pynchon-l-digest V2 #1422

[Doug Millison]

Another important use of "no return" in GR:   They have interrupted 
the natural cycle of life, death, decay, resurrection and turned it 
to anti-life purposes.  "Dead dinosaurs turn into oil which They use 
for War,  for personal gain, and to alienate people through the 
plastic fetishes of consumer society" might be the simple version, 
although the novel would support a far more nuanced reading of the 
way Pynchon uses oil to show that They move au rebours, against the 
natural cycle that includes "return". Disturbing this cycle has 
spiritual and religious implications, too.  In the past, people 
believed they would return to God after death; the Enlightenment 
project and modernity make this return problematic -- a theme that 
concerns Pynchon in GR as it does in the rest of his writings. (Not 
to mention the political dimension, where various factions ride their 
favored technologies to hegemony in the Cold War world.)

Of course Enzian "loves"  Weissmann/Blicero; in my reading,  this 
"love" can't and doesn't exist free of taint from significant outside 
influences. Pynchon explicitly links  colonialism and sexual 
relations, and we can see this  in the relationship between 
Weissmann/Blicero and Enzian, just as we can see it in the cases of 
"loving" couples elsewhere in Pynchon's  oeuvre. The "love" that 
Enzian feels for Weissmann/Blicero is merely one of the bonds that 
tie the two together, they are bound first and foremost as 
colonizer/colonized; Pynchon returns to this subject in M&D and shows 
how it works in America.  Pynchon also makes explicit the 
sado-masochistic dynamic that rules the personal relations and sexual 
acts of Weissmann/Blicero, Katje, and Gottfried. It's hardly a simple 
love affair -- neither Katje or Gottfried would be anywher near 
Weissmann/Blicero without the distorting effects of the war on their 
world (Katje's there as a spy, Gottfried is under Weissmann/Blicero's 
military command), and, again and again, Pynchon makes clear that 
their acts of love parallel the acts of war that surround them. He 
also makes it clear that the real fucking is done on paper by Those 
who manipulate the rest in the charade we know as the War, and to a 
certain degree thus takes them (Weissmann/Blicero, Katje, Gottfried, 
Enzian, Pokler, etc.) individually off the hook for what they must 
do. In Vineland, Pynchon would seem to be playing with a similar 
dynamic in the relationship he creates between Frenesi and the 
representative of state power Brock Vond  -- does Frenesi simply 
"love" Brock Vond?  Or does her dependence on him perhaps also rest 
on factors more other than simple, romantic love, not least among 
them the media that have helped her learn to love fascists in uniform?

I watched Hitchcock's "Notorious" on TV yesterday.  Does the Ingrid 
Bergman character "love" the Claude Rains character?  She says she 
does, her face reflects a rainbow of conflicting feelings and 
desires, some kind of "love" among them, surely,  as she tells him 
so.  But, like Katje, she's just on a spy mission. Romantic love has 
nothing to do with why she tells him she loves him, athough "love" of 
country leads her to accept the assignment from Cary Grant in the 
first place. Cary's also taking advantage of her love and trust of 
him.  It's a real mess, nothing simple or clear about this "love" at 
all -- sort of like the tangled web of conflicting loyalties, 
ambiguities, physical realities, mistakes, compromises, psychological 
damage (read up on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for insight into 
why Enzian, Katje, and Gottfried may not be firing on all cylinders), 
& etc.  that Pynchon creates for his "lovers."  Funny that a reader 
as sophisticated as rj, who can read ambiguity and irony throughout 
GR, insists that these relationships -- perhaps the most complex 
interpersonal and sexual relationships in the novel --  instead turn 
only on simple romantic love, stripping out the contexts in which 
Pynchon has so carefully placed them, subtracting from them the 
psycho-socio-economic dimensions Pynchon gives them in their colonial 
and wartime settings. Sure you can read it that way, but why would 
you want to? "No this is not a disentanglement from, but a 
progressive _knotting into_"

Another way of looking at  (not the only way, just another way) 
Gottfried would be  to say that he's a low-ranking soldier that 
Weissmann/Blicero takes advantage of in his capacity as Gottfried's 
superior officer; that's clear enough in Pynchon's depiction, after 
all, in among everything else that's going on between the two men. 
Society has come to recognize that people who enter into sexual 
relationships with managers, bosses, superior officers, students with 
teachers, etc. may not be freely entering said sexual relationship, 
that coercion and duress play a part that may in fact overshadow 
whatever personal or sexual attractions that might be invovled. That 
may not be all there is to Gottfried's relationship with 
Weissmann/Blicero, but it's certainly a part of it. Why deny 
complexity here, too? It's hardly a case of simple puppy love.

Tying up a few more loose ends. Weissmann/Blicero's crimes include 
breaking the German law on homosexuality (which shouldn't be a crime, 
IMHO), the crimes he commits in Africa as colonial oppressor, the 
crimes whose guilt he shares as a Nazi (complicity in the 
mistreatment and death of the Dora slaves, among these crimes).  A 
good cop could probably get him on any number of battery and assault 
charges, assuming he carried the same sort of violence into his 
everyday contacts with people that many Nazis exhibited. His Nazi 
brethren are his fellow Nazi officers, brothers and comrades in arms 
to use a familiar English phrase.

Finally, rj asks, "Are we also to take it, then, that the Christian 
God was "crazy as a bedbug"?

Good question. Read _God: A Biography_ by Jack Miles, a recent 
Pulitzer Prize winning book,  for insight into the development, over 
time, of the literary character of God in the Old Testament.  At 
times, "crazy as a bedbug" would fairly characterize this character, 
in Miles' close reading of scripture. In _Big Sur_, I think it is, 
Kerouac talks about God as a drunken, crazy old man staggering around 
up in Heaven. These interesting notions of course say more about us 
than they say about God.


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