Graduate Student Prize: Abstracts from Fall 2007
This space is provided for Graduate Student Prize papers. It is updated after each conference, and features a new conference paper from a different participant every other month. Please see below for the fall 2007 Graduate Student Prize winner's submission by Mary Foltz.
Congrats to winner, Mary Foltz! Kudos to Honorable Mentions Sarah Cambell, Ronan Crowley, Theresa Couchman, Alessandro Porco, and Kara Manning!!! We wish Mary, Sarah, Ronan, Theresa, Alessandro, and Kara the best of luck in all their future endeavors!
Interested in submitting work for the Graduate Student Prize? The deadline for the fall 2008 conference at St. Bonaventure is September 15th. Please email your completed paper of NO MORE than 9 double-spaced pages to Rebecca Housel: housereb@rochester.rr.com
And now, to this month's featured essay: Please check under "Editorials, Essays & More" for one of Honorable Mention, Kara Manning's, impressive essays.
“Going Down the Tubes: Thomas Pynchon’s Narrative Digressions into the Realm of Sewage”
Abstract: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is littered with scenes of toiletry and figures of excrement. While critics of GR focus on the role of obscene language, few have explored his narrative digressions into bodily waste, which reveal practices of excretion as the key to understanding the violence of contemporary subjects. Moving past eco-critics who outline the impact of sewage, Pynchon investigates why we destroy the world with waste by allowing readers to sink into the national effluent and to focus on that which we deny in narratives of identity. Thus, Tyrone Slothrop’s journey down the toilet of the Roseland Ballroom is not merely a comic adventure that displays a complicit critique of wasting but also calls us to learn about our subjectivity in light of the abject. A student of Freudian theory, Pynchon reveals that our violence lies in our obsession with separating ourselves from the “organic,” “natural” world. Secondly, he shows how we reiterate difference in a fecal and urinary bombing of the environment, by saturating the “natural” world with our excreta. Thirdly, fearing the power of the world united with excess to disrupt a narrative of civilization’s difference from “organic” matter, we engineer order. Pynchon also connects scenes of toiletry to the construction of racial difference; an association with the excess of whiteness creates multiple Others. In order to alter this violent process, Pynchon encourages us to plumb our sewage systems and to explore our bodily digressions in order to find “freedom in the wastes of the World” (588).
Thomas Pynchon’s novels are littered with the multiple wastes of our national body: crumpled paper and cardboard littering the streets, the dead and dying who no longer work but haunt national healthcare debates or discourses of war, homeless communities who live off the leftovers of our major cities, and even human excrement. With the W.A.S.T.E. system of The Crying of Lot 49, the mined and “wasted” “natural” world of Vineland, and the numerous scenes of toiletry in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon refuses to ignore the abject and instead invites us to dip into the stink of the western civilization’s excess. These narrative digressions into detritus move past eco-critical outlines of the violent impact of waste on our environment in order to explore the subjectivity of contemporary execretors. In short, Pynchon asks why we are destroying the world with our waste.
As the title of this paper suggests, today I will follow the infamous Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow as he goes down the toilet of the Roseland Ballroom. His journey into our underworld is not merely a comic adventure that displays a complicit critique of wasting but also calls us to learn about our subjectivity in light of the abject. A student of Freudian theory, Pynchon reveals that our violence lies in our obsession with separating ourselves from the “organic,” “natural” world. Secondly, he shows how we reiterate difference in a fecal and urinary bombing of the environment, by saturating the “natural” world with our excreta. Thirdly, fearing the power of the world united with excess to disrupt a narrative of civilization’s difference from “organic” matter, we engineer order. Further, Pynchon uses the metaphor of our sewage systems in order to outline the construction of racial difference; an association with the excess of whiteness creates multiple Others. In order to alter this violent process, Pynchon encourages us to plumb our sewage systems and to explore our bodily digressions in order to find “freedom in the wastes of the World” (588). Finally, he encourages the reader to embrace the decomposition of the self and to come up with ways of excreting that are not violent, but instead allow the self to unite with “the flux of excrement.” For Pynchon, both our attack on the environment and our persistent delineation of racial difference stem from a “civilized” subjectivity that seeks to bury excess in the bodies of Others.
