grgr: nazi occultism

[Terrance]

From: Lycidas at worldnet.att.net 
To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Subject: Theatre/Theater 
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 10:30:52 -0600 

 In a limited sense, Pynchon identifies this pathology as
the cultural setting of pre-war Germany. It is the 
"primitive German, God's poorest and most panicked creature"
(GR.465) or "the poor harassed German soul" (GR.426) whose
mind "for at last two centuries--since Leibniz" (GR.407) has
been strangely connected to "the rapid flashing of
successive stills to counterfeit movement....extended past
images to human lives" (GR.407). This "German sickness" is
tied to an old Pynchon concern, the influence of "texts"
(books, film, architecture, etc.) on the young mind.   
 "It brings up questions such as, Is there
something about reading and thinking that would cause or
predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a
Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?


The same theme runs through "The Secret Integration." Tom
Swift books, parental conspiracy, racist film and TV. 

In GR, Kurt Mondaugen, "One of these German mystics who grew
up reading Hesse, Stafan George, and Richard Wilhelm, is
"ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics
(GR.403) and Pokler was an extension of the Rocket, long
before it was ever built" (GR.402). The sickness is also
Christian and infects and is in turn infected by the "German
mania for subdividing" (GR.448) which also infects and is
infected by a cultural linguistics
(Christian/sexual-homosexual, fetishistic language) obsessed
with "name giving (note the dble irony of naming and the act
of naming--Enzian and Raketmensch), dividing the Creation
finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly
apart from named (GR.391, GR.366, GR.320-322). The German
sickness is a Modern sickness, a pathology that Pynchon
satirizes as an epidemic of the West, but directs at an
American audience sitting in an American Theatre, an
American reader and thinker, that Pynchon admonishes by
depicting the the German male at puberty who rebels against
what he considers a "detestable Burgerlinchkeit" (GR.162)
and who, in the wake of his "Wandervogel idiocy" (GR.162),
reads Hesse and company to become ready to accept Hitler on
the foundations of "Damian-metaphysics, a "Schwarmerei" that
soon degenerates into various forms of fanaticism for
technological specialization (GR.239) and fixed control
which is rationalized by those "folks in power" (GR.238). 

In a broader sense, these woes are caused by the human
mind--the subjectivity, the inwardly trapped mind that has 
separated what was once whole or unified so that human
experiences have become antagonistic.     


Creation sees itself with both eyes
Open. Only our eyes are turned inwards,
Walls of circumvallation,
Against our own free beginning.
What it is like outside, we only know from glimpsing
The faces of animals. As soon as a child is born
We turn and force him so that he sees
All forms inside-out, not the real, that real
That shapes the animal's face--free from death.

So who was it that turned us inwards, so that we,
And all we make, assume the posture
Of imminent departure? He stands upon the final rise,
>From which he sees our spreading lowlands.
He turns and stops and waits.
And here we live and take our leave. (DE VIII)


But with us, where we finally decide on one thing,
The other choice is always felt. We wear strife
Like a second skin. The lovers cannot always walk,
Arm in arm, along the borders
Of the world they have promised to find and to settle.
For a momentary sign, a reason for
Opposition will be prepared--laboriously;
We notice it because it is so meaningful
To us. We do not know the contour
Of feeling, only what facts it causes. (DE IV 9-18) 

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can enter through the lyre's strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. (SO I, III,
1-4) (GR.625-626)



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