GRGR(15): Enzian, nihilism, and a few other things

[Doug Millison]

Jeremy Osner said, among other things in a fine post, "Pointsman's problem
is that he is obsessed by his science, to the point that (generalizing) he
does not regard other people as people but as potential subjects" which
would seem to put Pointsman on par with other forces in GR that see humans
and indeed life in general as disposable pawns in their game, the Nazis for
example as we see in Pokler's story a bit later on (in the episode that,
falling at GR's center, might be said to be the novel's heart), where a
narrator tells us that Pokler and his Nazi colleagues considered humans
(concentration camp slaves) no more than production inputs along with the
rest of the raw material that creates the Rocket, and puts this sort of
industrial economy in a bigger, global picture of a System whose ultimate
crime is that it breaks nature's law of return -- birth, death, and renewal
in a cycle of universal return, breaking the cycle at the point of death
with no hope of renewal. Not a dime's worth of difference between the Nazis
and the 'muricans and the Brits and the rest of the industrialized powers
in GR's moral economy. By making them the final keepers of the Rocket,
Pynchon shows us how doubly fucked over are Enzian and his co-opted (and
corrupted) comrades, coming as they do from a people hunted to
near-extinction, seduced into the service of the ultimate technological
expression of the System that sought to exterminate them.

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