In a scene preceding Slothrop’s journey down a toilet in the Roseland Ballroom, Pynchon explores the violent practices of erecting white identity over and against the bodies of both Native Americans and African Americans and later associates the construction of whiteness with systems of sewage that push excess to the margins. When the government puts him under light narcosis, Slothrop travels to the Ballroom and sees “white college boys” enjoying swing music birthed from African American clubs and translated for the consumption of Harvard students: he witnesses the production of whiteness as a repetitive dance on top of the bodies of racial others. British born Ray Noble’s “Cherokee” “comes wailing up from the dance floor below, over the hi-hat, the string bass, the thousand sets of feet where moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song playing is one more lie about white crimes” (63). As Steven Weisenburger notes, Noble’s song praises a “sweet Indian maiden,” imagines her “love [that] keeps calling,” and expresses a desire to “hold her” (54). Yet, beneath this melody of “love” is the history of Cherokee maidens marching toward death or to a “wasteland” “reserved” for their occupation. There is no “trail of tears” in Noble’s hit, but only an erection pointing through each verse at a body defined by its constant desire for penetration. From Slothrop’s position as voyeur, he strays from the narrative melody of conquest in order to uncover “a lie about white crimes.” He begins to listen to the underside of the lyrical identity and to hear the groans of the bodies excreted in a cleansed narrative of history.[i]
As Slothrop begins to hear the underside of the white history in relationship to the Cherokee body, he also comes to a deeper understanding of the racial dynamics of service and pleasure in the Ballroom. The dancers who “reel” and “roister” to the cleansed nationalist rhythm also enjoy the pleasure of “two bartenders, a very fair West Indian, slight, with a mustache, and his running-mate black as a hand in an evening glove, [who] are moving endlessly in front of the deep, the oceanic mirror that swallows most of the room in metal shadows” (62). Further, men tired from the dance, can visit the upstairs bathroom where “Red” (a young Malcolm X) will shine their shoes and sell them condoms. While their “prep-school voices” resound and their feet spin, the dancers are surrounded by African American bodies flushed from the dance floor and into spaces of service: bathrooms and kitchens. Those who bear the marking of “white shit” are segregated from the space of enjoyment, yet may return to pleasure the white body in the reassertion of difference.
If Slothrop enjoyed evenings at the Roseland Ballroom with Harvard chums before the war, he no longer experiences pleasure as he slips beneath the melody of whiteness and begins to see the excessive bodies on which “the lie” of difference is built. His own racial identity, once confirmed in dance with friends, starts to fade; “Slothrop can’t even see his own white face. A woman turns to look at him from a table. Her eyes tell him, in an instant, what he is” (62). Tyrone Slothrop is a white man, a voyeur or spy, sent to witness the pleasure of white subjects in a mad gyration to a cleansed early jazz music devoid of political critique and therefore ripe for consumption. Still, he is also a sinking white subject who feels “the mouth harp in his pocket [revert] to brass inertia. A weight. A jive accessory” (62-63). The instrument, which inspires the identifying song of self, becomes strange and heavy once he hears the sounds beneath the narrative melody. Further, Slothrop, from his doorway position, comes to see the ballroom from the position of a young Malcolm X, as he, too, stood in awe of the racial dynamics of the Roseland. Standing with “Red” in the doorway, he can’t “enjoy” the scene, but instead experiences nausea; “upstairs in the men’s room at the Roseland Ballroom he swoons kneeling over a toilet bowl, vomiting beer, hamburgers, homefries, chef’s salad with French dressing, half a bottle of Moxie, [and] after dinner mints” (63). The food served by African American laborers can no longer sit in peace in Slothrop’s intestinal tract. Along with his lunch, Slothrop loses his instrument of song to
the loathsome toilet! Immediate little bubbles slide up its bright flanks, up brown wood surfaces, some varnished some lip-worn, these fine silver seeds stripping loose along the harp’s descent toward stone-white cervix and into lower night . . . the low reeds singing an instant on striking porcelain . . . then quenched in the water streaked with the last bile-brown coils of his vomit. There’s no calling it back. Either he lets the harp go, his silver chances of song, or he has to follow. (63)
The loss of the harp represents a letting go of white songs of identity and an embracing of the excremental aria that turns harmony into cacophony.[ii] Looking into the toilet and “following” his harp. Slothrop hears an explosion of “Cherokee:”
