pynchon-l-digest V2 #1440

[Paul Mackin]

And what _I_ don't understand is why anyone would want to turn Pynchon's
rather intriguing creation into a dull old Nazi, as if wearing the suit
and saluting the salute and even killing a few people (if he did
outside of war) was all there was to him.  I was under the impression that
in point of fact the so called "inner Nazi" was rather a void. Not
much going on in there. Perfectly willing to follow orders
of course. I get the impression Blicero was a real self-starter,
particularly for an officer of fairly low rank.  Don't suppose he was just
following the higher ups in arranging for the OOOOO/Gottfried space
mission. Does anyone remember (not to put too too much stress on a single
writer) Hannah Arendt's famous observation about the people behind the
evil of the Holocaust--"the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of
evil" is what she called it. Is Blicero just an Eichmann? I rather think
Pynchon did better by him than that.

			P.

On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, 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? 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.  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.
> -- 
> 
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>