GRGR(5) Enzian

[rj]

Jeremy: 
> I guess what I was on about is: are these Enzian's thoughts? or Weissman's
> paternalistic belief that he knows what Enzian is thinking?

As we saw earlier with the talking dog, sometimes narrative agency will
jump back and forth between characters and more detached vantages even
in the space of a sentence or phrase.

When Weissmann first encountered Enzian, the Herero boy had been
"long-tormented by missionaries." To Enzian, Weissmann "*seemed* so in
love with language." (my emph.) Further down in the paragraph the two
points of view are juxtaposed more overtly, I think:

" ... the old freighter plunged tropic after tropic . . . until the
constellations, like the new stars of Pain-land, had become all
unfamiliar and the earth's seasons reversed . . . and he came ashore in
a high-prowed wooden boat that had 20 years earlier brought
blue-trousered troops in from the iron road-stead to crush the great
Herero Rising." (99.33)

The perspective and descriptive vocabulary after the second ellipsis
("high-prowed boat", "blue-trousered troops") I'd like to assign to
Enzian here (these things are not named specifically or accurately, as
Pynchon no doubt could -- 'schooner', 'clipper', 'German troops' --
because Enzian didn't yet know what they were, or were called), but it's
by no means certain. What's more, Weissmann's own terms of reference
("the new stars of Pain-land", "the earth's seasons reversed") seem
achingly naive and apprehensive themselves. I sort of agree with David
that it's mainly Blicero through this section, in cohort with a detached
narrator, but I think we get a couple of glimpses of what Enzian
perceived and thought, certainly what he said. And it would be entirely
appropriate that the boy wasn't doing a whole lot of rationalising and
soul-searching at this point in time, still psychologically stranded
part-way between the tribal cosmos and that of its conqueror. 

At 101.21 we find out that Weissmann *named* "Enzian" -- for Rilke's
mountain-flower -- and that the two read the Duino Elegies together. The
whole "act of naming" thing is (always? usually?) acquisitive and
deleterious in Pynchon; I think we are meant to see this as part of the
process of the boy's corruption, the cultural genocide which was begun
by the Rhenish Missionary Society. Enzian's personal innocence is lost,
just as is the purity and autonomy of Herero culture. Whatever the good
intentions (Christianity) or aesthetic beauty (Rilke), thus is the
outcome of imperialism.

best