pynchon-l-digest V2 #1440

[Doug Millison]

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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