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

[jbor]

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>From: "Otto Sell" <o.sell at telda.net>
>

snip
> 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?

>From whose point of view? "God"'s? "Theirs"? Yours? Mine? millison's?
Nietzsche's?

> 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 ...).

I think these are the sorts of hypothetical distinctions Pynchon is asking
his readers to consider. Who are these "'simple' non-Nazi-German[s]": Geli?
Leni? Greta? Thanatz? Mondaugen? Narrisch? Pokler? WvB? Gottfried? Blicero?
Where do *you* draw the line? Does Pynchon draw a line? Is it really as
simple as "blame the Nazis"? What about the corporations? The Allied leaders
and bureaucrats? Marvy &co?
>
> <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.

But isn't the old Christian lie of good and evil the supreme binary of them
all? When Enzian becomes Ndjambi Karunga's child in the text he unites/
overcomes all those binary oppositions. But it isn't orgasm that gets him
there. It's *existence* -- being.

best