Chasing ... Cutting

[Yessenia Perez]

jbor wrote:
> 
> Hi Otto
> 
> > I suppose we have a different understanding of "overtly Holocaust-denial"  -
> > for me the Nolte- and neo-Nazi thing comes to mind when you say it.
> 
> I don't mean that Pynchon is denying the Holocaust. Emphatically. What I'm
> saying is that the narrative is being filtered through the characters'
> perceptions at this point; Katje and Blicero are determined, desperate, in
> trying *not* to acknowledge what is really going on outside (as with Pokler
> later): *they* are trying to deny the Holocaust, and the War. 

It's not denial, it's much more complicated. They are indeed
desperate! That's the right word to describe them. The
travelers, on the "ship of all nations", the Anubis, where
Ensign Morituri's Story (he's not quite a voyeur) is a
reworked Moundaugen's Story, are desperate. In fact, it's
the exact word used to  describes V., Weissmann, Fopple and
the assembled European decedents at the siege party, their 
sexual "party games" are desperate indeed, a "Conclave or
League of Nations, assembled" in a "parody of space" where
an african slave's man power moves the mechanical spheres
through a mechanical time, V's time, and where the slaves
are murdered in a sexual game of nostalgic desperation. How
did they get ot be so desperate? TRP gives the history and
he, significantly it is through Weissmann, links the history
of the Herero genocide with the  history after the failure
of the German revolution, with both world wars and the nazi
holocaust. But the holocaust is not the focus of this
linking. It is not the holocaust that is alluded to in the
opening scene of GR. No, that would fuck up the novel,
sorry. TRP situates the novel, and jbor has been right on on
this, and see Charles Berger's essay "Merrill and Pynchon
Our Apocalyptic Scribes", "just BEFORE the beginning of the
atomic age proper." The fall of the crystal palace is not an
allusion to the start of the holocaust but to the end of the
second industrial revolution. 


The Pirated Dream & Images of an Industrialized Life in the
CITY.1 of 10

Paleotechnic industry arose out of the breakdown of European
society and carried the process of disruption to a finish.
There was a sharp shift in interest from life values to
pecuniary values: work was no longer a necessary part of
living: it became an all-important end
 This second
revolution multiplied, vulgarized, and spread the methods
and goods produced by the first: above all, it was directed
towards the quantification of life, and its success could be
gauged only in terms of the multiplication table. 

See: Mumford's 'T & C,' ch.1, "Cultural Preparation"  (a)
The Monastery and the Clock, (b) Space, Distance, Movement,
(c) The Influence of Capitalism, (d) The Road Through Magic,
(e) The Mechanical Universe. 

 
A landless traditionless proletariat was put to work in
these new industries-a steady unremitting toil.


The phase one here defined as paleotechnic reached its
highest point, in terms of its own concepts and ends, in
England in the middle of the nineteenth century: its
cock-crow of triumph was the great industrial exhibition in
the new Crystal Palace at Hyde Park in 1851: the first World
Exposition. 

In short one is dealing with a technical complex that cannot
be strictly placed within a time belt: but if one takes 1700
as a beginning, 1870 as the high point of the upward curve,
and 1900 as the start of an accelerating downward movement,
one will have a sufficiently close approximation to fact. 


Carboniferous Capitalism
The great shift in population and industry that took place
in the eighteenth century was due to the introduction of
coal as a source of mechanical power, to the use of new
means of making that power effective-the steam engine-and to
new methods of smelting and working up iron. Out of this
coal and iron complex, a new civilization developed. 
Now, the sudden accession of capital in the form of these
vast coal fields put mankind in a fever of exploitation:
coal and iron were the pivots upon which the other functions
of society revolved. 
A series of rushes (get rich quick),
gold, copper, diamond, petroleum. The nineteenth century
town became in effect-and indeed in appearance-an extension
of the coal mine. 

After Watt perfected the steam engine, the technical history
of the next hundred years was directly or indirectly the
history of steam. 
The steam engine tended towards monopoly
and concentration. Wind and waterpower were free; but coal
was expensive and the steam engine itself was a costly
investment; so too, were the machines that it turned.
Twenty-four hour work, which characterized the mine and the
blast furnace, now came into other industries. The steam
engine became the pacemaker. If machines can work all day,
why not a man or a woman or a child? 

Since the steam engine requires constant care on the part of
the stoker and engineer, steam power was more efficient in
large units. 
The steam engine fostered a tendency towards
large industrial plants already present in the subdivision
of the manufacturing process. Great size, forced by the
nature of the steam engine, became in turn a symbol of
efficiency. Bigger was another way of saying better
. With
the big steam engine, the big factory, the big bonanza farm,
the big blast furnace, efficiency was supposed to exist in
direct ratio to size. 


With the integration of the railroad system and the growth
of international markets, populations tended to heap up in
the great terminal cities. The main line express services
tended to further this concentration and the feeder lines
and cross country services ran down, died out, or were
deliberately extirpated: to travel across the country it was
often necessary to go twice the distance through the central
town and back again, hairpinwise.

Blood and Iron 
Iron and coal dominated the paleotechnic period. Their color
spread everywhere from grey to black: the black boots, the
black hats, the black coach or carriage, the black iron
frame of the hearth, the black cooking pots, and pans and
stoves. Was it mourning ? Was it protective coloration? Was
it mere depression of the senses? No matter what the
origianl color of the paleotechnic milieu might be, it was
soon reduced, by reason of the soot and cynders that
accompanied its activities, to its characteristic tones,
grey, dirty brown, black. The center of the new
industrialism in England was appropriately called the Black
Country.

