When Does Innocence End?

[jbor]

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

> Seems as if we understand the passage up on p. 100 differently. What
> blasphemy (in Christian terms) should it be Weissmann is thinking of the
> missionaries could have committed if not molesting the boys?

Blasphemy is simply "impious or profane talk", isn't it? It is Enzian who
has blasphemed, in Weissmann's eyes, by using the name of God for the carnal
act he wants to engage in. I don't think it's suggested anywhere in the
novel that the members of the Rhenish Missionary Society were child
molesters, or that Enzian had been raped as a child. If he had it would
certainly be something he'd recall, I would imagine. He is very self-aware
and open, in his own self-analyses but also in conversation with Ombindi and
Katje. The Missionaries had all returned to Europe by 1904 anyway, when the
German soldiers moved in (315). Pynchon sets out the historical timeline
pretty clearly.

The "Christian sickness" (320) is the shame and guilt reflexes which the
Rhenish Missionary Society "infected" the Herero with in the 1870s-1880s-
1890s, both there in Sudwest, and by exposing them "to cathedrals, Wagnerian
soirees, Jaeger underwear, trying to get them interested in their souls"
when they brought some back to "the Metropolis" in Europe (315). I get the
impression from this that the Missionaries were pious, pretentious, prudish
types: patronising but vaguely benevolent.

The missionaries had taken some of the natives back with them as "specimens
of a possibly doomed race" (315); the Herero had started dying out seemingly
voluntarily a "generation earlier" than the German program of
"extermination" begun in 1904. The early missionaries and colonists noticed
that "there *was* a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to
commit suicide". (317)

> To come back to the topic-line "When Does Innocence End?":
> "It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among
> these men, once past  the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with
> masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and loosing . . ."  -
> and so on (GR 324).

The "innocence" ended before Ombindi and Enzian were even born, I think:

       Cynically, though, Ombindi has preached this (i.e. "tribal suicide",
     the "Final Zero") in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it's a
     weakness in his pitch all right -- it looks bad, looks like Ombindi's
     trying to make believe the Christian sickness never touched us, when
     everyone knows it has infected us all, some to death. Yes it is a
     little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward an innocence he's
     really only heard about, can't himself believe in -- the gathered
     purity of opposites, the village built like a mandala [....] Ombindi,
     self-conned as any Christian, praises and prophesies that era of
     innocence he just missed living in, one of the last pockets of pre-
     Christian Oneness left on the planet .... (320-1)

Now, in the Zone, despite the faction-fighting going on amongst the
Zone-Herero, Enzian and Ombindi have struck "a strange rapprochement":

    The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and
    methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same. (319)

Ombindi's Final Zero is tribal suicide, but what is the "Eternal Center"
which Enzian aspires to for himself as the saviour of his people, "the
journey without hysteresis" he wishes to enact for them? His mandala is the
Rocket; "magic" (321), and "a destiny he cannot see past this sinister
cryptography of naming" are what drive him on (322). It's faith, but in
what?

The Schwarzkommando were a Nazi unit, right? And Enzian (because he was
Weissmann's protege) became their leader? But now in the Zone after the war
they've turned feral. They're heading north, into their "country of death",
gathering bits of rocket to construct the 00001 in which Enzian is going to
sacrifice himself (just as Blicero sacrificed Gottfried). So, does Enzian
believe his martyrisation to the Rocket will somehow save/redeem *his*
people? How?

The closing statements of the little q & a between Ombindi and Enzian are
instructive (325). Enzian has ardently maintained faith in Blicero's vision:

      "Did you ever, in the street, see a man that you knew, in the instant,
     *must* be Jesus Christ -- not hoped he was, or caught some resemblance
     -- but *knew*. The Deliverer, returned and walking among the people,
     just the way the old stories promised . . . "

Ombindi hits him with the line from Weber about the "routinisation of
charisma", which I take to be a jab at the way Enzian has been currying the
loyalty of the Herero factions by playing the field of their various
religious affiliations. And it seems to me Enzian is acting out the Jesus
role, too, is still Weissmann's loyal protege. I can't see the difference
between what he is trying to achieve with the 00001 and what Blicero did
with the 00000. Shooting people off into space in rockets *does* seem nutty,
but I'm not quite sure if absolute annihilation is what either of them are
trying to achieve, or maybe it is:

     The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages. It began
     in mythical times when, when the sly hare who nests in the Moon
     brought death among men, instead of the Moon's true message. The
     true message has never come. Perhaps the rocket is meant to take
     us there someday, and then the Moon will tell us its truth at last.
     There are those down in the Erdschweinhohle, younger ones who've
     only known white autumn-prone Europe, who believe Moon is their
     destiny. But older ones can remember that Moon, like Ndjambi Karunga,
     is both the bringer of evil and its avenger. . . . (322)

The "avenger" of evil sounds a bit like that angry God of Revelation to me.

Like Gottfried, Enzian has faith -- perhaps blind faith -- in Blicero, and
in the Rocket (cf. the little faux-parable from that Edelman "gospel" at
314-5). I don't think Enzian ever really rationalises what he is doing, or
why; he is just *doing*, because he believes in the rightness of it. I think
the answer of what "it" is lies with Blicero.

best