Authors: Thomas Pynchon
And they all
sit
there, in front of the very high, blacked, lead-crossed windows, allowing him his
folly, the dog people skulking over in one corner, passing notes and leaning to whisper
(they plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up), the Psi Section lot clear
over the other side of the room—as if we have a parliament of some kind here . . .
everyone for years has occupied his own unique pew-seat and angle in to the ravings
of reddish and liver-spotted Brigadier Pudding—with the other persuasions-in-exile
spread between these two wings: the balance of power, if any power existed at “The
White Visitation.”
Dr. Rózsavölgyi feels that there well might, if the fellows “play their cards right.”
The only issue now is survival—on through the awful interface of V-E Day, on into
the bright new Postwar with senses and memories intact. PISCES must not be allowed
to go down under the hammer with the rest of the bawling herd. There must arise, and
damned soon, able to draw them into a phalanx, a concentrated point of light, some
leader or program powerful enough to last them across who knows how many years of
Postwar. Dr. Rózsavölgyi tends to favor a powerful program over a powerful leader.
Maybe because this is 1945. It was widely believed in those days that behind the War—all
the death, savagery, and destruction—lay the Führer-principle. But if personalities
could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations
could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar
hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma . . . that
its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources. . . .
Isn’t that what’s really at stake for Dr. Rózsavölgyi here in this latest scheme,
centered on the figure of Lieutenant Slothrop? All the psychological tests in the
subject’s dossier, clear back to his college days, indicate a diseased personality.
“Rosie” slaps the file with his hand for emphasis. The staff table shudders. “For
e
xam
-ple: his Minne
so
-ta, Mul-ti
pha
-sic Person
al
ity
In
ventory is tre
men
-dously lop
si
-ded, always in
fa
-vor of, the psycho-pathic, and, the un
whole
-some.”
But the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit is not fond of the MMPI. “Rosie, are there scales
for measuring interpersonal traits?” Hawk’s nose probing, probing, eyes lowered in
politic meekness, “
Human
values? Trust, honesty, love? Is there—forgive me the special pleading—a religious
scale, by any chance?”
No way, padre: the MMPI was developed about 1943. In the very heart of the War. Allport
and Vernon’s Study of Values, the Bernreuter Inventory as revised by Flanagan in ’35—tests
from before the War—seem to Paul de la Nuit more humane. All the MMPI appears to test
for is whether a man will be a good or bad soldier.
“Soldiers are much in demand these days, Reverend Doctor,” murmurs Mr. Pointsman.
“I only hope that we won’t put too much emphasis on his MMPI scores. It seems to me
very narrow. It omits large areas of the human personality.”
“Pre
cise
-ly
why,
” leaps Rózsavölgyi, “we are now pro
po
sing, to give, Sloth-rop a completely different sort, of test. We are now de
sign
-ing for him, a so-
called,
‘projec-tive’ test. The most fa
mi
l-iar ex
am
-ple of the
type,
is the Rorschach
ink
-blot. The
ba
-sic theory, is, that when given an un
struc
-tured stimulus, some shape-less
blob
of ex
per
-ience, the subject, will seek to impose,
struc
-ture
on
it. How, he goes a-
bout struc
-turing this blob, will reflect his
needs,
his hopes—will pro
vide,
us with
clues,
to his dreams,
fan
-tasies, the deepest
re
-gions of his mind.” Eyebrows going a mile a minute, extraordinarily fluid and graceful
hand gestures, resembling—most likely it is deliberate, and who can blame Rosie for
trying to cash in—those of his most famous compatriot, though there’re the inevitable
bad side-effects: staff who swear they’ve seen him crawling headfirst down the north
façade of “The White Visitation,” for example. “So we are
re
-ally, quite, in a
gree
ment, Reverend Doctor. A test, like the MMP
I
, is, in this respect, not adequate. It is, a
struc
-tured stimulus. The sub-ject can
fal
-sify, consciously, or repress,
un
-consciously. But with the projec-tive tech
nique,
nothing he can do, con-scious or otherwise, can pre-
vent
us, from finding what we wish, to know. We, are in control. He, cannot
help,
himself.”
