — Eric Meyer for example — seem to assume that one of them, the more threatening, named Red Malcolm, is a direct reference to Malcolm X. I question the validity of making such a specific connection between the two; I see nothing in the actions of Red Malcolm that reflect any part of Malcom X’s life work. Yet the choice of the name “Malcolm” does add to the work of racial signification in the episode: “the true name is Malcolm, and all the black cocks know him, have known him all along — Red Malcolm the Unthinkable Nihilist sez ‘Good golly he sure is all asshole ain’t he?” (64, emphasis in original). Again, we return to the realm of naming and signification — Malcolm is a ‘true’ name because it is the name by which blacks know him. This must inevitably calls to mind Malcolm X, who was deeply concerned with his own name and its potential to carry on the legacy of slavery — hence the X, and later, his change to his Muslim name, El Haji Malik El Shabazz. And while it is difficult to avoid this comparison, it would be nearly impossible to call Malcolm X a nihilist, an unthinkable (unthinking?) one at that; I think it is important to avoid the simplistic impulse to say that Malcolm X has made an appearance in Gravity’s Rainbow. I make that distinction because Slothrop’s experience of blackness in this scene seems to be uninhibitedly negative — ‘Negros’ are threatening and malevolent, their party is tribal and rhythmic, and Slothrop seems constantly terrified of even losing his own identity to this threatening Black other: “Slothrop can’t even see his own white face” (62). The fear that American racism is founded on runs strong in Slothrop’s subconscious.
And so he manages to escape down the toilet. Because this is all recounted later by Slothrop under the influence of Sodium Amytal, the reader should avoid the temptation to think of the Roseland Ballroom as the “reality” of the episode and the adventure in the toilet as some form of unreality or hallucinogenic experience: it is all fictional, all manufactured by Slothrop. And yet, the reader follows Slothrop along a line of escape from a paranoiac situation to a schizophrenic one. In the Roseland ballroom, he was operating under a paranoiac regime by which the world was divided into the self and the threatening other; but this breaks down in the surrealism of the toilet world. The toilet world is a schizophrenic one in that it breaks molar racial and social stereotypes into their molecular component parts. It begins with a general democratization and equalization, because everyone’s poop from both the colored and the white bathroom ends up in the same sewer (but even so, Slothrop can tell the difference between Negro dingleberries and White ones). The ‘brown dusk’ of generalized excrement is segmented into its component parts — individualized dingleberries. The same process occurs with the paranoiac stereotypes and archetypes that Slothrop brought down with him into the toilet world; they cease to be generalized stereotypes, and become individuals. There is only one of everything in the toilet world, one person of each racial and social identity:
Not ‘archetypical’ westwardman, but the only. Understand, there was only one. There was only one Indian who ever fought him. Only one fight, one victory, one loss. And only one president, and one assassin, and one election. True. One of each of everything. You had thought of solipsism, and imagined the structure to be populated — on your level — by only, terribly, one. (67)
This is a unique way of segmenting the totalizing tendency of stereotypes and archetypes; each one is true, but it is true of only one, and so therefore there are really quite a few people in this world — there is one of absolutely every racial or identity combination imaginable — one “Norwegian mulatto lad with a fetish for horsy paraphernalia” and so on. And so, Pynchon has found a way to break down identity politics; not by dissolving it or getting rid of it, but literally by breaking it down into its component parts to create a completely schizophrenic world. Here I would like to offer a reminder of Deleuze and Guattari’s comment that the identities of the schizophrenic are always racial and always based on social identities: the schizoid identifies him or herself with different socially-constructed identities where each one corresponds to a level of intensity in the Zone of the body without organs across which the schizoid moves. Each of those levels of intensity is manifest in the toilet world as an individual.
