Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

The only strange item, which grew strange as surveillance developed, was that he seemed to be alone. To date Slothrop has still not recorded, tagged, discovered, or liberated, a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence.

Or has he by way of the language, caught the German mania for name giving, dividing the creation, finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist, whose molecules are words…

Tchitcherine was the wolf. The minute he put on the head, in front of the mirror by the ikon, he knew himself. He was the wolf.

It is just precisamente a seagoing tower of Babel here— the torpedo? Why is he screaming about the torpedo?

There are worse foundations than a film. Did Prince Potemkins fake villages survive catharine’s Royal progress? Will the soul of the gaucho survive the mechanics of putting him into light and sound?

Since discovering that Schwartz commando are really in the zone, leading real, paracinematic lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwartzcommando footage he shot last winter in England for operation black wing, Springer has been zooming around and a controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film is somehow brought them into being.

“ something that antisocial?”
“ but it’s everything we believe in”…
“ but even the freest of gauchos end up selling out, you know, that’s how things are.”

It is the period of General Roca’s campaign to open the Pompas by exterminating the people who live there: turning the villages into labor camps, bringing more of the country under the control of Buenos Aires. Martin Fiero is soon sick of it. It’s against everything he knows is right. He deserts.

Keep the customer happy. Martin Fierro is not just the gaucho hero of a great Argentina epic poem. On the U-boat, he is considered an anarchist saint. Hernandez’s poem has figured in Argentine political thinking for years now— everybody everybody’s had his own interpretation,

For this crew, nostalgia is like sea sickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them alive.