1945

[jbor]

----------
>From: <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>


> oy, oy, oy, GR.160 and GR.582, where again we
> have the "paranoid" verb tenses and moods and modalities,
> crucial because it's 1945. Whadayouknow. "...the Jew blamed,
> fucked (yes it makes a difference, fucked and being fucked
> that is) under by the courts, attached till his was
> bankrupt, and in the fullness of time, sent east along with
> many others of his race."

The Pflaumbaum episode in _GR_ is one I've looked at quite closely. The
first part is narrated from Leni Pokler's pov. There the factory owner is
resentfully described as a "Jewish wolf" and a "sneaking hypocrite", because
he set fire to his paint factory "for the insurance" and thus Frans lost his
job and eventually became involved with the Wandervogel idiocy and Leni's
happily bourgeois family life got all screwed up because of it. Pynchon --
through Leni -- uses a stereotype with the "oy oy oy" thing, and in the joky
line about Pflaumbaum trying to make "patterned paint", paint that would
come in "polka-dots, plaid, Stars of David." But later we are told that it
was his fate to be "sent east along with many others of his race"; the joke
being, more or less on Pflaumbaum after all, though Leni would not know it.

Leni's ambivalence towards Jewish people is an interesting study, and I
think you'll find that Pynchon is interested to plumb the depths of *her*
latent anti-Semitism rather than Frans's or the Nazis. Later at the
Studentenheim (later in her life, but before the Pflaumbaum mention in the
text -- is this an important juxtaposition?) there is that apocryphal sexual
encounter with the lesbian Jewess Rebecca (156 ff), where Leni is attracted
to the "Jewess's darker colouring, her rawness", her "animal darkness". And
then later on again when Leni takes up with Peter Sascha an externalised pov
reports how Leni's "face darkened, Judaized by the words she speaks"
(219-20); her Leftist allegiance becomes physicalised in this way, marking
her as an enemy of the Reich just as if she was a Jew herself.

> I too tire of these peanut gallery pretenses and
> pedantries)

Why the insult? Kai offered an opinion and some excellent textual direction.
What's this thing about a "peanut gallery"? Talk about "elitism"!

> this Fear of God
> Living or Dead, is a "German Sickness" in TRP's Fiction.

Not *just* a "German sickness", however. I don't understand why you are
trying to take this in isolation from all the Protestant/Puritan stuff with
Slothrop's ancestral baggage -- that doom-laden "hand of God" et al, the
paper mills -- which is given the same, if not greater weight in the text.

best



~~~
    "By 1945, the factory system - which, more than
     any piece of machinery, was the real and major
     result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
     extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
     German long-range rocket program and the death
     camps, such as Auschwitz.It has taken no major
     gift of prophecy to see how these three curves
      of development might plausibly converge, and
                before too long. ... "
                                 (T. Pynchon, 1984)
                                                    ~~~