But this Sodium Amytal session does not cast the necessary light on Slothrop’s place in the structure I have laid out of Enzian-Tchicherine-Blicero; that information comes later, when Tchicherine places him under Sodium Amytal. All he gets out of this interrogation session is confusion:
Deep, deep — further than politics, than sex or infantile terrors…a plunge into the nuclear blackness…Black runs all through the transcript: the recurring color black. Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkommando. But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät. And he also coupled “Schwarz-“ with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream…The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop’s Blackwords only appear to flower separately? Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words… Well, the man is a puzzle. (390–391 all ellipses in original)
The important movement in this passage is the progression of the signifier “schwarz” and black; by attaching it to an ever-increasing host of suffixes and creating new names, the blackness becomes generalized to the point of omnipotence, weakening its association with Enzian and the Schwarzkommando. This is not to say that blackness loses its racial denotation, but rather that blackness is revealed to be a relational signifier; Blackness has a certain relationship to Slothrop that is mediated by his unconscious, and that relationship dictates the relationship of the signifier “blackness” or “schwarz” to the group of people that it describes. What this relationship actually is mystifies Tchitcherine; we should not turn to him for all the answers. But his description of the process of signification is very useful: the tendency for name-giving is political and nationalist, and implicitly colonialist — it is the paranoiac-despotic regime of signs whereby a despot imposes his own code upon a society, and that power is endlessly affirmed by the power to endlessly create new signifiers. The political consequence of this is “setting the namer more hopelessly apart from the named,” distancing the colonialist from the colonized, making blackness an ever more unapproachable Other. Tchicherine is right to suspect that this is a German tendency; certainly their rule over their African colonies, especially in the Südwest were Enzian hails from, was one of the most brutal in the history of colonialism. As we will see, there is very an equivalent tendency to play god with language in the German characters in the book. But the tendency that Slothrop demonstrates in this Sodium Amytal session is not a despotic drive towards naming, but a schizophrenic deterritorializing of the signifier “schwarz,” and that is what confuses Tchicherine. As he attaches it to more and more things, it signifies less and less; it slowly loses its racial meaning, and comes to stand instead for pure Otherness. The passage even uses one of Deleuze and Guattari’s words for the schizophrenic process: “molecules.” Slothrop here is breaking language down into its molecular parts, and revealing it to be entirely based on relationships of meaning. If “setting the namer more hopelessly apart from the named” is a paranoid act of signification that allows for colonialism and racism, then the process of setting the name more hopelessly apart from the namer and the named is a potentially liberating process; it can remove the subject of repression from his or her location as a subject. This deterritorialization removes the categorical signifier that enables repression — black — away from its subject.
Slothrop did not chose to be a schizophrenic agent, or a revolutionary, or anything else. Indeed, in his internal life, as I have argued, he is more paranoiac than schizophrenic. But he is at the center of a schizophrenic cultural process within the landscape of the novel. It is unavoidable that he should be the schizoid at the center of the structure of Blackness, the center that constantly pushes the signifier away from its meaning. He was given this schizoid role by the investment that the structures of Power made in him. This schizophrenic process decomposes all structures and deterritorializes all structures:
As some secrets were given to the Gypses to preserve against centrifugal History, and some to the Kabbalists, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, so have this Secret of the Fearful Assembly, and others, found their ways inside the weatherless spaces of this or that Ethnic Joke. There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly — perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time’s assembly — and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn’t. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A. E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to along and scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in his life, but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too, yes yes nothing like getting the 3 of Pentacles upside down covering the significator the second try to send you to the tube to watch a seventh rerun of the Takeshi and Ichizo Show, light a cigarette and try to forget the whole thing) — to no clear happiness or redeeming cataclysm. All his hopeful cards are reversed, most unhappily of all the Hanged Man, who is supposed to be upside down to begin with, telling of his secret hopes and fears. . . […]
