pynchon-l-digest V2 #1440

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> I don't understand this persistent call to distance Blicero/Weissmann
> from the Nazi that Pynchon has made him. Sure you can interpret GR
> that way, buy why would you want to? 

Your Damn Skippy! Why, why oh why? Why? 

Paul, The last right//left  that the critical dynamic two-OH
take is hot air balloon. Yes folks, that's what they
predicted or hoped or suspected VL would be. Of course the
Hot Air balloon is only a pie in the sky escape from endless
exegetical flying in circles. Let me think about it Paul. I
like this formula, Weissmann/Blicero///Rilke///Slothrop.


We can identify the Nazi inside
> ourselves and not necessarily split it off and condemn it as the
> Other -- surely our failure to do precisely that is part of what
> Pynchon calls our attention to  in GR -- but that doesn't mean that
> Nazi aint nasty all the same. And certainly those people who, during
> WWII and the run-up to the War, affirmed and actualized the inner
> Nazi by actually becoming and acting like Nazis out in the world
> (Weissmann, to name GR's most prominent example) aren't any less evil
> just because everybody might have the potential to act that way -- we
> don't excuse their behavior, the choices they have made to act the
> way they act, any less.  That's how we distinguish savages, after all
> -- they act out the impulses that the rest of us manage to keep in
> check.  

And isn't that what happens to Weissmann/Blicero? Doesn't he
become a beast? Infrahuman? 
No humanity in his eyes and all that? Sure it is. 

Don't they teach Conrad anymore? Just kidding. 


Pynchon presents Weissmann/Blicero unmistakably as a Nazi,
> with the same kind of cultural background that helped produce all the
> rest of his fellow Nazis and Nazi supporters.  He's got the tragic
> Romantic sensibility skewed to the dark side that helped shape the
> development of the Nazi worldview.  He's had the formative
> experiences in the colonial nightmare that was the training and
> testing ground for the Nazi genocide (see _Exterminate All the
> Brutes_ by Sven Lindqvist, and Pynchon's V.). Not only is
> Weissmann/Blicero clearly a Nazi officer with a military role to play
> in the novel,  he follows the broader Nazi program of objectifying
> people and using them as tools -- as production factors in the
> manufacture of the rocket weapons (including both the Dora slaves and
> Pokler); Pynchon links Blicero quite clearly to the many instances he
> provides in GR of the way people make objects of other people and of
> themselves, even his sex games carry Holocaust overtones (Hansel and
> Gretel and the Oven). Pynchon also gives Blicero/Weissmann all the
> trappings and overtones of the military-industrial complex/aerospace
> industry that is busy raping Earth and planning to move on to the
> Moon and beyond at the time Pynchon writes GR in the 60s and early
> 70s, clearly implying that the System that governs in the post-War
> period is, for all practical purposes, the same as the System that
> governs the War, the System that includes BOTH the Nazis (and
> Japanese and Italian fascists, plus fascist elements in the partisan
> forces in Europe) on the one hand AND the Allies on the other -- the
> porosity of that boundary for the multinational corporations that
> profit from the War by manipulating and supplying both sides. Not
> only does Pynchon milk Blicero's Nazi characteristics for all they're
> worth in GR, he applies them to the post-War, Cold War society that
> he shows growing out of WWII (the society in which he sits writing GR
> in the 60s and early 70s) and which he often includes,
> anachronistically, in GR. Because it's not the Nazis per se, after
> all, that Pynchon condemns in GR -- it's the Nazis and everybody else
> who use human beings as production factors, who treat Nature as
> Other, who seek to transcend the natural cycles of birth, death,
> regeneration.  In the Nazi Blicero/Weissmann, Pynchon exploits  the
> perfect metaphor to condemn the injustices of contemporary society,
> and to suggest how they came into being in the first place.
> --
> 


Right, right, right, right, Doug is right on here, but there
is the Difference. And it may be  simply a matter of
shifting as Paul says. After all, there is no dialectic. One
side need not accept part of the other, one side does not
need to be destroyed in part by the other. No dialectic. 

Now what's the problem with the Nazi in Blicero. It's is
there. Doug has stated it well.