Sex & the Swastika

[Robert Pirani]

At 09:05 PM 1/11/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>
>Doug Millison wrote:
>> 
>> rj, why such a firm insistence that TRP couldn't possibly be referring to
>> Hitler's dominatrix? In texts so obviously rich in literary and historical
>> allusions, I really don't understand your reluctance to admit what, in the
>> context of this novel, appears so completely obvious.  How do you answer
>> the bigger question, which is Why do so many of Pynchon's character names
>> lead to historical personages whose history intersects so significantly
>> with the material, themes, and motifs that Pynchon deals with?  Just
>> coincidence? Or what?
>>
>
>I'm really open to this idea, I see how this is quite
>valuable, I'm not refusing to be convinced, only being
>critical in a positive way. I have seen how this approach
>opens the book to very interesting and much needed
>discussions of Pynchon's method of writing and how he treats
>the reader and politics and so on, but I must repeat, I
>don't get the Geli Tripping allusion to Geli R. Willing to
>be convinced, but skeptical at the moment.
>
>

Terrance -

I agree -- the fact that  Geli the character in GR fails to gain any
resonance (ok I decided to use a six-bit term for echo) by being linked to
Hitler's niece is what originally led me to question on this thread if
Rosenbaum wasn't misremembering (insert less kind term for relying on
literary hearsay here) the characters Geli and Katje. But Doug M. assured
me that columnist Rosenbaum refers to TRP often and so wouldn't have made
an error like that. Still it seems far too imprecise an affect for Pynchon
to at one point depict scatalogical sex and another use a name associated
with that supposed act in Hitler's underground history with the intent of
bringing an "echo" of that story to the reader's mind, that would be a
rather clumsy step for our cool Astaire of the novel.

Robert