all those long, long notes . . . what’re they up to, all that time to do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot? Down in New York . . . “Yardbird” Parker is find out how he can use the notes at the higher ends of these very chords to break up the melody into have mercy what is it a fucking machine gun . . . shit, out in all kinds of streets . . . his bird’s singing, to gainsay that Man’s lullabies. . . So, that prophecy, even up here on rainy Massachusetts Avenue, is beginning these days to work itself out in “Cherokee,” the saxes downstairs getting now into some, oh really weird shit. (63-64)
Musicians, like Charlie Parker, enter into the harmonic, sing-song tunes that fuel the dance of whiteness in order to blast the song into chaos and to allow the voices of the dead as well as those removed to the margins to reveal those who are excreted from the drone of history. Beginning with a tune familiar to audiences, the sax players move away from the comforting lullaby in order to create “weird shit” or to allow the excess of the lyrical subject to seep and to scream through in a “dum-de dumming” called scat (63).[iii] If the white dancers swing in time with “Cherokee,” there is also the possibility that they might experience pleasure in the wild saxophones and further become entranced with dancing in time with the speaking “shit” of history. They might bend over to become “all asshole” (as does Slothrop) and to find pleasure in ruptured melodies that penetrate the body, that make the self move and dance differently in a type of ego-shattering (64).
Although Slothrop fears and attempts to avoid the movement of a song of self into chaos, he has also experienced pleasure in the song exploded. He decides to follow his harp down the toilet “for the sake of tunes to be played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to be bent from the official frequencies” (65-66). He longs to create a melody of excremental whiteness; he yearns for a music birthed from the underground and spewing forth from bathroom stalls. Still, the aural penetration and inspiration of the body by a Charlie Parker is one thing, while the anal penetration of the body by Malcolm X is quite another; “If Slothrop follows the harp down the toilet it’ll have to be headfirst, which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up in the air helpless, and with Negroes around that’s just what a fella doesn’t want, his face down in some fetid unknown darkness and brown fingers, strong and sure, all at once undoing his belt, unbuttoning his fly, strong hands holding his legs apart” (64). This quotation can be read as a paranoid fear of the power of the black phallus to disrupt narrative of white power. Indeed, Slothrop flees from “a thick finger with a gob of very slippery jelly or cream [that] comes sliding down the crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs along like topo lines up a river valley” (64). Even in his escape down the toilet, Slothrop continues to differentiate between white shit and “Negro” shit, until “there comes a godawful surge from up the line, noise growing like a tidal wave, a jam-packed wavefront of shit, vomit, toilet paper and dingleberries in a mind-boggling mosaic” (66). Here, all excrement becomes one in a wave that knocks Slothrop from his ability to recognize difference. The “cylinder of waste has wiped him out, dark as cold beef gelatin along his upper backbone, the paper snapping up, wrapping across his lips, his nostrils, everything gone and shit-stinking now as he has to keep beating micro-turds out of his eyelashes” (66). Unlike his abandonment of self to the rupturing sounds of early jazz music, Slothrop cannot entirely let go to this experience of “weird shit.” Resting after the wave has rushed him toward a city in the bowels of the earth, he feels a “Negro dingleberry—stubborn as a wintertime booger as he probes for it. His fingernails draw blood” (67). After the wiping away of self in an excremental tide, Slothrop returns to a corporeal wholeness by violently dragging the organic matter of the racially marked other from his body. So adamant is he that he worries not for the damage to his own body as he desperately separates himself from excrement.
Yet, he does see that those who dwell in the city’s sewage system refuse this type of violent removal of excrement from the body and instead enjoy the push and flow of excrement; they thrive in that which others pick out from their bodies like Slothrop’s now bloodied “Negro” turd. Slothrop “stands outside their communal rooms and spaces . . . . He can only feel his isolation. They want him inside there but he can’t join them. Something prevents him: once inside, it would be like taking a blood oath. They would never release him. There are no guarantees he might not be asked to do something . . . something so . . .” (67). He is isolated from this community because he feels compelled to separate himself from the organic flow of the world. Slothrop knows that joining the community would require giving up his coherent identity for “something so” much like the confusion of self found in the pleasure of jazz music, “something so” abhorrent and yet so potentially pleasurable as uniting the self with the lubed penis of Malcolm X, something so horrific and yet desirable as becoming the Freudian child pierced again and again by the pleasures of worldly stimulus traveling into his mouth, nose, and anus.
