What have the watchmen of world’s edge come tonight to look for? deepening on now, monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag, toward ash the color the night will stabilize at, tonight… what is there grandiose enough to witness? only Slothrop here, and Sir Stephen, blithering along, crossing shadow after long prison-bar shadow cast by the tall trunks of palms lining the esplanade. The spaces between the shadows are washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach. There seems to be nothing happening of any moment. No traffic whispering in the circular driveways, no milliards of francs being wagered because of a woman or an entente of nations at any of the tables inside. Only the somewhat formal weeping of Sir Stephen, down now on one knee in the sand still warm from the day.
The illustration used above is from Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” (2006), and it does indeed correspond to the passage in question.
Welcome to the Casino Hermann Goering, one of the main locations you’ll be sojourning at if you decide to subject yourself to the exquisite torture of making your way through Thomas Pynchon’s incomparable (some say ‘unreadable’) WWII novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Perched picturesquely on the idyllic French Riviera, the casino seems almost too perfect, and indeed, it is. The second of the four long chapters of Gravity’s Rainbow tracks American soldier Tyrone Slothrop’s progress as he investigates the casino, finds he has been stationed there only to be kept under surveillance, and eventually escapes. Pynchon’s constant references to palm-trees are intended to imbue the casino with a breezy tropical flavour that almost casts a spell on us. The point of it all is to keep Slothrop from asking questions, to keep him from discovering that he is a victim at the centre of a nefarious plot. Sentences like the following condition us to associate palm-trees with tranquil mornings and a sense of leisurely abandon:
Good mornings of good old lust, early shutters open to the sea, winds coming in with the heavy brushing of palm leaves, the wheezing break to surface and sun of porpoises out in the harbor.
Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 248
Slothrop wakes to morning sunlight off of that Mediterranean, filtered through a palm outside the window, then red through the tablecloth, birds, water running upstairs.
Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 239-40
Eventually, Slothrop begins to suspect that the palm trees, along with the rest of the scenery, have all been calculated to lull him into a false sense of security. He begins to imagine the place as an ‘endless simulation’, and starts scanning for glitches in the matrix. The palm trees in particular appear too good to be true:
The harbor has broken out in whitecaps, so brilliant the can’t be gathering their light from this drab sky. Here it is again, that identical-looking Other World-is he gonna have this to worry about, now? What th’-lookit those trees-each long frond hanging, stung, dizzying, in laborious drypoint against the sky, each so perfectly placed…
All of this paranoia comes to a head in the passage cited atop this page. Slothrop confronts Sir Stephen Dodson Trick, who initially seems to be nothing more than an innocent linguist prone to etymological ramblings. Slothrop has successfully deduced that Sir Stephen is in on the conspiracy, which he admits to Slothrop in one of the funniest scenes in the novel. The backdrop for this admission is a row of ‘prison-bar palms’ – the trees here finally dropping the pretence and revealing their true form. Slothrop has uncovered the truth: all along, while he thought he was on holiday, he was actually being held captive in ‘Their’ elaborately decorated skinner box.
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