"Morality" in *GR*

[jbor]

Millison:

> Slothrop and Pokler each encounter the Other, yeah, I like rj's
> imaginative and poetic interpretation. But while it may ignore it can
> hardly erase the judgement the novel renders with regard to Pokler
> (and, by extension, to those responsible for the exploitation of
> slave labor in the Nazi war effort).

The reader renders this judgement, not the text.

> Slothrop and Pokler are both
> victims of systems, victims of Them,  but their actions in the novel,
> and the consequences of their actions, are obviously quite different.
> Slothrop's fate is ambiguous (he ceases to function as a character in
> the novel); Pokler's less so, he continues to exist as a character,
> fully aware of the extent of his guilt.

I'm not sure that this establishes a priority of either character's
significance in or to the text. If anything I would imagine that Slothrop's,
by virtue of the relative prominence and extent of his erstwhile protagonism
in the narrative, is the more salient example.

> If anything, Slothrop's dance with the girl (hardly a marriage;

"The tune is minor and precise. ... They begin their stately dance. ... She
felt like voile and organdy." (282)

As far as "symbolic marriages" in *GR* go, it'll do for me.

> she
> wears her first communion dress; she evaporates 150 pages and many
> episodes before Pokler puts his wedding ring on the hand of the
> "random woman" in Dora)

The "random woman" in the camp doesn't exactly stick around for long either.

> serves to highlight the Nazi war crimes for
> which Pokler will come to realize he is partially responsible.  The
> girl's doll's hair "belonged to a Russian Jewess"

This detail brings to mind that Concentration Camp Commandant's wife who
used the hair of the death-camp victims to make dolls, as someone cited here
previously. This (plus the lapis lazuli eyes, and the fact that her play
house is in an "abandoned estate") alerts the reader to the fact that the
girl is (the daughter of) a Nazi.

> and its burning in
> the fire (282) recalls the Nazi fires that consumed so many Jews.

The doll's hair here is being burned by Slothrop to make warmth. Fire is not
evil.

> Like the doll, the Dora slaves were reduced to objects to be
> manipulated in the creation and production of the rocket, to feed the
> furnaces of the war effort.

This connection is not made at this point in the text. The Dora sequence in
*GR* begins with Slothrop's embrace of the Nazi child and ends with Pokler
giving his gold ring to the Dora Jewess.

> Comparing Slothrop and Pokler is fruitful.  Slothrop's journey of
> discovery leads to enigma, fragmentation.  Pokler's leads to Dora
> where he finally admits what he's known but denied for some time:
> "He knew about Nordhausen and the Dora camp:  he could see -- the
> starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners [....] He had
> known, too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-education camp
> [....] he could finally put the two data together " (428); Pokler
> comes to this understanding well before he goes into Dora and,
> finally, sees at first-hand  the crime he's been a part of  -- one of
> the crimes that, presumably, will be prosecuted in the War Crimes
> Tribunal at Nurnberg we hear about in the Low Frequency Listener
> passage.

Pokler will not be prosecuted at Nuremberg; von Braun certainly wasn't.

> Pokler knows evil when he sees it, he now clearly sees his
> own part in it, and, "Later, in the Zone" we are told, his "guilt
> will become a sensual thing" (428).

No, you've misread and/or misquoted the sentence. Pynchon's flash-forward
from Pokler's conversation with Weissmann to his entrance into the camp is
as follows:

     Later, in the Zone, with his guilt become a sensual thing, prickling at
   his eyes and membranes like an allergy, it would seem to Pokler that he
   could not, even by that day in Weissmann's office, have been ignorant of
   the truth. ...  He should have throttled Weissmann .... (428)

The guilt becomes "sensual" when he finally enters Dora and vomits at the
stench of "shit, death, sickness, mildew, piss" and the sight of the stacked
corpses and bodies (432-3). Certainly, "Pokler helped with his own
blindness" (428), because the promise of his yearly reunion with "Ilse" was
more dear to him than the fate of the "foreign prisoners" he had seen. He
didn't know what went on in the camp next door, but he didn't want to know
either. Like Slothrop, he had been selfish, solipsistic. It is only when he
goes into Dora -- "not looking for Ilse, or not exactly" -- that he realises
that this "invisible kingdom had kept on". His "guilt" is his complicity,
certainly, but it is compounded by his self-delusion about the different
"Ilses" whom he meets each year. Previously, one of the young girls who
might or might not be Ilse had touched his calf seductively:

   ... A number of uncertainties shifted then for Pokler and locked into
   sense. To his shame his first feeling was pride. He hadn't known he was
   so vital to the program. Even in this initial moment he was seeing it
   from Their side -- every quirk goes in the dossier, gambler,
   foot-fetishist or soccer fan, it's all important, can all be used. (420)

The passage continues, detailing Pokler's suspicions and paranoia about the
"administrators" who might or might not be charting his and the other
scientists' "dirty little secrets" in order to "keep them happy, or at least
neutralize the foci of their unhappiness."

As with Tyrone there's a lotta ambiguity, fragmentation, enigma surrounding
Pokler, too.