Perhaps because Slothrop won’t abandon his ego-identity in order to join this community, he is given a vision of the old West that reconfirms his initial insights into the racial dynamics of the Ballroom and that reveal the “traditional American tune” of the violent erection of national identity. Moving past the communal spaces where bodies shift and sway with the flow of sewage, Slothrop discovers Crouchfield, the “White Cocksman” who does “it with both sexes and all animals” (69). Crouchfield’s song is Noble’s “Cherokee” in that he erects his identity through the splayed and open body of racially marked others and through animal bodies associated with a wild, unruly environment. Still, this vision of Crouchfield does not indulge in lyrics of love but instead shows “a shootout . . . bloody as hell. The wind will be blowing so hard blood will glaze on the north side of the trees” (69). Thus, the eroticism of Noble’s song is revealed in an erection that like a gun asks for the other to behave and then eliminates the body that won’t submit.
This experience of the old West takes place in the Red River Valley and thus brings the reader back to the moment in which Malcolm X makes Slothrop crack into a river valley: the moment in which “Red” claims Slothrop’s body. Like the imagined music of Charlie Parker that leads the white listener into pleasurable rupture of standard melody of self, Malcolm X’s body makes Slothrop into a valley in which he might experience the story of a movement westward through a different lens. “In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his face, each of the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the connection he’s traveled all this way to see” (71). This, then, is Malcolm X’s gift to Slothrop: the ability to see a “home on the range” as violent erection of whiteness through a subduing, removal and murder of a Native American other. Further, Slothrop comes to understand race as a “scar” created in a battle of differentiation. Malcolm’s sweet thrust sings to him, moves him, and leaves him wondering about the pleasures in letting go of his erection and letting the voices and bodies of others emerge from the toilet and rush into him.[iv]
This is, of course, how our encounter with Slothrop ends; he abandons the self to the world in an excremental scattering. Reflecting on the earlier scene in the Roseland Ballroom, our narrator imagines a place where there is no difference between “Shit and Shinola,” no way to distinguish bodies that are allowed the privilege of excretion and bodies that must labor in “shining” the shoes of excretors.
Well there’s one place where Shit and Shinola come together, and that’s in the men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet . . . . Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman’s warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what the white toilet’s for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of gravestones, classical columns or mausoleums, that white porcelain’s the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm’s in the toilet slappin’ on Shinola, working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit and Shinola. (688)
Here, Pynchon shows how the white subject makes a coherent self through the flushing of “organic” excess, in the burying of “shit” in a tomb. Further, Malcolm is the “turd” who must be confined to labor for his “sin” of wearing the stain of excess. Still, Pynchon imagines Malcolm’s labor as returning excrement to the white subject:
It is nice to think that one Saturday night . . . Malcolm looked up from some Harvard kid’s shoes and caught the eye of Jack Kennedy . . . . Did Red suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just enough to let white Jack see through, not through to but through through the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop’s shoes? Were they ever lined up that way—sitting, squatting, passing through? (688)
What if the white subject didn’t see “through to” erect his difference in the shine on his shoes, to recognize self in opposition to a shiny blackness? Without seeing his face reflected out to him, he might relinquish his hold on identity and become the excrement the he so adamantly wishes to push to the margins and bury. Tyrone and Jack might focus on the parts of themselves lost to the toilet grave; they might follow themselves down the drain and into the grave of identity. They might revel in anal play with Malcolm, all three men pushing into the bodies of each other and avoiding the violence of narcissistic reflection.[v]
If Slothrop’s scattering involves “passing through” the toilet grave and opening up for others to pleasure one site of his decomposition, it also requires a reunion with the “natural” world. “He likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain, getting to know shrikes and capercaillie, badgers and marmots” (623). No longer able to distinguish the self from a racially marked other, Slothrop refuses to wear garments as armor against potential invaders. His body becomes a picnic for ants and butterflies; he claims furry mammals as his closest acquaintances. Without acting as hunter, without a personal pesticide, he gives up the fight with the “organic” and finds pleasure in the porousness of his body open now to worldly stimulus.[vi] This penetrated subject who revels in the body as hole and enjoys the multiple ways in which the world might pass through him is Pynchon’s ethical excremental subject.
