pynchon-l-digest V2 #1796

[Doug Millison]

Pynchon goes way beyond showing Nazi's roots in the earlier German 
romantic movement and sounding an alarm -- he shows American 
interests helping to water that diseased plant, and he shows the 
plant blossoming in the U.S. GR and Vineland both feature Nazis who 
are alive and well (one real, one fictional) and very much a part of 
the U.S. scene in the 60s as Pynchon writes GR and in the 80s as he 
writes Vineland.  Von Braun -- eminence grise of both the German and 
U.S. long-distance rocket programs -- introduces GR, which centers on 
a rocket program very like the U.S. aerospace campaign of the 50s and 
60s, the U.S. post-WWII technology program made possible in large 
part by the Nazi scientists brought back to the U.S. (along with the 
Nazis who played such an important role in CIA's Cold War 
counter-inteligence program), a historical fact which Pynchon brings 
into the story line of his novel; by introducing GR with von Braun's 
quote, Pynchon puts that reality in your face from the moment you 
start reading the novel.  Then there's the ex-Nazi Karl Bopp helping 
to execute Reagan's domestic policy in Vineland.  I'm sure I'm 
forgetting the Nazis (or allusions to them) in COL49 -- Dr. 
Hilarious, probably, who is certainly alive and well and evangelizing 
LSD psychotherapy in that novel, which I guess might be intended to 
recall the Nazi aviation scientists who researched mescaline for the 
Nazi war effort and later became part of the CIA research program 
into the possible use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs for military 
and counter-intelligence purposes, whence LSD made its way into the 
wider world. In Pynchon's world (the flesh world in which he writers 
and his fictional reflection of it),  Nazis are in fact part of the 
American establishment, on the technology front and on the domestic 
police front.

"Jane":
"I think he also admonishes his readers to be cognizant of
the fact that the sickness  of idealism and  race and blood
religiosity, the romantic nationalistic  dreaming of
transcendent national teleology that infected Nazi Germany,
the fact that the sickness  of idealism and  race and blood
while it is only a potential and NOT a reality in the USA,"
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>