IG Farben & French Shakespeare.1

[Lear's Fool]

MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In the context of thise strings, it is worth noting that Pynchon most often
> doesn't specifically name names, despite claims to the contrary.  Usually
> there are allusions to various companies that may reward reader legwork, but
> actual connections aren't spelled out in the novel nor are specific
> allegations made.

He does name names. But why? The actual connections are also
there, but what does it mean that Pynchon names I G Farben
or Jay Gould & Jim Fisk, J.P. Morgan, Richard Nixon,
Rathenau, Dulles, JFK, Malcolm X? And what does it mean 
that he connects I G Farben to the U.S. Military Industrial
Complex? That a screaming ICBM is come to America? 

And VL, as Doug notes, turns to the American war on drugs
and the very real connection that the text, not some
paranoid view of the text, but the author, and we can
identify the authorial voices in VL much easier than in GR,
makes.  Are there allegations being made? What allegations? 
We have to locate the narrative norm to make the connections
and determine what if any allegations, assertions are being
made. P has done the leg work. We know he has been
interested in Lefty politics from the very start and that he
does in fact make the connections that Doug points out, the
connection in and out of the text--Reagan and Hollywood and
war on drugs and Vietnam-- can't be brushed aside as so much
paranoid reading on the part of a particular reader or way
of reading. Take Malcolm X, isn't his presence, his
characterization in GR in part an assertion, a statement,
perhaps even something didactic (Dickensian even)? Race
relations in America is a theme in all of P's fiction. P
does not simply create Marvy for our amusement does he? 
Locating the narrative norm is important here. Otherwise you
can pull out any line or string selected lines of that big
fat encyclopedic text or pull them out from the bigger
fatter text that is often said to be one text,  that text
that certainly has been shown to have  the elements so
essential to Menippean Satire and Encyclopedic narrative in
its pardoic form, one being the overwhelming of the reader's
bookishness, another being the cataloguing of false opinions
and distorted and paranoid (by paranoid here I am referring
to P's most generalized use of the idea, humanities drive to
make sense of the world)  views of the world and history.
The BBH Bush book is the kind of stuff P makes fun of in his
book, but that doesn't mean he doesn't share some of the
concerns raised by that book or some of it's political and
or historical views.  

> 
> Re IG Farben, specifically--as to its history, GR's references are almost
> entirely cribbed. GR is correct exactly to the extent that its (in most
> instances) single source is correct, incorrect in the same degree.

I disagree, while you are correct, it's P's source and he
cribs, not only from Sasuly but from a lot of texts. He
mentions this in the SL Intro. Literary thief, that's our
man, but again I will use Wagner as my example, just because
I like it: 

"Wagner had indeed made liberal use of the poet's privilege
to deal with history in his own way for his own purposes. He
substituted the Tannhauser who was the lover of Venus for
Heinrich von Ofterdingen as the central figure in the
Wartburg Contest of Song, though by way of compensation to
the latter he gave his Tannahuser the Christian name of
Heinrich. He flouted history by making HIS Tannhauser one of
the singers at the court of Landgrave Hermann in 1207 or
thereabouts, when the real Tannhauser would have been only a
tiny boy." WO.59

THE WAGNER OPERAS, ERNEST NEWMAN, PRINCETON 1991, Knopf
1949.

Wagner was a thief, and he flouted history, so Pynchon, but
like all the great literary thiefs, Shakespeare, Melville,
two more examples I like, P makes what he takes his own. And
so we will not discover what use P makes of Tannhahuser or
Wagner or Frazer, or Graves, or Brown or Freud, or I Ching
or Sasuly, simply by discovering his sources and comparing
texts. Sure we can see where he ripped the pages and pasted
them right into his MS. We can find this in Melville
(Moby-Dick) and Poe (we noted Pym and other stories) and the
list is endless. But list members of a certain age and
generation, Dave Monroe (?)  and Doug, others,  having read
GR, I think, back when it was published, have a very
important contribution to make here, and we cannot, we must
not, discount that reading by stating that GR is fiction and
the reader brings this to the text and not the other way
round. That's a critical stance and it's been very popular,
but it's reading of P is but one reading or school.  You
read GR after having read the novels and poetry and
biography (Malcolm X is also ripped off, sure there is a big
difference when P is in parodic narrative and when he is
providing more technical and historical "information," but
these two modes are not so distinct) of the day, in the mood
of the day, the politics of the day, and you have something
that is very valuable. Sure, we need to go back to the text,
the characters of the text as Robert and Paul M. often
remind us, and we should not, imho, bring P's art down to
the political wrangle that includes the bashing of the Bush
family or other projects like it.  


> 
> Nor can Pynchon lay claim to any specific or extraordinary insight or opinion
> into the Holocaust.  Happily, desepite what might be inferred from what has
> been said on this list, he offers none.

I agree. 



> 
> GR is fiction and, given the extent to which it succeeds as such, one can, I
> think, safely assume P's goals in writing it were primarily esthetic, not
> historical or pedagogic.

Yes, it seems  safe to say this was his primary goal, but
his primary goal does not  preclude these others. The two
are in fact not incompatible,
but two sides of the same text. 

> 
> Much of what is being said on this string as to what P means or teaches are
> inferences drawn from the novel by its readers.  They have the worth of
> reader opinion, no more.  Mileage will certainly vary.

That may be true, but that doesn't mean that there are not
lessons there that P is responsible for. And I'm not talking
about the lesson about fiction itself or reading or the
critics lesson about fictionality. 


> 
> If there are lessons properly to be learned from GR, they are literary ones.
> Reading it as history is a fool's game.

Yes, a fool's game, but there more in P than a postmodernist
instruction on the reading process. What about Love and
Death and Technology? That Locke essay is very perceptive,
no?