When Does Innocence End?

[jbor]

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

> Then, what is the blasphemy of the missionaries. In which way have they
> talked impious or profane?

The Missionaries, as Christians, *believed* in blasphemy. They "corrupted"
the boy not by physical abuse but by instilling in him a "fear of Christian
sins" (99.28), as David M. notes.

>
> Not necessarily, as many cases of molested children prove. Remember how
> Wolfley's essay is entitled: Repression's Rainbow.

Yes it is, but as I recall Wolfley never suggests that Enzian had been
sexually molested by the Rhenish Missionaries. I don't think we can
legitimately apply contemporary and Western-style psychiatric diagnoses to
Enzian's situation either -- repressed memory syndrome and the like. It is
certainly a possibility, though there is not textual evidence either way.
There *are*, however, several occasions when Enzian expresses his continuing
love for and reverence of Weissmann.
>
> All true but in what relation to the question?

"Innocence", for Enzian, or a faith in religion of any kind, ended long
before Weissmann appeared on the scene.

>
> "all your make-believe ceased to matter." (325)

Yes, that's the quotation:

     "[...] He saw into your soul, all your make-believe ceased to
      matter. . . . "

This is Enzian telling Ombindi of the force of Weissmann's "charisma", and
of Enzian's continuing faith in his mentor as a "Deliverer".

>
> What remains of a belief if we *know*? - nothing:
> "a field of force that vanishes once the unknown becomes the known."
> (Fowler, p. 13)

Isn't that the whole thing with faith? A belief which goes beyond
rationality, beyond material evidence, beyond the scientific "data" (314-5)?

>
> Surely. "Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich." (Rilke, Erste Elegie). When you
> turn "guardian angel" upside down you get "guardian executioner" (727)

The narrative is still talking about different versions of "scholasticism"
which emerge from this obsession with the Rocket. I think that that
paragraph is actually talking about the paranoias of "heretics" such as the
Gnostics, Kabbalists and Manichaens:

     Manichaeans who see two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in
     the sacred idiolalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are
     Enzian and Blicero) of a good rocket to take us to the stars, an evil
     Rocket for the world's suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.

On the previous page the text nominalises "Test Stand VII, the holy place",
but the narrative's relation to this statement is also equivocal, I admit.

>  and
> what else is said in the Revelation. When we really read the bible it's a
> very unfair story, from the beginning to the end. Indeed "Christian
> sickness."
> Maybe Enzian's rocket is just the counterpart to the 00000 like the
> Manicheans on p. 727 believe.

Maybe. I think that Pynchon is demonstrating that there are a number of
possible interpretations. In a reflexive way he is foregrounding the
ambiguity of his own text, I think.
>
> The primal twins were Abel and Cain - whose sacrifice, the first killed lamb
> mentioned in the bible, had been refused. Blicero is sacrificing Gottfried.

The connection is made (by the Manichaeans) between Blicero and Enzian as
"the Primal Twins." The story of Cain and Abel is one of fratricide rather
than "sacrifice". There is, I think, another Biblical model for Gottfried's
willing sacrifice: Jesus (*not* Isaac, however: no divine intervention for
Gottfried, no substitution -- cf. the 'Chase Music' fragment).

> Do you think Blicero has treated Enzian in another way, more
> friendly, like a real lover, than Gottfried? The impressions I've got around
> the "Kinderofen" is not that Gottfried is playing the "Axis Berlin-Rome"
> (94) by his free and own will. Blicero shouts at him, quite typically for
> the time and place and I remember how shivers ran down my spine reading this
> for the first time, remembering my own experiences with "Militaries" here.

The description of their lovenest at 93-95 is a very provocative sequence.
(I can just see the Pulitzer judges choking on their paté.) I think that the
"shouted commands" are as much a part of "the game" as the "sable [...] cunt
and merkin" Blicero wears.

