When Does Innocence End?

[jbor]

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

> Weissmann: "He believes (...) in blasphemy" - and to be more precise: "like
> the Rhenish Missionary Society who corrupted this boy." . . . Aren't we
> necessarily to think further: "...believed in blasphemy."
> For Weissmann it seems indisputable that the monks too "believed" in
> blasphemy. In which?
> Christianity was the corruption the monks committed, but what was the
> blasphemy then?

You're making a rather large jump here, from believing in blasphemy (or sin)
to actually practising it. The Missionaries believed that blasphemy is a
sin; and there are hangovers from his upbringing which give Weissmann a
chill when Enzian blasphemes. The boy is taking the Lord's name in vain,
according to Christian ethics. The Missionaries "corrupted the boy" by
teaching him to fear Christian sins. But Enzian, reflecting later, admits
that at the time he

     could not believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga and the
     Christian god were too far away. There was no difference between the
     behavior of a god and the operation of pure chance. Weissmann, the
     European whose protege he became, always believed he'd seduced Enzian
     away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves; the gods
     had left the people. . . . He let Weissmann think what he wanted to.
     The man's thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert's for water.
                                                               (323.30)

> "nor even a request." - "the boy wants to fuck" (100) - it's a proposal.
> It's Enzian who initiates the situation. He has learned to like it and knows
> that white males like it.

Christianity is a learnt reflex. Is sexuality -- homo- or otherwise -- in
your opinion?

> The boy says a blasphemy (according to Christian values) in using the
> Herero-word for God for the act. Evidently it's no blasphemy for Enzian what
> they're doing.

Blasphemy is about saying, not doing. The sexual act itself is a cardinal
sin in the Christian mythos which *neither* Enzian nor Weissmann are too
concerned about. Weissmann was only "[b]rought up into a Christian ambience"
[99] remember. Instead of the Christian God he worships the romantic
nihilism of Rilke's songs to death -- that slender volume "a gift from
Mother at the boat".

snip
> If Enzian has been
> corrupted with Christianity how come that he's proposing such an act? To a
> Baas! Because it's common for him, what he has learned from his folk what
> Christianity means: being sodomized by that white folk that pretends to be
> God's representatives down here.

See the quote above. *Weissmann* thought he'd seduced the boy "away from
religion" -- *both* religions, the Herero and the Christian. But for Enzian
the gods "had gone away themselves". For him, his own personal survival was
as much "the operation of pure chance" in a godless world as it was the sign
of divine predestination. He "let Weissmann think what he wanted to", to
revel in his own guilt and self-loathing, all part of that "Christian
ambience" the white man had been "brought up into."

> "Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen." ( GR 667) I think that
> this goes for a lot of things in the novel.

Yes. But a lot of the ambiguity has to do with the various perspectives on
events that different characters have, in combination with those
perspectives brought by author and reader to the text.

> I wished they'd made a video. Guess the novel fitted to their expectation of
> what to expect from those 'hippies' and alike.

The jury which awarded the Pulitzer Prize to *GR* were mightily put out by
the veto. Critics often suggest that the Judges didn't understand the novel;
I suspect that they understood it only too well.

best