ZERO-Fundstellen in Gravity’s Rainbow

"The centigrade temperature of -273,15 degrees, at which matter possesses the least energy; thus a physically inert condition. In Pavlov’s neuropsychiatric writings, however, the term assumes a parallel meaning Pynchon will soon reference: "An unreinforced conditioned reflex without any repetitions … ends in every case in extinction, to an absolute zero" (Lectures 2:121). Here, it signifies an absolute lack of response to external stimuli, thus a psychologically inert condition, the imagined death in Pirate’s dream."
(Weisenburger p. 17).

"Today it’s been a long, idiot chase out to zero longitude, with the usual nothing to show." (4, 20)

"Country for miles around gone to necropolis. (…) The money seeping its way out through stock portfolios more intricate than any geneology: what stayed home in Berkshire went into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money and the Word. (…) the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate. (…) Interest from various numbered trusts was still turned, by family banks down in Boston every second or third generation, back into yet another trust, in long rallentando, in infinite series just perceptible, term by term, dying … but never quite to the zero."
(4, 27-28)

"Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! a piece of time neatly snipped out … a few feet of film run backwards … the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning … a ghost in the sky. …
Pavlov was fascinated with "ideas of the opposite." Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission. … But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize, shock, castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their weaking selves, past "equivalent" and "paradoxical" phases—you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave … who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference, and, "I think," Pavlov writing to Janet, "it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients." (…)
Spectro shakes his head. "You’re putting response before stimulus."
"Not at all. Think of it. He’s out there, and he can feel them coming, days in advance. But it’s a reflex. A reflex to something that’s in the air right now. Something we’re too coarsely put together to sense—but Slothrop can. "
"But that makes it extrasensory."
"Why not say ‘a sensory cue we just aren’t paying attention to.’ Something that’s been there all along, something we could be looking at but no one is. Often, in our experiments … I believe M.K. Petrova was first to observe it … one of the women, quite early in the game really … the act merely of bringing the dog into the laboratory—especially in our experimental neurosis work … the first sight of the test stand, of the technician, a stray shadow, the touch of a draft of air, some cue we might never pin down would be enough to send him over, send him transmarginal.
"So, Slothrop. Conceivably. Out in the city, the ambience alone—suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory? when the V-2 hits, you see, first the blast, then the sound of it’s falling … the normal order of stimuli reversed that way … so he might turn a particular corner, enter a certain street, and for no clear reason feel suddenly …" (…). (49)
"(…) this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness. (And is it really the rocket explosion that Slothrop’s keying on, or is it exactly this depolarization, this neurotic "confusion" that fills the ward tonight?) How many times before it’s washed away, these iterations that pour out (...)." (8,48-50)

Pointsman aber sieht Slothrop in der ultraparadoxen Phase eines Experiments, das Jamf begonnen und nicht beendet hat. In der paradoxen Phase erzielen starke Stimuli schwache Reaktionen und umgekehrt. In der ultraparadoxen Phase aber kommt es zu einer Verwirrung der Seiten der binären Opposition, eine Umkehrung des reziproken Prinzips findet statt. Die Abwesenheit des Stimulus bewirkt die Reaktion, seine Anwesenheit (das Ticken des Metronoms bei Pavlov) bewirkt gar nichts.

"(…) Slothrop’s connections with the rockets is remarked upon, and here is the first mention of Dr. Lazlo Jamf, a sort of scientific archfiend in then novel who not only created the unnatural plastic Imipolex but, we will learn later (see 84ff) conditioned infant Tyrone Slothrop’s baby erections to respond to its smell (…).
The fact that the V-2, breaking the speed of sound, arrives before its noise (back Beyond the Zero point, then) is fascinating to Pointsman, who is obsessed with finding out Slothrop’s connection with the rocket’s ghost."
(Fowler, p. 102).

"If ever the Antipointsman existed, Roger Mexico is the man. (…) But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I.P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or Zero. "Summation," "transition," "irradiation," "concentration," "reciprocal induction,"—all Pavlovian brain-mechanics—assumes the presence of these bistable points. But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one—the middle Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion—the probabilities. A chance of 0,37 that, by the time he stops his count, a given square on his map will have suffered only one hit, 0,17 that it will suffer two. …" (9,55)

"Roger Mexico is the "Antipointsman," a good thing to be. Roger can exist without either/or, one-zero divisions, can live in unexamined twilight; Pointsman’s thirst for surety, division, analysis is Western infection. Pointsman sees history as all Cause and Effect, and of course by this point in the novel we know what to make of that assumption. Cause and Effect is taking a fearful battering by the exact coincidence of Slothrop’s erections and the V-2 hits (56, but should be 48-49!), and Pointsman is aware that our grasp of history itself is threatened by the dark miracle. Mexico is neither surprised nor alarmed, for he knows there are more things in heaven and earth than are explicable by our rationality."
(Fowler, p. 104).