“we were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop,” a spokesman for the Counterforce admitted recently in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. (737–738)
This passage is immediately preceded by the story of the boy who hated kreplach but who loved all the component parts of kreplach. Pynchon here explicitly pays attention to the process of decomposition and segmentation that I have been referring to as the schizophrenic process. Slothrop has been sent to witness his own assembly, to understand himself as a series of parts. But he is being broken down instead. He has no agency himself, he is caught in a paranoiac assembly, but a paranoiac assembly with a schizophrenic function, to break down and to be broken. But it is not truly Slothrop who is schizophrenic, it is the schizoid forces that created him, on two levels of analysis that the passage provides the reader: the paranoiac structure that governed his life, here referred to as “the Counterforce,” is revealed to be strangely schizoid; They were not interested in Slothrop in himself, but it is left unclear what They were interested in. Indeed, the spokesman for the Counterforce then makes the archetypal Schizoid statement: “Opinion even at the start was divided” (738). More importantly, Slothrop was created by Pynchon’s language, exactly the same way the Counterforce was — by Pynchon’s recordings on the page. In this passage, as in many others, Pynchon reveals his project to us, his games of signification and deterritorialization. The tarot deck is here invoked as a model system of signification, like language, prescribed by some authority (A.E. Waite invented and designed the modern tarot deck. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that his name sounds so much like “white,” but it would fit neatly into the paradigm I have just constructed, where the white man gets to create a language and impose it on his subjects by claiming a metaphysical order of signification that only he had access to). The tarot cards as units of signification are deterritorialized simply by being signifiers in an alternative system of signs. Because the signifiers are deterritorialized away from their significance, they are productive and functional for Slothrop and for Pynchon himself. The signifier, even without meaning, is enough to “send you to the tube.” That “you” seems to refer directly to Pynchon himself; he seems to be telling the reader that the effort he has expended on creating the set of signifiers of Slothrop’s life promised him only a scuffling future and mediocrity. The schizoid pun in this statement is unavoidable; “Scuffling” was one of Slothrop’s identities. Pynchon has built Slothrop out of paranoiac significators, and the exercise seems to Pynchon to be somewhat futile and mediocre because they do not allow Slothrop the promise of escape or greatness; liberation is not in his cards. But I am arguing that because they are just cards — just signifiers, deterritorialized from meaning — there may be hope for the reader of the novel to find a mode of escape in them while Slothrop is condemned to his mediocre paranoia. By this point in the novel, the reader is sensing the end nearing; they have slogged through over seven hundred confusing and deterritorialized pages that seem to have no meaning, no message. And so the reader is in a position to recognize that the signifiers of the Tarot cards only have meaning because they have no meaning at all; that they are only functional as much as Slothrop (or even Pynchon) let the cards into his head and his action. Through all the paranoia in this passage and in the seven hundred and thirty seven preceeding pages, the reader has begun to question and take apart the functionality of the paranoiac They-systems, and in so doing have begun their own schizophrenic process of political decomposition. The reader has agonized about paranoiac systems in his or her own life, and has decided whether or not to empathize with Slothrop’s paranoia. And in so doing, he or she has begun his own schizophrenic process of decomposition and self-critical analysis. And I believe that this is incredibly useful in a political sense, that enough of this self-aware and schizoid thought can lead to a genuine escape from Them and Their structures of power. However, this speculation on the experience of the reader is only conjecture, based primarily on my own experience with the novel, and I can only hope that reading this far into this essay has shaped your experience of it.
Yet I can say that Gravity’s Rainbow is considered the quintessential postmodern novel, and thus I consider it to have some real bearing upon our postmodern world: the systems of power that produce Slothrop as a subject have analogies to the systems of power that produce us as subjects in a capitalist world. According to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is inherently schizoid, and it manufactures schizoid individuals, myself included. I am not schizophrenic, but I am schizoid because I have been produced by a part of the Capitalist system; the real operation and production of individuals by segments of capital (for example, media, advertising, law, education) ought to be studied using Deleuze and Guattari’s framework. But perhaps if I cease to rebel against it, and allow myself to form an independent schizoid consciousness, I will be able to find my own avenue of escape, which will in turn perforate others’ already segmented experience of life on the Capitalist body.