Slothrop stands in opposition to the White Cocksman Crouchfield or the military machine of the U.S. in its approach on Hiroshima, which is also explored in the novel. Throughout the narrative, he cannot sustain the erection of identity through a wasting of the body of an enemy; instead, Slothrop finds unexpected arousal on the sites where cohesive identity is challenged or where he encounters “droppings of the Beast.” In the bathroom of the Roseland Ballroom or even in his early encounters with the devastation of the German bombs in London, Slothrop experiences desire at the revelation of the Other’s phallic turd; he sees the “sky, beaten like Death’s drum, still humming, and [his] cock—say what? Yes lookit inside his GI undershorts here’s a sneaky hardon stirring, ready to jump—well great God where’d that come from?” (26) This unlikely erection is what makes Slothrop horrific for other military personnel as Ned Pointsman notes, “There can be no doubt that he [Slothrop] is, physiologically, historically, a monster” (144). For if more were to desire a closeness to the excremental body that is the Other, war might cease to exist; instead, adult male subjects would pass through each other without harm in an effort to share an original pleasure in scattering and being filled. Pynchon asks through this depiction of Slothrop, what if the subject refused to let go of its excess and began to experience pleasure in his connection with waste? In an enjoyment of floating in the wastes of the world, Pynchon suggests we might “be restored to the Earth” and “find freedom” (588). Through a joining with excess and recognizing the self’s perpetual decomposition, we are free from the battle of differentiation, the battle that requires the renunciation of pleasurable penetration by multiple worldly others. We are free to live decomposed.[vii]
[i]See Kyle Smith “‘Serving Interests Invisible’: Mason & Dixon, British Spy Fiction, and the Specters of Imperialism.” He argues, “Gravity’s Rainbow utilizes the spy genre’s uncertainties to reveal the imperial Self as the true enemy, and to show how the imperial Self constructs various Others using its own fears and fantasies. The enemy in GR might be termed variously the Raketenstaadt, the West, corporate America, the imperial Self, or the State. The encompassing, and yet most specific term to describe this is Whiteness” (187). I concur with Smith’s assessment and stretch this argument past “fears and fantasies” to the process whereby white excrement comes to stain the body of the Other. Still, for Smith, Pynchon does not offer any alternatives to this imperial movement of Whiteness. Instead, “in GR one of the strategies to oppose whiteness is to make it visible both by bringing attention to the way it structures reality and making visible the Others it ignores” (191). I counter this claim by asserting that the construction of whiteness does not “ignore” the bodies of the Others, but constantly concerns itself with “wasting” the Other. Smith concludes that “the use of strategies of the spy novel in Pynchon’s texts convey attention to the crisis of representation . . . they do nothing to represent the invisible any further than to show how Whiteness tries to prevent forces from existing it cannot control” (195). I insist that Pynchon does offer the reader an alternative ethical position: refusal to waste the body of another through violent excretion and instead a focus on making the self unite with its waste.
[ii] See Christopher Ames “Power and the Obscene Word; Discourses of Extremity in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’” (Contemporary literature, volume 31, No.2 (Summer, 1990, 191-207). He writes, “Any reader of Gravity’s Rainbow must notice how dramatically Pynchon dichotomizes the world of his novel—from the capitalized collective nouns of “They” and “Us,” “Elect and “Preterite,” “Force and “Counterforce” to the subtler oppositions between zero and one, war and peace, and technology and waste. The axis that divides humanity in Pynchon’s novel is power. No other category so clearly grasps the essential division, the true war, that separates the antithetical parties. The equation epitomizes the dynamics of the privileged discourse of power; the language of the powerless takes the shape of obscene statements of profanations” (193).
