1945
Terrance
lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Thu Jan 4 09:24:58 CST 2001
Reading P, fiction or prose is very tricky, dates, because
Time in his fiction is not clock but dream or mirror, or
time-space or in the process of being made in the image of
THEIR WAR are not what they seem to be, so JFK is murdered
and the 60s, even the early 70s are folded into 1945. see
page 81 0f GR for but one example.
For the culture of Death, the German Culture of Death that
includes the Holocaust with a capital H (German's burning
Jews in Ovens) also see 162 of GR, and 238, 391, 403, 426
(where the gnostics and Germans are equated) 448, 465, 491,
and 224 of V. (that's 1922), GR 546, 749-760, I could list
50 or more pages and if I could get into the archives I
could provide quotes from the text as well. Also, the
screaming at the opening may be read as a reference to
Rilke's First Elegy, and as I posted Weissmann's reading of
Rilke, and I don't assume there is a right or correct
reading, is a nazi-romantic ethos reading of Rilke 98-102.
Note also, for example, Weber's Charisma, P credits not only
to Hitler but to FDR and JFK, of course THEY put FDR
together and take him apart and JFK and Malcolm X get the
GUN, the camera and calculus, see GR 407, German film is
co-opted by the "corporate state" and applied not to film
but to Human lives.
and the Holocaust with a capital H, is also Colonial Powers
in Africa and in America and in China and so on. Remember
that Enzian's new God of chance is forged by what he
considers his great fortune (his Life //s the life of Moses)
and he survives a German concentration camp.
The Rocket with a capital R, as Doug says (and I'm not
inclined to read the holocaust in that beautiful poem that
opens the novel) is like the Whale in Moby-Dick, many things
to many people GR.727, a swastika and a cross, a and it
certainly is the colonial outpost of the White Metropolis
and the Death of six Million Jews and others. P makes the
comparison in V. Bodies, human life as Junk, see also The
Secret Integration, Carl Barrington and Carl McAfee.
However, P is more concerned in GR with the present
dispensation, the Rocket above our heads and how it got
there. The Holocaust is what it will bring and Doug is
right, we choose to go to the moon so we can build ICBMs and
make war in Asia and on "Drugs" in America. The Camera and
calculus, from Leibnitz and Lang to the American von Braun
and Reagan's Hollywood in VL.
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list