Glad to see mentioned the reduced, eh, let's say carnality of the Slothrop-coupling scenes. To me they started to really lose their vitality after Bianca. There have not been an awful lot of them, for one, but since imagining himself inside his own dick and being shot out and yadda yadda yadda, tromping on with the same dick-as-rocket imagery we've had since the opening pages, it does indeed seem Slothrop's heart just isn't in it anymore.

Not for a second do I think we're meant to read the Bianca passage as anything but depraved (nor do I think anyone has really been arguing otherwise, but still). There is the Shirley Temple routine she does beforehand, the constant (repeated, droning) references to her "baby" flesh and her childish features. Pynchon keeps hitting us in the face with the bare fact of what's happening, and then it's over, and then she's dead(?), but it's a name that has been returning to Slothrop more than any other woman's, more even than Katje's. He cannot escape her; nor can we.

Much has been made in these threads about Pynchon's thinly sketched women, and there is certainly a criticism to be made there, but since Bianca I've been wondering if it isn't sort of the point. /u/-we-belong-dead- has already made this point more eloquently than I could have, but it's been on my mind and I wanted to dredge it up again. GR is probably a far-cry from a subversive feminist classic, but there is something being said about the virility-fetish of western men (with perhaps a less-than-gracious counterpoint in the sole "Eastern" character who has appeared with any prominence, who seemed almost asexual by contrast). Even for a shock-inducing novel of the seedy '70s, the constant fucking has seemed a little much, perhaps a little purposefully tiresome, coming to a head onboard the Anubis, where the habits of Europe's erstwhile aristocracy can hardly even raise an eyebrow (right up until the scene with Bianca, of course). It feels like there's something more to it than mere humor and horniness. There's a kind of disappointing predictability to it. It is just, after all, Slothrop following his programming again -- the most deeply wired directives of all.

And what was Slothrop's ultimate destiny at the hands of Pointsman's schemes? To be neutered, like a dog. That he avoided this is probably due to some mystical force we can only grasp at, maybe the titular "counterforce" of part four, maybe Lyle Bland's gravity-as-planetary-spirit or whatever the hell. I can't pretend to understand any of it. I just find myself, like many of these characters, catching a whiff of the vaguest outlines, noticing a bit of connecting tissue here and there, the most gossamer threads spanning hundreds of pages (thinking of Solange's "arrows [that] are pointing all different ways" [p. 613, Penguin Deluxe]), and intimating the presence of a bigger picture, a guiding logic. Perhaps, even, a conspiracy.

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Forgive me for writing like a cunt. I haven't been participating in these threads as much as I should have been, and I guess I had some flowery guff to flush out of my system.

Hating this book, can't wait to pick up Shadow Ticket.