Blicero's quip about the "the Rome-Berlin Axis" is loaded with irony --
perhaps even bitter irony.

best


PS Have just been dipping again into A.J.P. Taylor's *The Origins of the
Second World War*, which first came out in 1961, and which characterised
Hitler's rise to political power and subsequent foreign policy as
opportunistic rather than planned. (Taylor addressed some of his critics in
a 1963 preface called 'Second Thoughts'). It's well worth (re-)reading and
is still an (if not *the*) authoritative historical account. I'm almost
certain Pynchon would have read it. On "the Berlin-Rome Axis" in 'Second
Thoughts' Taylor writes:

      It is dangerous to deduce political intentions from military plans.
     Some historians, for instance, have deduced from the Anglo-French
     military conversations before 1914 that the British government were
     set on war with Germany. Other, and in my opinion wiser, historians
     have denied that this deduction can be drawn. The plans, they argue,
     were precautions, not "blueprints for aggression". Yet Hitler's
     directives are often interpreted in this latter way. I will give one
     remarkable example. On 30 Nov. 1938 Keitel sent to Ribbentrop a draft
     for Italo-German military talks which he had prepared on Hitler's
     instruction. Clause 3 read: "Military-political basis for the
     Negotiation. War by Germany and Italy against France and Britain, with
     the object first of knocking out France." A responsible critic has
     claimed that this provides clear proof of Hitler's intentions and
     destroys my entire thesis. Yet what could German and Italian generals
     talk about when they met, except war against France and Britain? This
     was the only war in which Italy was likely to be involved. British and
     French generals were discussing war against Germany and Italy at this
     very time. Yet this is not counted against them, still less against
     their governments. The subsequent history of Keitel's draft is
     instructive. The Italians, not the Germans, had been pressing for
     military talks. After the draft had been prepared, nothing happened.
     When Hitler occupied Prague on 15 March 1939, the talks had still not
     been held. The Italians grew impatient. On 22 March Hitler ordered:
     "The military-political bases ... are to be *deferred* for the present.
     Talks were held at last on 4 April. Keitel recorded: "The conversations
     were started somewhat suddenly in consequence of Italian pressure." It
     turned out that the Italians, far from wanting war, wished to insist
     that they could not be ready for war until 1942 at the earliest; and
     the German representatives agreed with them. Thus, this marvellous
     directive merely proves (if it proves anything) that Hitler was not
     interested at this time in a war against Great Britain; and that Italy
     was not interested in War at all. Or maybe it shows that historians
     should be careful not to seize on an isolated cause in a document
     without further reading. (xiii)

Taylor concludes the book by commenting that the war declared on 3 Sept.
1939 between Germany, France and Britain, was a war

     over the settlement of Versailles [...] which had been implicit since
     the moment the first war ended. [...] Though Hitler blundered in
     supposing that the two Western Powers would not go to war at all, his
     expectation that they would not go to war seriously proved to be
     correct. Great Britain and France did nothing to help the Poles, and
     little to help themselves. The European struggle which began in 1918
     when the German armistice delegates presented them before the Foch in
     the railway-carriage at Rethondes, ended in 1940 when the French
     armistice delegates presented themselves before Hitler in the same
     carriage. There was a "new order" in Europe; it was dominated by
     Germany.
       The British people resolved to defy Hitler, though they lacked the
     strength to undo his work. He himself came to their aid. His success
     depended on the isolation of Europe from the rest of the world. He
     gratuitously destroyed the source of this success. In 1941 he attacked
     Soviet Russia and declared war on the United States, two world powers
     who asked only to be left alone. In this way a real World War began.
     We still live in its shadow. The war which broke out in 1939 has become
     a matter of historical curiosity. (278)

Elswhere he remarks:

      Suppose you said that a declaration of war indicates that the world
     war had started, then you would have to go back to 1932 when Mao Tse-
     tung and Chu Teh declared war on Japan in the name of the Kiangsi
     Soviet.
      For the Abyssinians the war started in 1935. For the Spanish
     Republicans it started in 1936; for the Czechs, even thought they were
     defeated without an actual war, it started in 1938. [...]
      The war between France and Germany, in which British troops were
     involved to a lesser extent in May-June 1940 lasted for something
     like six weeks -- from any dynamic point of view a fortnight. The
     Germans in conquering Europe between 1939 and 1940 suffered fewer
     casualties than [... at] the battle of the Somme in 1916.
      These were all preliminaries and no more than this. From June 1940
     until June 1941 there was virtually peace in Europe and for that
     matter generally in the world. [...]
                                           *How Wars Begin* (1977) pp.124-6

best