pynchon-l-digest V2 #1676

[Doug Millison]

rj:
>It is this question of complicity which looms large in _GR_ as well. A
>character like Blicero doesn't appear to be motivated by anti-Semitism in
>the least, personally that is, though he is undoubtedly a Nazi and stands
>accused of the same war crimes, atrocities and mentality as a Mengele or
>Barbie at the end of 1945 at Nurnberg. A parallel character such as Major
>Marvy would be, theoretically, celebrated as a hero at this time despite the
>fact that he is far more despicable in thought, word and action. His
>castration -- romantic embellishment or wishful thinking on Pynchon's part
>- -- seems to me to represent the notion of "justice" in Pynchon's novel far
>more clearly than Nurnberg (or, for that matter, civil suits and the
>perpetuation of hatred and vilification).


I don't know what your beef with the U.S. justice system might be, 
unless it's the rather banal and always unfortunate truth that it 
doesn't always punish the guilty and sometimes penalizes the 
innocent, or why you seem to be so irritated by the notion of 
Holocaust victims recovering damages from the giant corporations who 
profited from their suffering or who plundered their assets.  I do 
prefer it, the U.S. justice system, to the alternatives -- the Nazi 
judicial system, for example, or the system of justice in China where 
I've also spent a lot of time. I don't think Pynchon has any 
particular problem with it either, given the way he uses it to 
protect his privacy when necessary.

But I agree, Pynchon does render poetic justice to Marvy, doesn't he, 
emasculating that drugstore cowboy flower of the U.S. 
military-industrial complex, which, after WWII, also includes von 
Braun, Blicero, and other Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, companies that 
played and profited from both sides during WWII, the U.S. government 
polititicians that support them (recall that Ike is said to have 
edited out of his famous speech a reference to a U.S. 
military-industrial-government complex, or something quite close to 
that, I don't have the reference at hand).

I'm not the fan of Blicero that some are on Pynchon-L, and offering 
the argument that he might not be anti-Semitic is certainly not a 
rhetorical move I would make; I'm not sure how many Nazi officers of 
his rank and responsibilities you would find in WWII who managed to 
resist the Nazi propaganda re the Jews or who would risk the 
appearance of doing so.

Questions of guilt and complicity and shared responsibility for many 
crimes in addition to the Nazi war crimes do pervade GR. One of the 
novel's most powerful moments, for me, occurs when Pokler realizes, 
as he encounters the dead and dying Dora slaves, to what degree he, a 
simple rocket engineer just doing his job and doing his best to get 
by, must share responsibility for this crime.

Given that GR, at its publication, was seen as a sort of sequel to 
V., I expect we might be able to discuss some of these issues in the 
context of the group reading of that novel, and give poor "Morris" a 
few more items to enter on that list where he's keeping score for 
that discussion.

"Such characters from "V." as Seaman "Pig" Bodine, Kurt Mondaugen and 
Clayton "Bloody" Chicklitz (who also figured in "The Crying of Lot 
49") reappear in relatively minor roles. A central character of 
"Gravity's Rainbow" is the German Lieutenant Weissmann, who had been 
V.'s sado-masochistic lover in Africa in 1922 (he had deciphered the 
mysterious atmospheric radio signals that spelled out Wittgenstein's 
proposition "the world is all that is the case").  In the new novel 
Weissmann has adopted the SS code name  "Captain Blicero" (white 
death) and devoted himself to the creation of V-2 rockets. At the end 
of the war he commands a Nazi rocket station from which he finally 
blasts off a secret missile, numbered 00000 and headed for the North 
Pole, the Herero land of the dead. In the body of the rocket he has 
imbedded, behind a plastic insulating shield, a fair-haired Aryan boy 
whom he has been torturing and buggering devotedly throughout the war 
in partial compensation for the loss of a black South-West African 
lover, a Herero native called Enzian. At the end of the war Enzian 
himself is the leader of a group of African expatriate rocket 
technicians, the Schwarzkommandos, who have dedicated themselves to
assembling one more model of Blicero's rocket of death. [...] Thus, 
for Pynchon, rocket technology is the final expression of Romantic 
love-death. His novel draws upon the affective world of Wagner, 
Mahler, Klimt, Munch, Grosz and Fritz Lang and the other German movie 
expressionists whose work found its apotheosis in Leni Riefenstahl's 
Nazi propaganda film "The Triumph of the Will." But it is Pynchon's 
ambition to relate the history of Germany to that of America and 
indeed the entire Western world. He carefully integrates American 
characters and references within his European scene (Emily Dickinson 
is quoted as an American equivalent of Rilke) and he writes in an 
unmistakably American style. Pynchon's Captain Blicero is a Nazi 
Ahab--obsessed, like everyone else in the book, with rockets, 
trajectories and explosions. His white whale is the rocket 00000. He 
has an English counterpart in the Pavlovian experimental psychologist 
Edward Pointsman (the "man who throws the switches") who believes in 
the "stone determinancy of everything, every soul." These Ahab 
figures are triumphant demons, evil variations of the paranoiac 
Herbert Stencil of "V.," the man who has dedicated his life to 
tracking down the hidden meaning and identity of V. but never learns 
that she is his mother, not merely a mysterious English girl named 
Victoria but also symbolically the Virgin, Venus, the vagina and--in 
the end--the Void, Mother Night."
--Richard Locke, reviewing GR in the New York Times, March 11, 1973

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