Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

[Jan Klimkowski]

Gravity's Rainbow was written in the 1960s and finally published in 1973.

MK-ULTRA was brought to public attention by the Church Committee in 1975, and was essentially unknown until then.

Thomas Pynchon moved in the same circles as Mimi and Joan Baez.

He was a very bright and original researcher of dusty tomes and hidden history, as the Herero material earlier in this thread clearly demonstrates.

In a dream from this time, his father has come to find him. Slothrop has been
wandering at sundown by the Mungahannock, near a rotting old paper mill,
abandoned back in the nineties. A heron rises in silhouette against luminous
and dying orange. "Son," a falling tower of words tumbling over and over
themselves, "the president died three months ago." Slothrop stands and
curses him. "Why didn't you tell me? Pop, I loved him. You only wanted to
sell me to the IG. You sold me out." The old man's eyes fill with tears. "Oh
son ..." trying to take his hand. But the sky is dark, the heron gone, the
empty skeleton of the mill and the dark increase of the river saying it is time
to go . . .

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 set 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

PUDDING.-But isn't this
POINTSMAN: Sir?
PUDDING: Isn't it all rather shabby, Pointsman? Meddling with another
man's mind this way?
POINTSMAN: Brigadier, we're only following in a long line of experiment
and questioning. Harvard University, the U.S. Army? Hardly shabby
institutions.
PUDDING: We can't, Pointsman, it's beastly.
POINTSMAN: But the Americans have already been at him! don't you
see? It's not as if we're corrupting a virgin or something
PUDDING: 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 harden, 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 Pavlov-ian
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.'1'' 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 zerowait till the infant
showed zero hardons in the presence of stimulus x, and then stop? Did he
forgetor ignorethe "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.

But one day Milton Gloaming popped in to deliver him from his
unmoving. Gloaming was just back from a jaunt through the Zone. He'd
found himself on a task force with one Josef Schleim, a defector of
secondary brilliance, who had once worked for the IG out of Dr.
Reithinger's office, VOWIthe Statistical Department of NW7. There,
Schleim had been assigned to the American desk, gathering for the IG
economic intelligence, through subsidiaries and licensees like Chemnyco,
General Aniline and Film, Ansco, Winthrop. In '36 he came to England to
work for Imperial Chemicals, in a status that was never to be free from
ambiguities. He'd heard of Slothrop, yes indeed . . . recalled him from the old
days. When Lyle Bland went out on his last transmural journey, there'd been
Green Reports flapping through the IG offices for weeks, Geheime
Kommandosache, rumors coupling and uncoupling like coal-tar molecules
under pressure, all to do with who was likely to take over the Slothrop
surveillance, now that Bland was gone.
This was toward the beginning of the great struggle for the IG's
intelligence machinery. The economic department of the foreign office and
the foreign department of the economic office were both after it. So were the
military, in particular the Wehrwirtschaftstab, a section of the General Staff
that maintained OKW's liaison with industry. The IG's own liaison with OKW
was handled by Vermittlungsstelle W, under Drs. Dieckmann and Gorr. The
picture was farther confused by the usual duplicate Nazi Party offices,
Abwehr-Organizations, set up throughout German industry after 1933. The
Nazis' watchdog over the IG was called "Abteilung A" and was set up in the
same office building asin fact, it appeared perfectly congruent withthe
IG's own Army liaison group, Vermittlungsstelle W. But Technology, alas,
braid-crowned and gold-thighed maiden, always comes up for grabs like
this. Most likely the bitching and bickering of Army vs. Party was what
finally drove Schleim over the hill, more than any moral feelings about
Hitler. In any case, he remembers the Slothrop surveillance being assigned to
a newly created "Sparte IV" under Vermittlungsstelle W. Sparte I was
handling nitrogen and gasoline, II dyes, chemicals, buna rubber,
pharmaceuticals, III film and fibers. IV handled Slothrop and nothing else,
exceptSchleim had heard tellone or two miscellaneous patents acquired
through some dealings with IG Chemie in Switzerland. An analgesic whose
name he couldn't recall, and a new plastic, some name like Mipolam . . .
"Polimex," or something. . . .
"Sounds like that would've come under Sparte II," was Gloaming's only
comment at the time.
"A few directors were upset," Schleim agreed. "Ter Meer was a
Draufgängerhe and Hörlein both, go-ahead fellows. They might have got
it back."
"Did the Party assign an Abwehr man to this Sparte IV?"
"They must have, but I don't know if he was SD or SS. There were so
many of them around. I can remember some sort of rather thin chap with
thick eyeglasses coming out of the office there once or twice. But he wore
civilian clothes. Couldn't tell you his name."
Well now what'n the bloody 'ell. . . .
"Suveillance?" Roger is fidgeting heavily, with his hair, his necktie, ears,
nose, knuckles, "IG Farben had Slothrop under surveillance? Before the
War? What for, Gloaming."
"Odd, isn't it?" Cheerio boing out the door without another word,
leaving Roger alone with a most disagreeable light beginning to grow, the
leading edge of a revelation, blinding, crescent, at the periphery of his brain.
IG Farben, eh? Mr. Pointsman has been chumming, almost
exclusively these days, with upper echelon from ICI. ICI has cartel
arrangements with Farben. The bastard. Why, he must have known
about Slothrop all along. The Jamf business was only a front for . . . well
say what the hell is going on here?

Infant Tyrone.

Infant Joan.

Victims, not perps.

Of something that would have seemed unbelievable before Paperclip and MK-ULTRA were revealed...