V.V. (13) "And they heard a Bondel one night ... " 277.17 (was Re: Eddins on Blicero

[jbor]

----------
>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
>

> that
> sequence of people, places, events Weissmann namedrops
> is indicative of a certain alignment,

Kautsky? Italia Irredentia?

> and that the
> apparently offhanded manner in which he does it might
> well refect that fascist aesthticization of politics.

I think one needs to factor in Weissmann's characterisation: he is paranoid,
deranged, attention-seeking ... quite a kook. Nothing at all like the
serious and bookish young man reading Rilke to his Herero lover in _GR_.

> The Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic are
> merely the apst and present here,

"merely"??? And, actually, the "present" of Mondaugen and Stencil retelling
the story is 1956, the "present" of its writing several years after that.

> but it's that
> fascist and Nazi future that is most darkly
> foreshadowed here.  This should not be deemphasized
> ...

I don't think there's ever going to be a problem about that here! But the
actual text should probably get a look-in every now and then too. I think
Pynchon has built Mondaugen's story around the details of the 1922 rebellion
of Abraham Morris and his 1,200 or so Bondels against the British/Dutch
Administration in the South-West Protectorate; it is this which has been the
direct cause of Foppl's Siege Party after all. The narrative describes the
assembled guests as forming a "tiny European Conclave or League of Nations"
(235.18): this is a direct allusion. (And, let alone "deemphasized", old
Hugh Godolphin's active presence in the goings-on seems to have been totally
discounted, whereas Weissmann's is disproportionately exaggerated.) Finally,
that scene where the guests gather on the roof to pop champagne corks as the
British/French biplanes drop bombs on the Bondel camp is something of a
climax to proceedings (276-7). Rather than merely "foreshadowing" the Nazi
future -- which is the "superficial" and "hardly profound" connection being
made in the chapter, as Pynchon himself comments in that 1969 letter to
Thomas Hirsch, a connection resting largely on that anomalous passage at 245
-- the historically factual events interwoven with the fiction seem to be a
comment on the racism, decadence and complacent cruelty of the "besieged"
Westerners.

best