Pynchon and His Moses

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

jbor, are you lurking? 

jbor wrote:
> 
> It's the development of Enzian's character which is so inspired I think, and
> true testimony to the novel's brilliance. First there is the spontaneity and
> naive sensuality of the man-child (playlist addition: Neneh Cherry) in his
> initial contact with Weissmann in Sudwest. The boy is so literal, so
> innocent, so primal:
> 
> (On being christened Enzian) "Omuhona. . . . Look at me. I'm red, and brown
> . . . *black*, omuhona. . . . " (101.13up)
> 
> Later on in the Zone when the boy has become prophet-Messiah for the
> displaced Herero, Enzian of Bleicherode, he is continually brought down to
> the day-to-day banalities of human politics: trying to keep the peace
> amongst the various factions of the Schwarzkommando, already conscious of
> his own necessary sacrifice and the need to groom a successor (as of the
> vying for this role between Christian and Andreas, 731). But it his acute
> self-consciousness, and his intimations that he is only human and not really
> a Messiah at all, which undercut the Christ allegory inscribed in his story,
> certainly for the reader as for Enzian himself (and which, ironically,
> *enrich* the Christ myth). These doubts (and the Messiah complex itself) are
> all part of the European "disease" which Enzian has acquired through being
> Weissmann/Rilke's prodigy for those four years in Sudwest and then
> afterwards in the Weimar (Rocket-)State, and it's a version of the same sort
> of solipsism which afflicts Slothrop, Pokler, Tchitcherine et. al. The other
> Zone Herero, even Ombindi, are in awe of their Nguarorerue because it is
> only he who has been indoctrinated into the ways of the Western world, who
> understands the secret powers and mysteries of the master race (the baby
> Jesus Con Game et. al.), and so it is only he who can lead them to their new
> tribal destiny (a destiny which no longer even exists, a phantom destiny; or
> one which must be forged by motive force. In fact, it is a destiny which is
> nothing more than the simulation of the death-wish mentality of the
> oppressor culture.)
> 
> But Enzian is wracked by self-doubt and consciousness of self-delusion,
> addled by drugs and frailty and his encroaching age (731.22-40: great
> passage!). It seems he isn't going to be able to hold it all together, that
> the Schwarzkommando Counterforce will fail...  Until that moment when he
> acts, a sudden (last?) reversion to the instinctiveness of his youth, the
> boy he once was rising in the man he has become, "Spaceman Smile turning
> everything inside a mile radius to frozen ice cream colors NOW that we're
> all in the mood, how about installing the battery covers *any*way, Djuro?"
> (732.8up). And he removes Ombindi's people from the watch, and sets about to
> assemble, shoot and *become* that 00001. This, and the non-meeting with
> Tchitcherine, are very up sequences for me, liberating.
> 
> Enzian's perceptions, as the Schwarzkommando Oberst, like Pointsman's,
> Pudding's and Weissmann's earlier, are an intricate study in the psyche of
> the leader, the politics of control. That Pynchon projects this (essentially
> human) urge beyond the narrow lens of imperialism and war is a measure of
> the post-colonialist (and anti-nationalist) sensibility of his fiction.
> 
> (can't resist, it's just *such* a nice drive)
> best