Pynchon, Musil, Wittgenstein

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Doug already knows this...


1.) Pynchon can less compared with James Joyce, more with Robert Musil. This 
Austrian author who died in his Geneva exile 1940, wrote 1500-pages-novel 
called "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" (The Man without qualities). The novel 
plays in the K. U. K. monarchy in Vienna during the last months before  WW I. 
It's about the main figure, Ulrich, "der Mann ohne Eigenschaften". He is a 
mathematician but one year on vacation. He has to think about a lot of 
things.  He is involved in the preparations of the so called "parallel 
action", combined jubilee days of the Germain Kaiserreich and the K. U. K. 
Monarchy at the same time, but before the jubilee days can take place, the 
war breaks out.
The novel is very satirical und you often can laugh about the stupidity of 
the aristocracy (aristo-crazy) and their bourgeois appendix. Ulrich has to 
deal with them but takes care for distance. He separates two kinds of 
perception: the sense for reality and for possibility (Möglichkeitssinn). He 
delevops a philosophy of "rational mystics" which is metaphysical (but not 
religious) and scientific at the same time. Musil's (and Ulrich's) 
Weltanschauung is based on the Vienna School of Positivism (Mach) and a 
rational perception psychology derived from it. This positivism was developed 
in the years before the war later it was more or less forgotten (because of 
phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger) and psychoanalysis).
I wonder why the German members of PL don't speak about the astonishing 
parallels between Pynchon and Musil. Wasn't the first short story of Pynchon 
"Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (the right title?)?

2.) The early Pynchon was in deed a determinist of entropy. Elfriede Jelinek, 
an Austrian writer and the German translator of GR (and one of the favorite 
enemies of Mr. Haider at the moment, she went into exile to Paris) wrote in 
1976 an article about Pynchon and GR in the Austrian literature magazine 
"Manuskripte" from Graz; when I read it this was the first time I was 
confronted with Pynchon. In this article she critisizes from a 
materialist-dialectic point of view (she is still a feminist Marxist today) 
the ideology of Pynchon as "deterministic" and inflexible. For Mrs. Jelinek 
Pynchon "naturalizes" social developments; transfering principles of 
thermodynamics on society is for Jelinek a reduction of complexity and, in 
the end, reactionary. Nethertheless, she is very impressed by Pynchon's art 
and says he is the best when he narrates, only narrates.

3.) When Pynchon quotes Wittgenstein for example in V., then he is referring 
indeed to the early Wittgenstein in Tractatus.  But Tractatus is not anti-
systematic, just the opposite. The Tractatus logico-philosophicus has the 
spirit of the Positivist Vienna School and has a clear and very crystalline 
architecture. If you think at that Wittgenstein wrote it in a note book 
in-between the bloody battle-fields of the First World War then you must come 
to the conclusion that psychologically spoken Wittgenstein had the desire to 
build a well-formed world out of words and mathematics against the chaos of 
death and destruction. The late Wittgenstein of the Philosophische 
Untersuchungen (Philosophical investigations) then decades later didn't need 
such a prothesis any longer; the late Wittgenstein with his Sprachspiele 
(language or speech 
games) became in deed a kind of buddhist philosoph. Nowadays, or better since 
the sixties, the philosophy of postmodernism and 
deconstruktism/poststructuralism reduces the world again to the point where 
only the language and its structures count. "Je est un autre" (Rimbaud). Back 
to the roots, back to the early Wittgenstein? But there is a difference: the 
chaos is accepted in the meantime.

By the way, Wittgenstein was a very complicated character. After the first 
war he became a schoolteacher in a small mountain village in the Austrian 
Alpes (Dorfschullehrer). He wanted to be independent from his father, a 
famous German-jewish steel-baron in Czechoslovakia and a very rich man; 
Wittgenstein wanted to earn his own money. But there was a bitter episode 
because of it Wittgenstein gave up his job as a teacher and went to a 
monestery where he worked as a gardener for a while. The story was that he 
treated this very poor
farmer children as best as he could but he was choleric. For example he 
showed them the stars in an astronomy lesson in the evening also he had not 
to do it. But another time when he was provoked by a ten-year-old boy, he hit 
him very brutally so that the boy lost his conscience. A few days after that 
the boy died. There was no direct connection between his choleric outbreak 
and the death of the boy, but a shadow fell on his reputation as a teacher, 
and so he left the mountain village and went to the monestery.
kwp