GRGR Finale: "No return."

[jbor]

millison:
> ...oil ...and the plastic fetishes of consumer society ...

Yes indeed, a very important theme, but, again, who are "They"?

Fossil fuels and plastics aren't solely wartime commodities, surely? If
Weissmann is to be held responsible for the atrocities committed by the
Rhenish Missionary Society and von Trotha in Sudwestafrika a generation or
more earlier than his arrival there in 1922, then how do *we* escape
condemnation for our willing complicity in this exploitation of Nature's
bounty? We enjoy the spoils of this interrupted cycle of life, death, decay,
rebirth etc every day. The equation being made with Weissmann and Enzian in
Sudwest is surely a similar one.

(And, *why* was Weissmann in Sudwest in the first place? Are we ever told
what his official capacity is, in either *V.* or *GR*. We know no more than
he had been sent there, quite against his will.)

As a spy I would imagine Katje actively infiltrated Blicero's lovenest.
Certainly the text reveals how they each willingly partake in the Kinderofen
game. Katje's and Enzian's love for Blicero outlasts the war, in both cases
it goes beyond the coloniser/colonised or A4 battery commander/spy dynamic
which first moves them into one another's orbit. So it's not just the War,
nor colonial oppression, which is forcing some travesty of love upon these
characters. It is explicitly depicted in the text as a lasting and heartfelt
emotional attachment.

Without the War Jess and Roger wouldn't be together either. It has
determined the contours of and power dynamic in their relationship as well,
but it doesn't lessen that relationship or "taint" the love Mexico feels for
Jess, does it? The games Jess plays -- the exhibitionism in flashing her
tits to that lorry-load of midgets on the motorway, or in torturing Mexico
with her aloofness -- aren't so dissimilar to the games being played in
Holland, are they? Indeed, if anything, they're worse. Mexico is a *less*
willing participant than either Gottfried or Katje: he never knows where he
stands with her, until the War is over, that is, when she has actually
returned to Beaver and won't even acknowledge that there was a relationship
between them. In terms of sexual relationships Jess is far less honest than
Blicero, Enzian, Katje and  Gottfried, who all freely enter into their
sexual *and* romantic liaisons in full and open cognisance of what's what
and who's who. Homosexuality might have been against the law in Germany in
1944, but S&M wasn't - what's so wrong with it if each of the partners are
willing participants? Certainly, this is how most instances of
unconventional sexual behaviour are being portrayed in the text, or else the
supposed aggressor is revealed to be more victim than victimiser. Surely
Katje's sexual exploitation of Pudding's war/shit/death fetish at Pointy's
behest overturns the simplistic reading of the Blicero/Katje/Gottfried
menage a trois which millison is clinging to?

None of the "love affairs" are "simple" -- consider the way poor Slothrop is
used and manipulated in turn by Darlene and Katje and Leni and Greta and
Bianca. But that doesn't diminish the emotions or turn any of them into
degenerates imo. Certainly there are ironies galore, and deliberate
ambiguities in this text; but there are also simple human emotions, such as
love, which are being depicted. millison seems happy enough to condone the
white bread versions of the affirmative "power of love" when it suits him:
Roger and Jessica to name one example which he has upheld in the past. I
don't understand why he can't admit that this same emotion (indeed, a more
honest and equal variety of it in fact, as I've suggested) can operate just
as potently in other situations, and between other people?

Blicero never assaults and batters anybody. He is not personally responsible
for the imprisonment of the Dora inmates, nor does he wield direct authority
over them at any point. One can assume anything she or he likes, offer up
any contemporary or Springer-show scenarios you want; however, unless these
can be supported by actual references *in the novel* they are irrelevant to
textual interpretation. Where in the text is it *ever* even insinuated that
Enzian, Katje or Gottfried aren't "firing on all cylinders"? That millison's
argument relies on such obvious and pathetic flights of fancy only gives me
confidence that I'm on the right track.

And, millison, I would suggest that *you* read up on post-traumatic stress
disorder because the hokey bullshit you're peddling is way off the beam.
Current therapies for torture and trauma survivors centre on nurturing
resilience rather than prolonging the cycle of hatred and retaliation by
focusing on blame, or seeking to actively restrict these people from free
and equitable participation in the new circumstances and environment in
which they find themselves, and "from which there is no return."

Here are some articles and organisations which might help to disabuse you of
your misconceptions on this topic:

http://www.nrc.no/global_idp_survey/rights_have_no_borders/sorensen.htm
http://www.fmrc.asn.au/ann_rep_98/page8.html
http://www.unhcr.ch/refworld/unhcr/hcspeech/30ap1997.htm
http://www.icomm.ca/~ccvt/ordeal.html
http://www.atmhn.unimelb.edu.au/organisations/national_bodies/startts_case.h
tml

*********

millison unsnipped:

