Weissmann & Rilke

[jbor]

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>From: "J Suete"
>

snip
> PS I think your comments on Weissmann's Sudwest "adventures" and Nazism are
> so absurd that they can I only suggest that you read chapter 9 of V. again,
> and I can only say that if you read chapter 9 of the novel V., where
> Weissmann shows up at the party with V., also known as  Greta in Gravity's
> R, their personal transmogrifications (fantastic, bizarre, mutational
> change) of history to satisfy their narcissistic desires for pleasure by
> murder with a glass eye's view of the genocidal past coupled with their
> evil acts of the present---flaying of the servant and so on, and come away
> thinking that Weissmann is only engaged in "domestic affairs", well, that's
> fine, but we can't make any progress in these posts, that's fine too.

I think you are somewhat confused. 'Mondaugen's Story' in *V.* is the one
retold by Herbert Stencil in Dudley Eigenvalue's office in 1956, and has
been, as the "psychodontist" asserts, "Stencilized". It is another of those
postmodernist palimpsests -- narratives nested within other narratives,
seemingly in infinite regress -- which Pynchon is so fond of. Its
unreliability is compounded by Stencil's own quest, Mondaugen's rhapsodic
illness at Foppl's Siege Party, and the various "conspiracies" and attempts
at "indoctrination" Mondaugen imagines, and which might or might not be
occurring about him; and Pynchon foregrounds each of these narrative
contingencies quite overtly within the text.

Greta Erdmann does not appear in *V.* at all. The jumbled dream sequence of
the 1904 uprising is purportedly Mondaugen's scurvy-induced vision but, as
the narrative admits, the "dreams of a voyeur can never be his own":

     ... Foppl the siege party's demon, ... was in fact coming more and more
    to define his guests assembled, to prescribe their common dream.
    Possibly Mondaugen alone among them was escaping it, because of his
    peculiar habits of observation. So in a passage (memory, nightmare,
    yarn, maundering, anything) ostensibly his host's Mondaugen could at
    least note that the events were Foppl's, the humnanity could easily have
    been Godolphin's. (*V.* 255)

Stencil has Mondaugen confess to "an increasing inability to distinguish
Godolphin from Foppl", and admit that the dream itself "may or may not have
been helped along by Vera Meroving", who is the female incarnation of V. at
this point in the novel. But the imbedded story of 1904 is most probably
Godolphin's, augmented perhaps by Foppl's "tales of when he'd been a
trooper, eighteen years ago." (256)

Weissmann, the "transvestite lieutenant" from Munich, does have a bit part
in the Siege Party sequence: he is Vera Meroving's companion; he tells
Mondaugen (prophetically) that "[s]omeday we'll need you ... for something
or other, I'm sure"; he identifies the chilling cry of the "strand wolf"
(which recurs as a metaphor in *GR*); he steals Mondaugen's oscillograph
rolls; and, finally, it is he who decodes the Wittgensteinian code of the
sferics for the hapless engineer.

There is perhaps a slight shift in the characterisation of Weissmann from
*V.* to *GR*; for example, Rilke is not mentioned at all in the earlier
text. Thus, your misapprehensions regarding the chapter in *V.* need not
interfere with a consideration of Weissmann's readings of Rilke in *GR*.