[iii] See Ames, C. “ . . . the essential force of scatology and obscenity—the exposing of what should be hidden, the voicing of what should be silent, and the association of those forces of the oppressed. Obscenity’s capacity for shock, deface, or disgust grants its meaning as transgression. Obscene grafitti, which appears in several contexts in Gravity’s Rainbow, foregrounds several of the ways in which obscenity represents the language of the Preterite . . . . Yet by its very nature it defaces, communicates through an illicit medium. It is characteristic of the social margins that expression comes to be conceived of as the defacing of existing structures” (199). While Ames sees the power of obscenity to “deface existing structures,” I argue that Pynchon’s ultimate goal is not inversion; he does not look for a language that will perpetuate a system of violent excretion whereby those who enjoy association with whiteness might be eliminated. If his focus is not inversion (or transgression), he presents a character who desires a closeness with his own excrement, not for the sake of revolt, but because he finds something so pleasurable in that contact that he is driven to become one with his waste.
[iv] See Stefan Mattessich. Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Slothrop may be Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal subject who is “no longer a centered subject structure in a rationalized world but a field of force, experiencing its own self-identity as a spatial coextension with an intrinsically hallucinatory ‘outside.’ It does not lack the objects of its desire because those objects fall within the field it also is by virtue of it inclusive unity, which is why the positivity of that desire manifests itself in terms of ‘desiring–production,’ a production of production itself according to the ‘law’ of an identity between production and product.” (137) I agree with Mattessich that Pynchon is critiquing a masochism: “Ths masochism of this passage is nearer to its standards form than its ‘visionary reconfiguration’ (by Deleuze) and designates quite distinctly an axiomated condition of being: caught in the identificatory meshes of a familiarized desire, impersonating power and the law in a mode of a perpetual insufficiency (attempting to kill the father who never dies because desire is usurpative in nature), addicted to a commodified exchange that promises ‘comfort’ and delivers the docile subject, the masochist here represents the (male) type of social repression. He is oppressed by the difference between his desire (fantasy consumption and consummation) and his own production (by men of power who ‘define’ him as self-alienated)” (153-154). Pynchon writes (I think) against masochism as this subject longs for punishment by the law and a continued differentiation between self and the master/father. Instead, he formulates an ethical subject who becomes waste, not as a type of punishment, but in a worldly embrace, an overwhelming organic orgasm described by Bersani as “ego-shattering.” I think I am in agreement with Mattessich and the difference between our arguments lies in focus. “The process of de-voiltion that can be traced most clearly in the destiny reserved for Tyrone Slothrop could be said to mirror the text’s own de-voilition, the movement of its deteritorializaion that verges on breakdown, silence, even a kind of autism” (157). While he outlines the ways in which the text dissolves, I look at the body that falls apart and becomes waste.
[v]John F. Kennedy is important to Pynchon here because of his participation in WWII in the Pacific theatre. As the novel ends with the bombing of Hiroshima, Kennedy becomes the connection between the old west and the bombing of the Japanese.
[vi] See Madeline Ostrander, “Awakening to the Physical World; ideological Collapse and Ecofeminist Resistance in Vineland.” She writes, “The novel problematizes all ideologies based on binary thought. Instead, it points to a reclaiming of the material, the natural, and the bodily as a form of resistance. In its attempt to integrate the rational and spiritual with the natural, Vineland’s narrative resembles an ecofeminist reconstruction of experience. It, like ecofeminist thought, points toward the equal and mutual roles of nature, the body, the material, and the feminine with the spiritual and rational in forming human experience” (122). It would be fruitful to explore the connections between Pynchon’s multiple wastes found throughout his oevre: The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, etc.
[vii] On Slothrop’s final scattering “As some secrets were given to the Gypsies 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 of 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 out to be a punch line to it, but there isn’t. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered” (738). “ ‘Dying a weird death,’ Slothrop’s Visitor by this time may be scrawled lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human being out on the road, ‘the object of life is to make sure you dies a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life. . . .” (742)
“Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering.” (742)
“Listening to the Toilet”—This section begins right after Slothrop’s vision of the bomb moving towards Hiroshima. The bomb’s impact is compared to a shutting off of the other’s toilet and “hosing the place out.” War is revealed to be a process of eliminating the Other’s capacity to waste or to disallow the movement of waste out from the Other. This discussion of the toilet is littered with the interjections of Japanese as the bomb moves in to take their lives.