Authors: Thomas Pynchon
They all talk effectiveness, an American heresy, perhaps overmuch at “The White Visitation.”
Loudest of all, usually, is Mr. Pointsman, often using for ammo statistics provided
him by Roger Mexico. By the time of the Normandy landing, Pointsman’s season of despair
was well upon him. He came to understand that the great continental pincers was to
be, after all, a success. That this war, this State he’d come to feel himself a citizen
of, was to be adjourned and reconstituted as a peace—and that, professionally speaking,
he’d hardly got a thing out of it. With funding available for all manner of radars,
magic torpedoes, aircraft and missiles, where was Pointsman in the scheme of things?
He’d had a moment’s stewardship, that was all: his Abreaction Research Facility (ARF),
early on snaring himself a dozen underlings, dog trainer from the variety stage, veterinary
student or two, even a major prize, the refugee Dr. Porkyevitch, who worked with Pavlov
himself at the Koltushy institute, back before the purge trials. Together the ARF
team receive, number, weigh, classify by Hippocratic temperament, cage, and presently
experiment on as many as a dozen fresh dogs a week. And there are one’s colleagues,
co-owners of The Book, all now—all those left of the original seven—working in hospitals
handling the battle-fatigued and shell-shocked back from across the Channel, and the
bomb- or rocket-happy this side. They get to watch more abreactions, during these
days of heavy V-bombardment, than doctors of an earlier day were apt to see in several
lifetimes, and they are able to suggest ever new lines of inquiry. P.W.E. allows a
stingy dribble of money, desperate paper whispering down the corporate lattice, enough
to get by on, enough that ARF remains a colony to the metropolitan war, but not enough
for nationhood. . . . Mexico’s statisticians chart for it drops of saliva, body weights,
voltages, sound levels, metronome frequencies, bromide dosages, number of afferent
nerves cut, percentages of brain tissue removed, dates and hours of numbing, deafening,
blinding, castration. Support even comes from Psi Section, a colony
dégagé
and docile, with no secular aspirations at all.
Old Brigadier Pudding can live with this spiritualist gang well enough, he’s tendencies
himself in that direction. But Ned Pointsman, with his constant scheming after more
money—Pudding can only stare back at the man, try to be civil. Not as tall as his
father, certainly not as wholesome looking. Father was M.O. in Thunder Prodd’s regiment,
caught a bit of shrapnel in the thigh at Polygon Wood, lay silent for seven hours
before they, without a word before, in that mud, that terrible smell, in, yes Polygon
Wood . . . or was that—who
was
the ginger-haired chap who slept with his hat on? ahhh, come back. Now Polygon Wood . . .
but it’s fluttering away. Fallen trees, dead, smooth gray, swirlinggrainoftreelikefrozensmoke . . .
ginger . . . thunder . . . no use, no bleeding use, it’s gone, another gone, another,
oh dear . . .
The old Brigadier’s age is uncertain, though he must be pushing 80—reactivated in
1940, set down in a new space not only of battlefield—where the front each day or
hour changes like a noose, like the gold-lit borders of consciousness (perhaps, though
it oughtn’t to get too sinister here,
exactly like them
. . . better, then, “like a noose”)—but also of the War-state itself, its very structure.
Pudding finds himself wondering, at times aloud and in the presence of subordinates,
what enemy disliked him enough to assign him to Political Warfare. One is supposed
to be operating in concert—yet too often in amazing dissonance—with other named areas
of the War, colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic
death: P.W.E. laps over onto the Ministry of Information, the BBC European Service,
the Special Operations Executive, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the F.O. Political
Intelligence Department at Fitzmaurice House. Among others. When the Americans came
in, their OSS, OWI, and Army Psychological Warfare Department had also to be coordinated
with. Presently there arose the joint, SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division (PWD),
reporting direct to Eisenhower, and to hold it all together a London Propaganda Coordinating
Council, which has no real power at all.
Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid and dotted, boxes
big and small, names printed and memorized? Not Ernest Pudding—that’s for the New
Chaps with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed
in American politics (knowing the difference between the New Dealers of OWI and the
eastern and moneyed Republicans behind OSS), keeping brain-dossiers on latencies,
weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all, all who might someday be useful.
Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen
of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse
him. His greatest triumph on the battlefield came in 1917, in the gassy, Armageddonite
filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man’s land some 40 yards
at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit. He was pensioned off around
the beginning of the Great Depression—went to sit in the study of an empty house in
Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades, none of whose gazes quite met one’s own,
there to go at a spot of combinatorial analysis, that favorite pastime of retired
Army officers, with a rattling intense devotion.
It occurred to him to focus his hobby on the European balance of power, because of
whose long pathology he had once labored, deeply, all hope of waking lost, in the
nightmare of Flanders. He started in on a mammoth work entitled
Things That Can Happen in European Politics.
Begin, of course, with England. “First,” he wrote, “Bereshith, as it were: Ramsay
MacDonald can die.” By the time he went through resulting party alignments and possible
permutations of cabinet posts, Ramsay MacDonald had died. “Never make it,” he found
himself muttering at the beginning of each day’s work—“it’s changing out from under
me. Oh, dodgy—very dodgy.”
When it had changed as far as German bombs falling on England, Brigadier Pudding gave
up his obsession and again volunteered his services to his country. Had he known at
the time it would mean “The White Visitation” . . . not that he’d expected a combat
assignment you know, but wasn’t there something mentioned about intelligence work?
Instead he found a disused hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics, an enormous
pack of stolen dogs, cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians,
Couéists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots,
all exiled by the outbreak of war from pet schemes and manias damned, had the peace
prolonged itself, to differing degrees of failure—but their hopes
now
focusing on Brigadier Pudding and possibilities for funding: more hope than Prewar,
that underdeveloped province, ever offered. Pudding could only respond by adopting
rather an Old Testament style with everyone, including the dogs, and remaining secretly
baffled and hurt by what he imagined as treachery high inside Staff.
Snowlight comes in through tall, many-paned windows, a dark day, a light burning only
here and there among the brown offices. Subalterns encrypt, blindfolded subjects call
Zener-deck guesses to hidden microphones: “Waves . . . Waves . . . Cross . . . Star . . .”
While someone from Psi Section records them from a speaker down in the cold basement.
Secretaries in woolen shawls and rubber galoshes shiver with the winter cold being
inhaled through the madhouse’s many crevices, their typewriter keys chattery as their
pearlies. Maud Chilkes, who looks from the rear rather like Cecil Beaton’s photograph
of Margot Asquith, sits dreaming of a bun and a cup of tea.
In the ARF wing, the stolen dogs sleep, scratch, recall shadowy smells of humans who
may have loved them, listen undrooling to Ned Pointsman’s oscillators and metronomes.
The drawn shades allow only mild passages of light from outdoors. Technicians are
moving behind the thick observation window, but their robes, greenish and submarine
through the glass, flutter more slowly, less brightly. . . . A numbness has taken
over, or a felt darkening. The metronome at 80 per second breaks out in wooden echoes,
and Dog Vanya, bound atop the test stand, begins to salivate. All other sounds are
damped severely: the beams underpinning the lab smothered in sand-filled rooms, sandbags,
straw, uniforms of dead men occupying the spaces between the windowless walls . . .
where the country bedlamites sat around, scowling, sniffing nitrous oxide, giggling,
weeping at an E-major chord modulating to a G-sharp minor, now are cubical deserts,
sand-rooms, keeping the metronome sovereign here in the lab, behind the iron doors,
closed hermetically.
The duct of Dog Vanya’s submaxillary gland was long ago carried out the bottom of
his chin through an incision and sutured in place, leading saliva outside to the collecting
funnel, fixed there with the traditional orange Pavlovian Cement of rosin, iron oxide
and beeswax. Vacuum brings the secretion along through shining tubework to displace
a column of light red oil, moving to the right along a scale marked off in “drops”—an
arbitrary unit, probably not the same as the actually fallen drops of 1905, of St.
Petersburg. But the number of drops, for this lab and Dog Vanya and the metronome
at 80, is each time predictable.
