Rilke, Pynchon, Kleist

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

The thread on Rilke seems to have faded already. I hope you
can bear one more take on RMR. Since I haven't been able to
reread M&D with you, what I have in mind concerns chiefly GR.
 
I was reading the "Elegies" the other day, and the scene in 
the fourth elegy reminded me of the last page in Gravity's 
Rainbow. A performance has ended, but the lonely narrator 
wants to stay, awaiting the Angel to "startle the stuffed 
skins [puppets] into living action". "Angel and puppet. Actual
theater at last!" In Pynchon "the stuffed skin" can, perhaps, 
also refer to that piece of meat, puppetlike penis, which the 
Pavlovians especially want to see as mechanical. And which may
have undergone a metamorphosis into the infamous Rocket/missile,
gaining angelico-apocalyptic force in the process.

The couple Engel/Puppe can also refer to "one/zero"
so important in the novel. Pure spirit and pure matter. 
It's funny, in Heinrich v. Kleist's "On the Puppet Theater" 
-- a dumbfounding essay by one of the all-time greats -- 
gods and puppets are compared. The puppets embody pure 
meaningless immanence, grace, which is out of the reach 
of human beings who have eaten of the tree of knowledge.
("But Paradise is locked and bolted and the Cherub is behind 
us. We must make a journey around the world, to see if a
back door has perhaps been left open.") 

Also Rilke's narrator rejects the "half-filled masks" of 
human actors, longing for the fullness of puppets instead. 
The human beings are inconsistent with themselves. Incapable 
of *pure dancing* without reflection. So, according to the 
"Mr. C." of Kleist's essay, it is "absolutely impossible for 
the human being to compete with a puppet. Only a god, on this 
field of contest, could prove a match for the matter; and 
here is where both ends of the ring-shaped world interlock." 

Yes, ring-shaped... Now the end of the essay is so amazing 
that I want to quote all of it: 

[Mr. C.]: "But just as two intersecting lines, converging
on one side of a point, reappear on the other after their 
passage through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach 
a concave mirror, vanishes to infinity only to reappear before
our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the
infinite, return to us once more, and so appear most purely
in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all
or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or
a god".
     "That means", said I, somewhat amused, "that we would have 
to eat from the tree of knowledge a second time to fall back into
the state of innocence."
     "Of course," he answered, "and that is the final chapter
in the history of the world."

("On The Puppet Theater", in Kleist: _An Abyss Deep Enough_.
Trans. Philip B. Miller.  New York: E.P. Dutton 1982. p. 211-216)


It is interesting that Pynchon's characters have so often been 
compared to puppets. But they are, most obviously, not capable 
of that pure material immanence of Kleist's and Rilke's puppets; 
instead they keep reflecting paranoiacally on the question of 
their secret mover(s). Slothrop's penis may be a conditioned 
puppet, too, but what exactly is behind its performances, never 
becomes clear. Suffice it to say that it seems to be loaded with 
sinister connections and phallogocentric heritages, which make the 
pure present impossible. Neither the zero of the puppet or the one 
of the angel are to be reached in GR. But there still may be moments 
of "physical grace", whatever they are.

Back to the M&D thread: such blind, remorseless, unexplainable Beings 
must be all the more baffling to Mason since he's a Deist, believer in
immanent G-d.


Heikki

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