GRGR(5) Enzian

[David Morris]

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?

rj:
>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.)

As you point out "we find out that Weissmann *named* "Enzian" -- for Rilke's
mountain-flower -- and that the two read the Duino Elegies together."  Thus
for Enzian to've discussed Weissmann's being "so in love with language"
seems probable.

>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)

"High-prowed boat", "blue-trousered troops" could be a primitive's
vocabulary, but as you say, "the new stars of Pain-land", "the earth's
seasons reversed" are Weissmann's, and thus the whole may be W's
poetry-soaked perspective as he comes ashore.  The question that intrigues
me is whether Enzian is really, at the point of W's landing, such a classic
"noble savage."  The fact that his people had been destroyed "20 years
earlier" leads me to think he SHOULD be less naive, less pure, than he's
been portrayed (by Weissmann, IMHO).

>[snip] 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.

I guess your "certainly what [Enzian] said [to Weissman]" is my perspective
for these passages.  And, as I've said above, that "the boy wasn't doing a
whole lot of rationalising and soul-searching" could well be more fiction
manufactured by Weissmann.

The rest of your post re. "The whole "act of naming" thing is (always?
usually?) acquisitive and deleterious in Pynchon" seems a major theme in GR.