GRGR(13) - Geli

[Clare Kennedy]

>From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: GRGR(13) - Geli
>Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 18:13:42 -0700
>
>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.

I don't get this?



>
>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.

Why? It is certainly an opera Tom knows and probably loves, but what has it 
got to do with Geli? Gaily to Geli? Sorry, I don't get this.

Or is TRP just faking us out here?

Tom likes to fake people out, clever boy, you know, put a dead girl in your 
bed.

>
>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.

Was she? Or did he give it to her?

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.

Wo silver, that description sounds like half the characters in Gravity's 
Rainbow to my May Western mind.

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.

But Pudding does the nasty with Katje and not Geli and Pudding is a Brit. 
not a nazi??


They are linked by their common fetish.

Or maybe Tom uses these "grossed out" sex scenes as he always does in all 
his stories. No one is doing the mombo number 5 in Pynchon, it kinda goes 
with the world he creates, the characters he creates, they're always into 
"wacky" sex and "devient" sex.


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.

How can Pudding be Hitler? Than who is pointsman, Roger, Katje???






>
>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?

Wo silver, from Winthrop? The Rocks are Nazis?


>
>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.

Did she shit on him?

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.

Pudding and shit go back longer than the Rocks. Guy had a bad gut, ate
oatmeal, had a Monica, now he's Hitler and Pudding in Gravity's Rainbow?


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.

Sweet, nothing better for you sailors.

>
>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


I think Tom didn't get the putslicker cause they thought the book offensive 
and unreadable. I doubt they thought Pudding was Hitler/Rock.

Clare

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