Rilke (Was: Chasing ... Cutting)

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> Terrance,
> 
> How would you feel about hosting a Rilly Righteous Rilke Read (RRRR) of the
> Duino Elegies on the P-list before the start of the VLVL?  THAT would be a
> great insight into GR!
> 
> David Morris
> _________________________________________________________________________


Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Those freed Dora prisoners and their discontents are first and foremost a
> fine portrayal of the age old identification-with-the-repressor
> phenomonon. The situation is commonplace but Pynchon presents it with
> uncommon verve. Don't we all know a woman or two--also men--who endure for
> years in a marriage in which they are made miserable and driven half nuts
> by a dominant spouse from whom they are seldom allowed a separate
> existence? Yet, when on rare occasion we can experience such a person
> temporarily away from her oppressor, what do we find? Someone for once
> relaxed, at ease, able to enjoy a state of freedom. No we do not. What we
> find is a person ill-at-ease, guilt-ridden, as nervous as can be, who
> seemingly can't return soon enough to her state of customary captivity.

That's part of it, right, good one old man, and it might
prove interesting to revisit Katje's conversation with
Enzian again with this in mind. Or any of the flights in the
novel, the "liberations" that are really banishments,
longings to be Home in prison or in the oven or aboard that
Anubis: a flight from experience, not denial as rj would
call it or futile grasping for  transcendence as some one
else called it,  but entropical, gravitational and
contingent flight into a spatio-temporal and cognitive
realm, the Anubis or a Siege Party or Weissmann's S&M games
or his realm of Blicero.  It is fitting that Thanatz slips
on vomit and falls in with the DPs, the prisoners because
this cognitive realm of flight in TRP's fiction develops
into a cultural and historical prison house and  in so doing
acquires apocalyptic momentum. 

I am convinced that Rilke is so important to these episodes
and I think he has to be accounted for here, more so than
Sartean Existentialism, Marxism, Marcuse, Norman O. Brown
and his readings of Freud and the so called Neo-Freudians,
Jung, French Structuralism and Jonas, Weber, Scholem,
combined. Rilke is the most important text here and not
accounting for his presence in GR is a mistake. One might
even make the mistake of reading Weissmann/Blicero as a
romantic hero venerated by the text if one disregards TRP's
use of Rilke in constructing Weissmann/Blicero. Besides
Rilke is a GREAT Poet, a giant, a master. If you can't read
German that's a great loss but try the Stephen Mitchell
Editio, either the Selected Vintage paperback, but it is
missing some of the poems critical to GR, for example
Sonnets to Orpheus XII Part II, but you can get it on the
internet the other Mitchell text may be more difficult to
find and more expensive, might not be available in
Paperback, it is, Ahead Of ALL Parting, The Selected Poetry
and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Modern Library 1995. 



In  1973 when GR was  published Richard Locke, in an article
in The New York Times Book book review contended that "the
most important cultural figure in Gravity's Rainbow" was
Rainer Maria Rilke and that "the book could be read as a
serio-comic variation on Rilke's Duino Elegies and their
German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture." John Stark,
D. Fowler and D. Cowart stress the Rilkean allusions in
their readings of the novel.  For Stark, Pynchon "includes
echoes of Rilke's "Tenth" elegy so often throughout this
novel that it sometimes seems like an expanded version of
that poem" and he consequently states that "[i]nformation
about Rilke is indispensable for a full understanding" of
Gravity's Rainbow. 

I start back teaching on Monday so my time here will be very
limited. I won't be able to engage in idle chatter and name
calling and silly songs and stupid poems and bigotry but I
will try to post something once a week--only on Rilke and
that degenerate Weissmann/Blicero the most venerated
character in the book.