"But a hardon, that’s either there, or it isn’t. Binary, elegant." (…)
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. Pointman’s.
Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30 years? Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zero—wait until 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?" (13, 84-85)

"Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp cock still inside her, their strenghtless legs bent the same angle (…)" (15, 119)

"Notice also the use of imagery of Beyond the Zero once more (119), here the distinction between conscious and unconscious states."
(Fowler, p. 120)

"Soon, by the dialectic of the Book, Pointsman will be alone, in a black field lapsing to isotropy, to the zero, waiting to be last to go … (…)" (17, 142)

"It’s incredible. This connoisseuse of "splendid weakness," run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope. She is frightening. Someone called her an erotic nihilist … each of them, Cherrycoke, Paul de la Nuit, even, he would imagine, young Trefoil, even— so he’s heard—Margaret Quartertone, each of them used for the ideology of the zero (…)." (18, 149)

"Nora Dodson-Truck (149) like Melanie l’Heuremaudit in V. and the Vietnamese girl Aubade in Entropy, is cursed with a sort of existential heart’s zero, a "vacuum" at her core, but her "ideology of the Zero" remains too free-form to be very frightening."
(Fowler, p. 125).

"She even tried, from what little calculus she’d picked up, to explain it to Franz as Dt approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the pure light of the zero comes nearer. …
But he shook his head. "Not the same, Leni. The important thing is taking a function to its limit. Dt is just a convenience, so that it can happen."
He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without mercy, telling what she was supposed to believe, than denying it. "Tides, radio interference, damned little else. there’s no way for changes out there to produce changes here."
"Not produce," she tried, "not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don’t know …" She didn’t know, all she was trying to do was reach. But he said: "Try to design anything that way and have it work."
They saw Die Frau im Mond. Franz was amused, condescending. He picked at technical points. He knew some of the people who’d worked on the special effects. Leni saw a dream of flight. One of many possible. Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together. …"
(19, 159)

„Die meisten der mathematischen Anspielungen in Die Enden der Parabel stammen aus der Geometrie, der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung und der Analysis. Während die Begriffe aus den erstgenannten beiden Disziplinen unmittelbar anschaulich sind und überwiegend illustrativ eingesetzt werden, berühren die Grenzwertprozesse der mathematischen Analysis ein zentrales Thema des Romans. Mit Ausnahmen gelegentlicher Erwähnungen von unendlichen Reihen und Differentialgleichungen verweist Pynchon dabei hauptsächlich auf fundamentale Konzepte wie Stetigkeit, unendlich kleine Größen dargestellt durch den griechischen Buchstaben Delta), Differentiation und Integration. All diese Begriffe des Kalküls erlauben es ihm, Vorgänge der Grenzüberschreitung und Verwandlung metaphorisch zu verkleiden und symbolisch auszudeuten."
(Ickstadt, p. 173).

"(…) one of the triumphs of the book and includes some of the best writing he has ever done. Leni is all sense, apprehension, live nerves, pagan–supernaturalism (notice the birth signs she knows); her husband is, or at least claims to be, all science and rationality, but his fantasies (like Pointsman’s) need to drill an escape–valve in the iron confinement of Cause and Effect, the "fussy Biedermeier strangulation" of Western culture (…) Both seek to escape: she from drab circumstance into love and radical politics, he from the coffin-tight imprisonment of the West’s pretenses that the rational and conscious life is all that is important."
(Fowler, p. 126-27).

"The street fighting moment recreated so convincingly (158-159) includes the novel’s first use of the concept of "dt", sometimes (e.g. 760) spelled "delta-t" or simply "dt." Since time is infinitely divisible, its substance must be the consummation of an infinite chain of units no one of which contains any amount of time itself. Since the same absurdity also describes any unit of space, our idea of being itself is preposterous: palpable wholes made up of ghostly parts. In solving for instantaneous velocity (which does not exist in nature, but must be in logic), "delta-t", or an approximation of time, is substituted for time – the "delta" being the notation that represents an increment of time so thin that we can pretend that there is no time in it. Herman Weyl remarks that"it is impossible to posit any real thing as existing, closed and complete in itself … its ‘inner horizon’ is unfolded by an infinitely continued process" (Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, p. 41). Pynchon’s Other Kingdom can be glimpsed through the thinning membrane of the "last delta–t," a poetic way out of what Leibniz called "the labyrinth of the continuum." Both time and labyrinth are important code–chains in the structure of Gravity’s Rainbow, and the inability of mere rational analysis to reconcile the contradiction between logic and nature is one of the novel’s most important themes. Pynchon used the "dt" notation to symbolize the vanishing–small interface between our world and another in Lot 49 (…)."
(Fowler , p. 127-128.)

"Why do they want Rathenau tonight? (…) The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. "(164) (19, 164-167)

"In the Celtic Method of Tarot divination, the validator is the tenth and last card drawn from the deck; it summarizes all previous cards, indicating "what is to come" (Waite, Pictorial Key 299-305). Should it be the thirteenth of the Major Arcana, Death, it would confirm an overall sense of "mystical death … and the passage into a state to which ordinary death is neither the gate nor the passage." (ibid. 123)"
(Weisenburger, p. 95.)

"The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death–transfigured. (…) The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata - epoch on top of epoch, city on top on ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator."
"These sign are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic."
(19, 167)