pynchon-l-digest V2 #1676

[David Morris]

Thank you.  This quote below is far superior the banal stuff which preceded 
it.

Poor Me (for having to put up with you)

>From: Doug Millison give poor "Morris" a few more items to enter on that 
>list where he's keeping score for that discussion.
>
>"[...] 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. 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.  --Richard Locke, 
>reviewing GR in the New York Times, March 11, 1973
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