Iron became the universal material. One went to sleep in an
iron bed and washed one's face in an iron washbowl: and sat
on an iron locomotive and drove to the city on iron rails,
passing over an iron bridge and arriving at an iron-covered
rail station
. In the most typical of Victorian utopias,
that of J.S. Buckingham, the ideal city is built almost
entirely of iron. 

In the very midst of celebrating the triumphs of peace and
internationalism in 1851, the paleotechnic regime was
preparing for a series of more lethal wars in which, as a
result of modern methods of production and transport entire
nations would finally become involved: the American Civil
War, the Franco-Prussian War, most deadly and vicious of
all, the world war
. Bloodshed kept pace with iron
production: in essence, the entire paleotechnic period was
ruled, from the beginning to end, by the policy of blood and
iron. Its brutal contempt for life was rivaled by the almost
priestly ritual it developed in preparation for inflicting
death. Its "peace" was indeed the peace that passeth
understanding: what was it but latent war? 

Destruction of the Environment
 The first mark of paleotechnic industry was pollution of
the air. For all its boasts of improvement, the steam engine
was only ten percent efficient: ninety percent of the heat
created escaped in radiation, and the good part of the fuel
went up the flue. Smoke increased the thickness of London's
natural fog. 

In this paleotechnic world the realities were money, prices,
capital, share: the environment itself, like most of human
existence, was treated as an abstraction. Air and sunlight,
because of their deplorable lack of value in exchange, had
no reality at all. Manufacturers proudly displayed factories
with no windows as examples of the excellent gas-lighting
systems which served as a substitute for then sun!

Disease of dirt and disease of darkness flourished:
small-pox, typhus, typhoid, rickets, tuberculosis. Above
all, the psychological and social stimulus derived from
cultivating numerous different occupations and different
modes of thought and living disappeared. Result:  an
insecure industry, a lop-sided social life, an
impoverishment of intellectual resources, and a physically
depleted environment. 

The Degradation of the Worker
Kant's doctrine, that every human being should be treated as
an end, not as a means, was formulated precisely at the
moment when mechanical industry had begun to treat the
worker solely as a means---a means to cheaper mechanical
production. Human beings were dealt with in the same spirit
of brutality as the landscape: labor was a resource to be
exploited, to be mined, to be exhausted, and finally
discarded. The poor propagated like flies, reached
industrial maturity-ten to twelve years of age---promptly,
served their term in the mills and mines, and died
inexpensively.  Reduced to cog, the new worker could not
survive but as an extension of the machine. 

The Starvation of Life
Add to the lack of light a lack of color, except for the
advertisements on hoarding, the prevailing tones were dingy
ones: in a murky atmosphere even the shadows lose their rich
ultramarine or violet colors. The rhythm of movement
disappeared: within the factory the quick staccato of the
machine displaced the organic rhythms, measured to song,
that characterized the old workshop, as Bucher has pointed
out: while the dejected and outcast shuffled along the
streets in Cities of Dreadful Night, and the sharp athletic
movements of the sword dances and the morris dances
disappeared in the surviving dances of the working classes.
Sex, above all, was starved and degraded in this
environment. Sex had no industrial value. Starvation of the
senses and starvation of the mind was universal.


 But the echoes
> of the Holocaust are there in the very "game" they are playing, tauntingly
> so for them (who are caught up in it and choose not to see it), more
> ominously for us (who are spectating from a more comfortable, and
> complacent, distance, and pronouncing our moral judgements on the one and
> not the other with presumption and disdain). 

What one and not the other? 



(There is probably room here
> for a commentary on how the particular Northern myth these characters have
> chosen to play out is an archetype for and exemplum of the modes of
> (in)human domination and subjugation which have been going on in the real
> world -- and viewed as acceptable -- since the dawn of human history, also.)

Yes, this is the most important thing not being discussed.
Usually when this is discussed it is doesn't include the
novel, but of course it's a major theme. 
> 
> *Why* must we read it upside down? This is the same thing as saying that
> Weissmann is inherently "evil", that he is less than human ... that he and
> those like him deserve to be exterminated, isn't it? 

I wouldn't deny Weissmann his humanity. He is, one of us, a
poor harassed german soul, but, much as the Romantics liked
to stress Satan's humanity in Milton's PL, he is evil,
death, sin, incest, and all OUR woe incarnate. Blicero
cannot be exterminated, neither can Weissmann, they are us,
our very own dark hearts. To deny this, or to project it,
sublimate it, or attempt to transcend it, is a act of
DESPERATION that leads to solipsistic history and
annihilation. 


In turning it "upside
> down" don't *we* become the dominators, the oppressors, the murderers?
> Blicero is *human* too. Like Katje. Like the Jews. Like us.

Blicero humanity is lost, he becomes a specter, a malignant,
metastasizing cancerous root in the bleached white world. As
Berger says, "The apocalyptic text attempts to counter or
ward off total destruction." However, I  agree, Denial, like
condemnation, oppression, suppression, will, if only
slowly,  return. So in turning it upside down, we must not
forget, we turn 
> 
> I think it's important that they are who they are.

Yes. 
> 
> I think he's very concerned to depict the holocaust in Sudwest in *its own
> right*.

Yes, I agree he chose to tell it in its own right, but the
two are linked by TRP. The Herero story is not told to call
attention to the holocaust, that wouldn't make sense, he
links it to "overtly" correct the "overtly" denied story of
colonialism. 
> 
> I don't see Weissmann as a cipher for Hitler at all. Weissmann is on the way
> *down* the Nazi chain of command; he has fallen *out* of favour. He reads
> Rilke, not *Mein Kampf*. His visionary utopia is idealistic, romantic.

Right, he evolves, his thoughts about Hitler and the whole
mess evolve. His first mention of Hitler is in Mondaugen's
story. From there his views of Hitler and the Reich change
several times, paralleled by his various readings of Rilke.