Coprophagy (is Re: GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

Doug Millison millison at online-journalist.com
Sun Dec 12 15:33:37 CST 1999


At 8:17 AM +1100 12/13/99, rj wrote, of Pointsman's manipulation of Katje
and Pudding:
>a certain dignity seeps
>through even in this vision of humanity at its most base.

I don't see the dignity, sorry.

Pointsman's manipulations of Pudding's (and Slothrop's) weaknesses are
evil, just as Weissman's corruption of the boy Enzian is evil. Neither
Pudding nor Enzian has the ability to say no, and both are forever changed
for the worse as the result of  their exploitation. Pointsman knows what he
is doing is wrong yet he persists; Weissman, too. They both revel in their
exploitation of their victims, because their victims have become merely
stepping stones on to the higher purposes to which Pointsman and Weissman
aspire. Yeah, Pointsman has an orgasm at his Christmas party, but I imagine
Hitler got his rocks off, too, from time to time, and that doesn't make
Hitler any less evil.

Pynchon also provides the wherewithal in GR to see that Pointsman and
Weissman are probably just responding to the forces that bent them in their
youth, so of course in that respect they are victims, too. But, just as in
cases where today's child abuser turns out to have been abused as a child,
that doesn't make the crime any less heinous nor does it mitigate the
damage to the victim. It does make the situation poignant, giving us the
ability to gaze at perpetrator and see a victim at the same time -- a kind
of poignancy that Pynchon exploits in GR, upping the ante with savage,
ironic twists.

It's easy to see that Weissman = Nazi in GR's moral plan, just as the
Germans in Herereo-land stand for the rest of the colonial powers in their
extra-European adventures.  Pointsman = Science? Western technology? By
making multinational corporations accessories to the crimes of the
Holocaust, Pynchon spreads the blame around but doesn't soften the
judgement of Holocaust crimes that rings so clearly in GR. Pynchon also
lets us see that external agents of evil -- Hitler, Weissman, Pointsman,
Colonial Powers, Multinational Corporations, etc. -- might be the
projections of our own shadow selves. But that doesn't soften GR's harsh
judgement of the evil that those agents do.

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
http://www.dougmillison.com
http://www.online-journalist.com



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