The Chase ... and How to Cut to It

[Paul Mackin]

A while back now I got off on why Weissmann, not any of the actual German
personages, was the central choice to represent the Nazi carry over to
post-war corporate America. It simply made for more subtle fiction is
all. The German technical rocket expertise being brought to bear on cold
war assured mutual destruction was just too much of a cliche and easily
passed  off as rather incidental in the total scheme of things. Pynchon
wanted to suggest something mysterious by way of a link. Something a
little Romantic, a little bureaucratic, a little irrational (even a little
bit rock and roll so to speak). It mattered not really how much of an
actual Nazi Weissmann was--the desired psychological profile was there.
The REAL people were SO boring.

				P.

On Sun, 27 Aug 2000, Dave Monroe wrote:

> 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 ...


			P.