“Must say it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, Pointsman,” smiles Dr. Aaron Throwster.
“Your stimuli are more the structured sort, aren’t they?”
“Let’s say I find a certain shameful fascination.”
“Let’s not. Don’t tell me you’re going to keep your fine Pavlovian hand completely
out of this.”
“Well, not completely, Throwster, no. Since you’ve brought it up. We
also
happen to have in mind a very structured stimulus. Same one, in fact, that got us
interested to begin with. We want to expose Slothrop to the German rocket. . . .”
Overhead, on the molded plaster ceiling, Methodist versions of Christ’s kingdom swarm:
lions cuddle with lambs, fruit spills lushly and without pause into the arms and about
the feet of gentlemen and ladies, swains and milkmaids. No one’s expression is quite
right. The wee creatures leer, the fiercer beasts have a drugged or sedated look,
and none of the humans have any eye-contact at all. The ceilings of “The White Visitation”
aren’t the only erratic thing about the place, either. It is a classic “folly,” all
right. The buttery was designed as an Arabian harem in miniature, for reasons we can
only guess at today, full of silks, fretwork and peepholes. One of the libraries served,
for a time, as a wallow, the floor dropped three feet and replaced with mud up to
the thresholds for giant Gloucestershire Old Spots to frolic, oink, and cool their
summers in, to stare at the shelves of buckram books and wonder if they’d be good
eating. Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most unhealthy extremes. The
rooms are triangular, spherical, walled up into mazes. Portraits, studies in genetic
curiosity, gape and smirk at you from every vantage. The W.C.s contain frescoes of
Clive and his elephants stomping the French at Plassy, fountains that depict Salome
with the head of John (water gushing out ears, nose, and mouth), floor mosaics in
which are tessellated together different versions of Homo Monstrosus, an interesting
preoccupation of the time—cyclops, humanoid giraffe, centaur repeated in all directions.
Everywhere are archways, grottoes, plaster floral arrangements, walls hung in threadbare
velvet or brocade. Balconies give out at unlikely places, overhung with gargoyles
whose fangs have fetched not a few newcomers nasty cuts on the head. Even in the worst
rains, the monsters only just manage to drool—the rainpipes feeding them are centuries
out of repair, running crazed over slates and beneath eaves, past cracked pilasters,
dangling Cupids, terra-cotta facing on every floor, along with belvederes, rusticated
joints, pseudo-Italian columns, looming minarets, leaning crooked chimneys—from a
distance no two observers, no matter how close they stand, see quite the same building
in that orgy of self-expression, added to by each succeeding owner, until the present
War’s requisitioning. Topiary trees line the drive for a distance before giving way
to larch and elm: ducks, bottles, snails, angels, and steeplechase riders they dwindle
down the metaled road into their fallow silence, into the shadows under the tunnel
of sighing trees. The sentry, a dark figure in white webbing, stands port-arms in
your masked headlamps, and you must halt for him. The dogs, engineered and lethal,
are watching you from the woods. Presently, as evening comes on, a few bitter flakes
of snow begin to fall.
• • • • • • •
Better behave yourself or we’ll send you back to Dr. Jamf!
When Jamf conditioned
him,
he threw away the stimulus.
Looks like Dr. Jamf’s been by to see
your
little thing today, hasn’t he?
—Neil Nosepicker
’s Book of 50,000 Insults, §6.72, “Awful Offspring,” The Nayland Smith Press, Cambridge
(Mass.), 1933
P
UDDING
: But isn’t this—
P
OINTSMAN
: Sir?
P
UDDING
: Isn’t it all rather shabby, Pointsman? Meddling with another man’s mind this way?