> Another important use of "no return" in GR:   They have interrupted
> the natural cycle of life, death, decay, resurrection and turned it
> to anti-life purposes.  "Dead dinosaurs turn into oil which They use
> for War,  for personal gain, and to alienate people through the
> plastic fetishes of consumer society" might be the simple version,
> although the novel would support a far more nuanced reading of the
> way Pynchon uses oil to show that They move au rebours, against the
> natural cycle that includes "return". Disturbing this cycle has
> spiritual and religious implications, too.  In the past, people
> believed they would return to God after death; the Enlightenment
> project and modernity make this return problematic -- a theme that
> concerns Pynchon in GR as it does in the rest of his writings. (Not
> to mention the political dimension, where various factions ride their
> favored technologies to hegemony in the Cold War world.)
>
> Of course Enzian "loves"  Weissmann/Blicero; in my reading,  this
> "love" can't and doesn't exist free of taint from significant outside
> influences. Pynchon explicitly links  colonialism and sexual
> relations, and we can see this  in the relationship between
> Weissmann/Blicero and Enzian, just as we can see it in the cases of
> "loving" couples elsewhere in Pynchon's  oeuvre. The "love" that
> Enzian feels for Weissmann/Blicero is merely one of the bonds that
> tie the two together, they are bound first and foremost as
> colonizer/colonized; Pynchon returns to this subject in M&D and shows
> how it works in America.  Pynchon also makes explicit the
> sado-masochistic dynamic that rules the personal relations and sexual
> acts of Weissmann/Blicero, Katje, and Gottfried. It's hardly a simple
> love affair -- neither Katje or Gottfried would be anywher near
> Weissmann/Blicero without the distorting effects of the war on their
> world (Katje's there as a spy, Gottfried is under Weissmann/Blicero's
> military command), and, again and again, Pynchon makes clear that
> their acts of love parallel the acts of war that surround them. He
> also makes it clear that the real fucking is done on paper by Those
> who manipulate the rest in the charade we know as the War, and to a
> certain degree thus takes them (Weissmann/Blicero, Katje, Gottfried,
> Enzian, Pokler, etc.) individually off the hook for what they must
> do. In Vineland, Pynchon would seem to be playing with a similar
> dynamic in the relationship he creates between Frenesi and the
> representative of state power Brock Vond  -- does Frenesi simply
> "love" Brock Vond?  Or does her dependence on him perhaps also rest
> on factors more other than simple, romantic love, not least among
> them the media that have helped her learn to love fascists in uniform?
>
> I watched Hitchcock's "Notorious" on TV yesterday.  Does the Ingrid
> Bergman character "love" the Claude Rains character?  She says she
> does, her face reflects a rainbow of conflicting feelings and
> desires, some kind of "love" among them, surely,  as she tells him
> so.  But, like Katje, she's just on a spy mission. Romantic love has
> nothing to do with why she tells him she loves him, athough "love" of
> country leads her to accept the assignment from Cary Grant in the
> first place. Cary's also taking advantage of her love and trust of
> him.  It's a real mess, nothing simple or clear about this "love" at
> all -- sort of like the tangled web of conflicting loyalties,
> ambiguities, physical realities, mistakes, compromises, psychological
> damage (read up on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for insight into
> why Enzian, Katje, and Gottfried may not be firing on all cylinders),
> & etc.  that Pynchon creates for his "lovers."  Funny that a reader
> as sophisticated as rj, who can read ambiguity and irony throughout
> GR, insists that these relationships -- perhaps the most complex
> interpersonal and sexual relationships in the novel --  instead turn
> only on simple romantic love, stripping out the contexts in which
> Pynchon has so carefully placed them, subtracting from them the
> psycho-socio-economic dimensions Pynchon gives them in their colonial
> and wartime settings. Sure you can read it that way, but why would
> you want to? "No this is not a disentanglement from, but a
> progressive _knotting into_"
>
> Another way of looking at  (not the only way, just another way)
> Gottfried would be  to say that he's a low-ranking soldier that
> Weissmann/Blicero takes advantage of in his capacity as Gottfried's
> superior officer; that's clear enough in Pynchon's depiction, after
> all, in among everything else that's going on between the two men.
> Society has come to recognize that people who enter into sexual
> relationships with managers, bosses, superior officers, students with
> teachers, etc. may not be freely entering said sexual relationship,
> that coercion and duress play a part that may in fact overshadow
> whatever personal or sexual attractions that might be invovled. That
> may not be all there is to Gottfried's relationship with
> Weissmann/Blicero, but it's certainly a part of it. Why deny
> complexity here, too? It's hardly a case of simple puppy love.
>
> Tying up a few more loose ends. Weissmann/Blicero's crimes include
> breaking the German law on homosexuality (which shouldn't be a crime,
> IMHO), the crimes he commits in Africa as colonial oppressor, the
> crimes whose guilt he shares as a Nazi (complicity in the
> mistreatment and death of the Dora slaves, among these crimes).  A
> good cop could probably get him on any number of battery and assault
> charges, assuming he carried the same sort of violence into his
> everyday contacts with people that many Nazis exhibited. His Nazi
> brethren are his fellow Nazi officers, brothers and comrades in arms
> to use a familiar English phrase.
>
> Finally, rj asks, "Are we also to take it, then, that the Christian
> God was "crazy as a bedbug"?
>
> Good question. Read _God: A Biography_ by Jack Miles, a recent
> Pulitzer Prize winning book,  for insight into the development, over
> time, of the literary character of God in the Old Testament.  At
> times, "crazy as a bedbug" would fairly characterize this character,
> in Miles' close reading of scripture. In _Big Sur_, I think it is,
> Kerouac talks about God as a drunken, crazy old man staggering around
> up in Heaven. These interesting notions of course say more about us
> than they say about God.
>