Now that he has moved into “equivalent” phase, the first of the transmarginal phases,
a membrane, hardly noticeable, stretches between Dog Vanya and the outside. Inside
and outside remain just as they were, but the
interface
—the cortex of Dog Vanya’s brain—is changing, in any number of ways, and that is the
really peculiar thing about these transmarginal events. It no longer matters now how
loudly the metronome ticks. A stronger stimulus no longer gets a stronger response.
The same number of drops flow or fall. The man comes and removes the metronome to
the farthest corner of this muffled room. It is placed inside a box, beneath a pillow
with the machine-sewn legend
Memories of Brighton,
but the drops do not fall off . . . then played into a microphone and amplifier so
that each tick fills the room up like a shout, but the drops do not increase. Every
time, the clear saliva pushes the red line over only to the same mark, the same number
of drops. . . .
Webley Silvernail and Rollo Groast go sneaky-Peteing away down the corridors, nipping
into people’s offices to see if there are any smokable fag-ends to be looted. Most
offices right now are empty: all personnel with the patience or masochism for it are
going through a bit of ritual with the doddering Brigadier.
“That old-man
has,
no-
shame,
” Géza Rózsavölgyi, another refugee (and violently anti-Soviet, which creates a certain
strain with ARF) flicking his hands up Brigadier Puddingward in gay despair, the lilting
Hungarian gypsy-whisper bashing like tambourines all around the room, provoking, in
one way or another, everyone here except for the aged Brigadier himself, who just
goes rambling on from the pulpit of what was a private chapel once, back there on
the maniac side of the 18th century, and is now a launching platform for “The Weekly
Briefings,” a most amazing volley of senile observations, office paranoia, gossip
about the War which might or might not include violations of security, reminiscences
of Flanders . . . the coal boxes in the sky coming straight down on you with a roar . . .
the drumfire so milky and luminous on his birthday night . . . the wet surfaces in
the shell craters for miles giving back one bleak autumn sky . . . what Haig, in the
richness of his wit, once said at mess about Lieutenant Sassoon’s refusal to fight . . .
the gunners in springtime, in their flowing green robes . . . roadsides of poor rotting
horses just before apricot sunrise . . . the twelve spokes of a stranded artillery
piece—a mud clock, a mud zodiac, clogged and crusted as it stood in the sun its many
shades of brown. The mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied
textures of human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked leagues of shit
in all directions, not even the poor blackened stump of a tree—and the old blithering
gab-artist tries to shake the cherrywood pulpit here, as if that had been the worst
part of the whole Passchendaele horror, that absence of vertical interest. . . . On
he goes, gabbing, gabbing, recipes for preparing beets in a hundred tasty ways, or
such cucurbitaceous improbabilities as Ernest Pudding’s Gourd Surprise—yes, there
is
something sadistic about recipes with “Surprise” in the title, chap who’s hungry
wants to just
eat
you know, not be Surprised really, just wants to bite into the (sigh) the old potato,
and be reasonably sure there’s nothing inside
but
potato you see, certainly not some clever nutmeg “Surprise!”, some mashed pulp all
magenta with
pomegranates
or something . . . well but this is just the doubtful sort of joke that Brigadier
Pudding loves to play: how he’s
chuckled,
as unsuspecting dinner-guests go knifing into his notorious Toad-in-the-Hole, through
the honest Yorkshire batter into—
ugh!
what is it? a beet
rissolé?
a
stuffed
beet
rissolé?
or perhaps today some lovely pureed samphire, reeking of the sea (which he obtains
once a week from the same fat fishmonger’s son wheeling his bicycle, puffing, up the
chalkwhite cliff)—none of these odd, odd vegetable rissoles do resemble any ordinary
“Toad,” but rather the depraved, half-sentient creatures that Young Chaps from Kings
Road have Affairs With in limericks—Pudding has
thousands
of these recipes and no shame about sharing any of them with the lot at PISCES, along
with, later in the weekly soliloquy, a line or two, eight bars, from “Would You Rather
Be a Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder, or a Private with a Chicken on Your Knee?”
then perhaps a lengthy recitation of all his funding difficulties, all, dating back
to long before the emergence of even the Electra House group . . . letter-feuds he
has carried on in the
Times
with critics of Haig. . . .