P
OINTSMAN
: Brigadier, we’re only following in a long line of experiment and questioning. Harvard
University, the U.S. Army? Hardly shabby institutions.
P
UDDING
: We can’t, Pointsman, it’s beastly.
P
OINTSMAN
: But the Americans have already been
at
him! don’t you see? It’s not as if we’re corrupting a virgin or something—
P
UDDING
: Do we have to do it because the Americans do it? Must we allow them to corrupt
us?
Back around 1920, Dr. Laszlo Jamf opined that if Watson and Rayner could successfully
condition their “Infant Albert” into a reflex horror of everything furry, even of
his own Mother in a fur boa, then Jamf could certainly do the same thing for his Infant
Tyrone, and the baby’s sexual reflex. Jamf was at Harvard that year, visiting from
Darmstadt. It was in the early part of his career, before he phased into organic chemistry
(to be as fateful a change of field as Kekulé’s own famous switch into chemistry from
architecture, a century before). For the experiment he had a slender grant from the
National Research Council (under a continuing NRC program of psychological study which
had begun during the World War, when methods were needed for selecting officers and
classifying draftees). Shoestring funding may have been why Jamf, for his target reflex,
chose an infant hardon. Measuring secretions, as Pavlov did, would have meant surgery.
Measuring “fear,” the reflex Watson chose, would have brought in too much subjectivity
(what’s fear? How much is “a lot”? Who decides, when it’s on-the-spot-in-the-field,
and there isn’t time to go through the long slow process of referring it up to the
Fear Board?). Instrumentation just wasn’t available in those days. The best he might’ve
done was the Larson-Keeler three-variable “lie detector,” but at the time it was still
only experimental.
But a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t. Binary, elegant. The job of observing
it can even be done by a
student.
Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.
Unconditioned response = hardon.
Conditioned stimulus =
x.
Conditioned response = hardon whenever
x
is present, stroking is no longer necessary, all you need is that
x.
Uh,
x
? well, what’s
x
? Why, it’s the famous “Mystery Stimulus” that’s fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology
students, is what it is. The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches
per year on the subject, which ironically is the exact mean length Jamf reported for
Infant T.’s erection.
Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little sucker would have
been de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, “extinguished” the hardon
reflex he’d built up, before he let the baby go. Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich
himself said, “Not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned
reflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed
beyond
the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction
only
by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be
a silent extinction beyond the zero.
” Italics are Mr. Pointsman’s.
Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30 years? Did Dr. Jamf
extinguish only to zero—wait till the infant showed zero hardons in the presence of
stimulus
x,
and then stop? Did he forget—or ignore—the “silent extinction beyond the zero”? If
he ignored it, why? Did the National Research Council have anything to say about that?
When Slothrop was discovered, late in 1944, by “The White Visitation”—though many
there have always known him as the famous Infant Tyrone—like the New World, different
people thought they’d discovered different things.
Roger Mexico thinks it’s a statistical oddity. But he feels the foundations of that
discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd—think
of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving
past the tongue-stop—beyond the zero—and into the other realm. Of course you don’t
move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that’s how you
ought
to be moving.
Rollo Groast thinks it’s precognition. “Slothrop is able to predict when a rocket
will fall at a particular place. His survival to date is evidence he’s acted on advance
information, and avoided the area at the time the rocket was supposed to fall.” Dr.
Groast is not sure how, or even if, sex comes into it.
But Edwin Treacle, that most Freudian of psychical researchers, thinks Slothrop’s
gift is psychokinesis. Slothrop is, with the force of his mind,
causing
the rockets to drop where they do. He may not be physically highballing them about
the sky: but maybe he is fooling with the electrical signals inside the rocket’s guidance
system. However he’s doing it, sex
does
come into Dr. Treacle’s theory. “He subconsciously needs to abolish all trace of
the sexual Other, whom he symbolizes on his map, most significantly, as a
star,
that anal-sadistic emblem of classroom success which so permeates elementary education
in America. . . .”