pynchon-l-digest V2 #1441

[jbor]

----------
>From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
>

Seeing as you appear to be trying to keep *your* "inner Nazi" in check for a
change, I'll respond.

> 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.
>

Yes, you did.

> Ironic that the German colonialists -- Weissman the child abuser
> among them -- would consider the Herero savages even as they
> exterminated them.

Weissmann is not a child-abuser or a "colonialist", nor does he exterminate,
or condone the extermination of, anybody. Neither in *V.* nor in *GR*.

> 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

This idea that "good God-fearing citizens" are somehow superior to other
humans is odious to me. The term "savage" and the notion that some peoples
are "more civilized" than others is exactly where the missionary/
imperialists were and are coming from.

>
> 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.
>

Mostly rhetoric. The points were that Blicero is not *just* a Nazi, not the
*only* Nazi in the novel, and not a particularly *representative* Nazi. Just
like Slothrop is not *just* (not *even*) an American GI, not the *only*
American soldier, and not a particularly *representative* one. He's AWOL for
most of the novel, as also, psychologically at least, is Weissmann.

>
> 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.

The colonisation of Africa and exploitation and extermination of its peoples
had been going on for centuries before 1922, anti-Semitic attitudes and
pogroms even longer. Where do you think the African-Americans came from? The
Jewish Diaspora?

>
> 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.

It's *your* condemnation of these characters, ideologies, religions (and of
anyone who *dares* to disagree with you) -- not Pynchon's.
>
> That's the way I'm reading it today, at least. Please feel free to disagree.
>
> --