The Chase ... and How to Cut to It

[Dave Monroe]

I tend to think that the novel is playing on all sorts of very real, very
reasonable, very likely associations in re: Blicero, Pokler, von Braun, Dornberger,
and so forth.  I think it not unreasonable to consider Gravity's Rainbow in light of
Dr. Strangelove, or ..., even.  Again, the ironies involved in that von Braun
epigraph alone ...

Indeed, again, I'd situate the novel just as much amidst the cinema of the time as
the fiction, not to mention the news.   That arc from, say, Dr. Strangelove, or ...,
not to mention its straight men, Fail Safe and On the Beach (or second bananas like
The Bed-Sitting Room or Oops! Apocalypse!), through the increasingly
existentialist-to-absurdist war films of that long sixties, say, The Great Escape,
Catch-22, How I Won the War, TheDirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, to the High Renaissance
of that "imagination of disaster" ((c) Susan Sontag) ca., whaddaya know, 1973,
Soyent Green, The Omega Man, the Irwin Allen ouevre, the Planet of the Apes series
(which was even more about changing race relations in America than it was about
nuclear holocaust, see  Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth) ...

Not to mention the news, Vietnam, Watts, Kent State, CND, Nixon (if not quite yet
Watergate), and so forth (see Stephen Paul Miller, the Seventies Now, for a useful
and interesting summation and consideration in light of, I don't know, cultural
production of the time) ...

Which reminds me, that Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks connection, "The
explosion will not happen today.  It is too soon ... or too late."  "There is a zone
... wherea n authentic upheaval can be born."  Race, colonialism, postcolonialism
(which wasn't just a problem for the English or French, again, Vietnam) ...

But not just Pokler and/or Blicero, indeed, might I add as well General Clayton
"Bloody" Chiclitz?  Now THERE'S a name outta Dr. Strangelove, though I see him as
more George C. Scott than Sterling Hayden.  And there's perhaps a reason a novel as
seemingly impervious to "th' popular imagination" could be a bestseller nonetheless,
said imagination being already well set-up for it ... but that military-industrial
complex, indeed, not merely a Nazi creation, but I do think that its being strongly
hinted that Something Sinister That Way Lurks, via those Operations Overcast and
Paperclip (in the meantime, teh streets are clogged with newly pregnant
rollerskates).  Dale Cartyer's The Final Frontier is an excellent discussion of the
transitio from that Oven State to the Rocket State, that taking up of imperialism
into totalitarianism (and note that the Rocket is refrred to as an Oven as well) ...

And I do believe that Lieutenant to Captain is inevitably a promotion, any service,
any where, but ...

... but an "attempt" to "foreclose" a "reading," "vigorous" or otherwise?  Heyyy,
that's MY trick, pal ... but, no, more like anxious for you to get to yr presumed
Point, is all.  Me, I'm just beginning to work this out on screen, is all, but you
seem to have come Prepared.  'Cept all we get are hints, Hints, maybe, even, and the
only way I can seem to elicit any more is by asking-to-provoking, is all.  But, hey,
just where are they throwing that Critical Convention this year?  Really shoulda
gone when it was in Chicago, but, well, so difficult to break away around the
holidays ...


jbor wrote:

> I tend to think that there are distinctions being made in the novel between, say,
> Blicero and Pokler: that in actual, historical terms Pynchon isn't lumping a
> mid-rank Nazi officer in with someone like Wernher von B. at all.
>
> this is the position in society which Blicero aspired to in the New (post-War)
> Order; an
> Order which he could envision but, because of the looming outcome of the War and
> his inevitable fate thereby, he recognised he would never become a part of.
>
> Not only are the Nazi scientists, military men and bureaucrats indicted in the
> novel (are they?),
> ( ... then, if they are) so too are their corresponding numbers on the Allied
> bench: Pointy, Pirate and Pudding, for starters, let alone Major Marvy or Muffage
> and Spontoon.

> I won't deny that your interpretation has often been the critical convention ...
> but am just interested to know why you are suddenly so vigorous in your attempt to
> foreclose on an alternate reading is all ...    ; )
>
> (PS Is the change in rank from Lieutenant to Captain in the German military
> hierarchy a pro- or demotion?