pynchon-l-digest V2 #1441

[Doug Millison]

I wrote:
>That's how we distinguish savages, after all
>- -- they act out the impulses that the rest of us manage to keep in
>check.

Ironic that the German colonialists -- Weissman the child abuser 
among them -- would consider the Herero savages even as they 
exterminated them. Just as good God-fearing citizens nowadays will 
call a murderer a savage then kill him.  I imagine even the  law 
enforcement and judicial system in Australia distinguishes and locks 
up lawbreakers (another kind of savage), although perhaps  they join 
the more civilized nations in eschewing capital punishment

There's nothing simplistic about my reading of the Nazis in GR and 
how I see Pynchon playing with the ambiguities of guilt, innocence, 
crime, responsibility.  What's simplistic is the knee-jerk reaction 
that ignores the nuances of what I've written here. I can acknowledge 
Weissmann/Blicero's Nazi characterization without rejecting this 
character's complexity -- it's only in rj's and Mackin's revisions of 
my posts that this simplicity emerges, but God knows they need simple 
straw men to argue against so I can certainly understand why they 
create them.  I don't know what purpose -- other than muddying the 
water -- it serves to call my interpretation "anti-German" -- my 
readiung is certainly anti-Nazi, as I do abhor, along with most of 
the civilized world, the crimes the Nazis and their supporters (a 
group that includes, in GR, as I noted in my post yesterday, 
individuals, corporations, and governments on either side of the 
phony line between Allies and Axis) perpetrated. More than one 
P-lister has painted himself in a corner of absurdity for the sake of 
saying the opposite of what I'm saying.  Blicero's not a Nazi?  Cool. 
Slothrop's not an American soldier either. And the sun rises in the 
west.


rj:
>  Pynchon also shows why these
>types are really concerned to make such discriminations (usually
>economically-driven, or as self-justification), and what happens next when
>they do. Once the missionary-imperialists have distinguished someone as a
>"savage" -- by their deviance in behaviour and/or attitude from moral,
>religious and social "norms" which have been posited and established by the
>dominant (or "Elect") group -- they either try to assimilate these "savages"
>by conversion, or enslave them (as forced labour, or commercial as a
>colonial "market"), or, if it suits their purposes, wipe them out
>completely.


That's precisely what the Germans, and other colonials, did in 
Africa. Sven Lindqvist demonstrates, brilliantly, how their crimes in 
Africa led directly and inevitably to the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. 
As characterized by Pynchon in V. and GR, the Nazi 
Weissmann/Blicero's career perfectly traces that arc.

rj:
>  I think that rather than condemning "the
>Nazis and everybody else" Pynchon demonstrates that such
>historically-revisionist discriminations are meaningless, self-gratifying,
>and ultimately, the root cause of violence and destruction themselves.


I disagree. Pynchon makes a great effort to trace out the tangled 
roots from which blossomed the flowers of WWII's evil.  He traces the 
Nazi thread back to its roots.  He traces the American thread back to 
its roots, and so on.  In character after character, sub-plot after 
sub-plot, he shows complexity, nuance, knotting into; at the same 
time he never flinches from showing the harm these people, 
corporations, and governments do, and he never lets them off the 
hook:  Pynchon is perhaps at his best in showing characters tortured 
by the knowledge of what they have done; look at Pokler. In his 
juxtaposition of the beauties of the Earth that they despoil and the 
path of spiritual reconciliation that they reject in their fever for 
gnostic transcendence, with the destruction and pain his characters 
cause, I see Pynchon's condemnation of the characters who act -- 
sometimes consciously, sometimes unwittingly as they are caught up by 
larger forces -- against life.

That's the way I'm reading it today, at least. Please feel free to disagree.

-- 

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