perspective detective

[jbor]

I'm not so sure that Blicero is meant to be an exemplar of or metaphor for
"Nazi mentality", any more than his opposite numbers on the Allied bench --
*Major* Duane Marvy, *Lieutenant* Tyrone Slothrop, and *Captain* Geoffrey
("Pirate") Prentice -- are meant serve as same for American/British
"mentality". As far as being a Nazi goes, well, he wasn't one in Sudwest in
1922 when he was reading Rilke (and Rilke doesn't appear at all in *V.*, so
it's important to allow for a development or change in *Pynchon's* attitudes
and literary vision from the earlier to the later novel imo), and his
concurrence with, let alone loyalty to, Nazi ideology is suspect to say the
least. The sentiments in that final, haunting monody (721-724) are, if
anything, diametrically opposite to Hitler's own final pronouncements. Or,
if his is indeed meant as a burlesque or parody of some supposedly
prevailing 'Nazi mindset', then it operates as a *subversion* of the
historical and popular stereotype, which A.J.P. Taylor notes in passing,
that, in terms of foreign policy, Hitler "wanted war for the general
destruction of men and societies it would cause", and that he was an evil
"maniac, a nihilist, a second Attila" (*Origins of the Second World War*,
ix). Of his own analysis of Hitler's opportunistic foreign policy and lack
of long-range "intentions" Taylor admits:

      This is not the accepted view. Writers of great authority have seen in
    Hitler a system-maker, deliberately preparing from the first a great war
    which would destroy existing civilisation and make him master of the
    world. In my opinion, statesmen are too absorbed by events to follow a
    preconceived plan. They take one step, and the next follows from it. The
    systems are created by historians, as happened with Napoleon; and the
    systems attributed to Hitler are really those of Hugh Trevor-Roper,
    Elizabeth Wiskemann, and Alan Bullock. There is some ground for these
    speculations. Hitler was himself an amateur historian, or rather, a
    generaliser on history; and he created systems in his spare time.
    These systems were day-dreams. Chaplin grasped this, with an artist's
    genius, when he showed the Great Dictator transforming the world into a
    toy balloon and kicking it to the ceiling with the point of his toe.
    Hitler always saw himself, in these day-dreams, as amaster of the world.
    But the world which he dreamt to master and the way he would do it
    changed with changing circumstances. *Mein Kampf* was written in 1925,
    under the impact of the French occupation of the Ruhr. Hitler dreamt
    then of destroying French supremacy in Europe; and the method was to be
    alliance with Italy and Great Britain. His *Table Talk* was delivered
    far in occupied territory, during the campaign against Soviet Russia;
    and then Hitler dreamt of some fantastic Empire which would rationalise
    his career of conquest. His final legacy was delivered from the Bunker,
    when he was on the point of suicide; it is not surprising that he
    transformed this into a doctrine of universal destruction. Academic
    ingenuity has discovered in these pronouncements the disciple of
    Nietzsche, the geopolitician, or the emulator of Attila. I hear in them
    only the generalisations of a powerful, but uninstructed, intellect;
    dogmas which echo the conversation of any Austrian café or German
    beer-house. (Ibid., 68-9)

As with the JFK thing in *Libra*, I think it is DeLillo who has set the
literary water-mark with the Fuhrerbunker (and Chaplin btw) in *Running
Dog*. (However, Don Larsson makes some interesting connections with balloons
re. Schnorp's comment to Slothrop that "nobody bothers a balloon" at 332.23
on his wonderful web-companion to Weisenburger --
http://www.english.mankato.msus.edu/larsson/gr3.html
He misses the Chaplin-Hitler connection Taylor makes above, and which is
perhaps valid in that stereotypes of the "mad Nazi scientist" are playing at
the fringes of Slothrop's paranoia in this episode too.)

Anyway, I'm not sure that Blicero is a particularly "good Nazi" as an
archetype or literary model thereof (however much of a "good" Nazi we, as
readers, might otherwise deem him to be), and we have Enzian (and his
troop), Gottfried, and Katje, too, who are also Nazis, nominally at least if
not for all intents and purposes, to complicate the issue somewhat. I'd
suggest that Blicero is off on a tangent of his own device in that lead-up
to the Luneburg Heath firing of the 00000, if not indeed during his
bureaucratic manipulations of Pokler et. al. at Peenemunde and Nordhausen
(just like Slothrop, Marvy, and Prentice are for much of the time as well).
Certainly Weissmann's Rilkean vision is in place from 1922, engineered by
Pynchon to be distinctly and deliberately *before* even the first attempted
overthrow of the Bavarian govt by the NSDAP, Ludendorff's and other
right-wing factions in Nov 1923, and the initial emergence of Hitler --
albeit briefly -- into the public spotlight in Germany.

best


----------
>From: Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net>
>
snip
> Blicero's hairbrained attempt to use high tech to
> somehow cross over the Zero to the Other Side is a Pynchonian burlesque
> and a superb one. It's well worth discussing expecially if it can be seen
> as some kind of crazy metaphor for the Nazi mentality. Not saying it has
> to be seen as that. My only hesitation might be in giving a moral
> dimension to B's outlandish act itself rather than just giving him an
> B- for effort. Perhaps there is heroism of a kind in attempting to square
> the  circle. It was a grand fantasy. What the Nazi did went well beyond
> phantasizing about Death. Would that they had left it with phantasizing
> about Death.