GRGR(13) - Geli

[Doug Millison]

Yeah I know we're onto GRGR(14), but Geli's still worth talking about.

I got a call late the other night from an old friend who studies Pynchon. I
can't tell you who he is because he's got tenure to worry about (which he
would certainly worry about even more if I were to reveal his apparent
state of mind during the somewhat rambling call).  But he offered some
intriguing insights into what TRP might be up to with "Geli Tripping" so
I'm passing them along.

He maintains that the names Pynchon chooses for his minor characters are
often very important -- you can often track them down to real historical
figures, and this adds a level of meaning to the text that often puts
apparently inconsequential or mystifying elements in context.

For example, my friend thinks he remembers an aria sung by the women's
choir in Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore  that begins, "Gaily
tripping, lightly  skipping, come the ladies to the shipping."  So Geli
Tripping might be a pun on  that. Or is TRP just faking us out here?

Geli Tripping also leads to Geli Raubal, which leads to Pudding. My friend
is intimately familiar with the OSS reconstruction of Hitler's
personality. It apparently (I haven't read it) reports that Geli was
required to shit and piss on Hitler.  When she refused to do that any
longer, she died(?), committed suicide(?),  was killed by the SS??  There
was at least  one movie starlet who was Hitler's girlfriend for a  while
and also died "tragically."

The OSS reconstruction (as published in the original hardback version)
since it came out) uses key phrases to describe Hitler's personality.  If
you go to the PNOTES index issue and look up Pudding, and then go back to
the text wherever his name comes up, you will
find that many of the same phrases or ideas that Langer uses to characterize
Hitler (obsessive-compulsive personality type, paranoid, with delusions of
grandeur), TRP uses to characterize Pudding.  So while Pudding has nothing to
do with Geli they are confirming items in the subtext: Pudding in the novel
is engaged in hot lunch and golden showers and is adjectivally similar to
Hitler, and Geli (Raubal) was engaged in real life in providing the same for
Der Fuhrer.  They are linked by their common fetish.  By giving his witch the
name Geli, Pynchon is using his standard method for confirming earier
allusions.
Geli Tripping (Raubal) confirms that Pudding is an allusion to Hitler.

It is also the case that in Lot 49 there is Winthrop Tremaine, the owner of
the Army-Navy store that specializes in Nazi  memorabilia.  Among the many
Winthrops you might come accross if you look that up is a half-name that i
think is important: Winthrop Rockefeller, one  time governor of Arkansas.
So, in Lot 49, written while TRP was writing Gravity's Rainbow, we get this
dangling of an unclosed allusion.  Is TRP suggesting that the Rockefellers
were in support of the Nazis?  Does this  Winthrop's half-name suggest that
the Rocks were actually racist Nazis themselves, or that they supported the
Nazi regime?

What if TRP is alluding to multiple people here, my friend asked. Read up
on John D. Rockefeller, like in the book by Ferdinand Lundberg (The
Rockefeller Syndrome), and you find many descriptions of him that use the
same phrases that describe Hitler
(obsessive-compulsive personality type, paranoid with delusions of
grandeur).  We know that Nelson A. Rockefeller died in the apartment of his
young mistress -- with whispers of S&M.  And we know that old John D. had
stomach disorders (ulcers) and when they flared up he lived on a diet of
milk products and cereal grains often prepared as -- have you guessed it
yet -- PUDDINGS.  That is documented in his many biographies.  Rumor has it
that he developed a taste for mother's milk, and had a battery of wetnurses
to suckle him.

So maybe, just maybe, my old friend suggested, Brigadier Pudding represents
both
Hitler and old John D., the way that Winthrop Tremaine conflates the Nazis
and the Rocks.  In this light it's perhaps a bit easier to understand why
the Pulitzer Prize judges overrode the ruling of their committee for the
first time in their history
and denied TRP the prize.  I think that Gore Vidal was the only one smart
enough to have caught that, and he did.

I hung up the phone and it took me quite awhile to get back to sleep. I
think my old friend is on to something here.


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