Homophobia in GR? (1.Weissmann/Blicero & Rilke)

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 1:31 AM
Subject: Re: 1.Weissmann/Blicero & Rilke
GR.660-661
<Poetry Empire and arrogance. Again, see Mondaugen's Story in
<V. for the love of Empire, the history is provided, but lets
<see what happens in GR when this arrogant man gets a copy of
<Rilke hot off the press. It is Rilke's Tenth Elegy that he
<loves most. He identifies with the newly-dead youth and he
<makes several changes in his reading of Rilke, all of them
<obviously misreading. The newly-dead youth? What does that
<mean? He mis reads Rilke's notion of Pain,  right? His
<misreads the city of Pain, right? GR.98 What or who is the
<witch? He embraced the Reich flame, but he misread Rilke
<again, the flame, right? When he sees the royal moths are
<only being used he changes his reading of Rilke again, again
<he misreads the most fundamental of Rilke's poetic ideas.
<What of his relationship with the Herero boy and Katje? We
<need to understand how Rilke figures in these two important
<relationships, right? TRP, as he will in V. and M&D uses the
<crossing of the tropic zones to symbolize a change in
<consciousness here. Read it closely and Mondaugen's Story
<makes sense, mirror time and tropical reversal and sickness
<and here TRP re-works it with Weissmann. Weissmann is
<solipsistic, it is HIS pain, his self-conscious reading, HIS
<desire to, in a tortured misreading of Rilke's Ninth Elegy,
<to find an inverted or negative  physical correlate for the
<beautiful spiritual poetic Pure Being of Rilke's that he
<Projects a color negative of Rilke's yellow and blue gentian
<onto the boy. The word against the earth. Remember that the
<in the Ninth Elegy the pure Word is the simple things man
<praises as opposed to the mysterious earth from which they
<flower springs. Of course Weissmann's reifications here
<involve mirror metaphysics just as the other readings of
<German youth involve Daemon metaphysics preparing them to
<welcome Hitler, cause it is Gottfried who will be
<sacrificed, not Enzian-red, brown, black, but
<Gottfried-yellow, blue, white. Weissmann is not content to
<identify simply with his distorted reading of Rilke's
<newly-dead youth, no, he's arrogant, he has to be Rilke's
<HERO and he believes, like those missionaries, in Blasphemy,
<the boy uses the Herero name for God, and the resonance of
<the sacred Name fills him insanely with lust, lust in the
<face-the mask-of instant talion from outside the fire.[100]

Terrance, don't stop here, you miss the binaries:
"... to the boy NK is what happens when they couple, that's all: God is
creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought
together, including black and white, male and female . . ." (100)

And life and death too. The combination of Eros-Thanatos, all cultural,
philosophical and symbolical references to this, is one of the most
important binaries in GR: orgasm as the 'little death', the fact that our
sexual and digesting organs lie close togther or serve both functions, the
old 'inter faeces et urinas nascimur...'-thing (did I get that right - my
latin's not the best).

Weissmann is not merely a homosexual or he wouldn't be a chief Nazi but an
inmate of Camp Dora or another §175-camp himself. He is bi-sexual, sleeps
with Katje too (we get to know from Gottfried on p. 104), learned that
S&M-thing (another binary relating to E-T) down in Southwest along with
Foppl and alike living out their blasphemies on the Hereros: non-repeatable,
thus singulary acts (like eliminating a species like the dodoes forever, or
a tribe like the Herero, or a people like the Jews, or like the launching of
the final rocket on a larger scale, pointing to whole mankind and all life
on earth). Mondaugen's "stencilized" Story is indeed very important for
understanding the Blicero-figure, though this is from Foppl telling about
another guy:

"It had only to do with the destroyer and the destroyed, and act which
united them...
After he'd had her he must have hesitated a moment between sidearm and
bayonet. She actually smiled then; pointed to both, and began to shift her
hips lazily in the dust. He used both." (V. p. 264)

Without (the need to have) the knowledge of having done it ourselves we all
know immediateley that killing somebody is a very intimate act between two
people, at least when they look in each other's eye. But killing someone you
just had sex with -originally the livegiving-thing, the singular act
everyone of us came from - is pushing it to the extreme.

But it fits perfectly in Weissmann's agnostic Rilke-interpretation. If he is
to blame that he wants to be Rilke's hero we are all to blame. He's so evil,
even more evil than the evil SS, because he is working for Them, The Other
Kingdom, which only can be reached through singularities, some kind of
singularity - like killing someone, having sex, taking drugs, meditations,
dreams, death:

"Ein Mal jedes, nur ein Mal. Ein Mal und nichtmehr. Und wir auch ein Mal.
Nie wieder.
Aber dieses ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal:
irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar."
(Ninth Elegy)

jbors questions:
<4) It might be interesting to consider the significance
<of the inverted commas around that word "liberation" in the text (665.3up),
<however. (i.e. Have you considered this? What do you make of it?)

Where Adam and Eve banished or released?
When liberation is felt as banishment putting the word into quotation marks
seems alright to me. It's like the error of the "simple" non-Nazi-German (or
soldier in a POW-camp) on May 8th, 1945, getting the feeling of having lost
the war, don't realizing that in fact it was a release from the Nazis, that
it meant future freedom (eh, sort of ...).

<5) Why are they (the 175s) any different from any other "liberated"
<prisoner, except for that homosexual label with which they have been
<numbered, and by which they can be identified as a discrete group in the
<text?

Because they have been the only group of Nazi-victims who were victimized
just because of their sexuality, a very private thing normally but not in a
country where every privacy had been swept away for state purposes, where
the highest goal of
every woman was to get seven children and the permission to call the
youngest son Adolf or Hermann or Josef . . .giving life to children who were
bound to be killed in wars for Their purposes.
Another thing is the fact that many artists (writers, actors, painters) were
gay and the way the Nazis dealt with the arts is well known.
Discussion homophilia vs. homophobia without realizing the overall context
of binary oppositions in this novel will necessarily lead to misreadings.

Otto (Cain-descendant)