Pynchon's "knewspeak"

[jbor]

on 21/2/03 12:57 AM, P. Chevalier at Pierre.Chevalier at infm.ucl.ac.be wrote:

> Nope...
> Enzian is more of a Nietzschean superman... A kind of meridional
> Zarathoustra...
> Blicero is just what Nazi fantasies tried to make of it...
> 
> 
> At 06:49 20/02/2003 -0800, David Morris wrote:
> 
>> --- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> It's interesting too that Brownlie tries to bring Nietzsche into the mix.
>> But, like so many before him, he can find no evidence that Pynchon has read
>> Nietzsche.
>> 
>> But one very important character, Blicero, seems to suggest Nietzche's
>> superman, wouldn't you say?
>> 
>> DM

Blicero's perhaps the most pathetic, if not anywhere near the least
sympathetic, character in the novel.

I think Blicero is a bit more like Nietzsche himself, but transplanted into
the early 20th C. -- perhaps complicit, but in all likelihood not -- but
finally confronted by what had happened to his intellectual and
philosophical insights by 1933-1945. And perhaps seeking, self-consciously,
an alternative marketing strategy.


***


on 21/2/03 2:52 AM, prozak at anus.com at prozak at anus.com wrote:

> Pynchon seems to be familiar with barebones Nietzschean topics. I
> think there's something significant to the idea of the superman
> appearing in Pynchon's work.

Though the blonde superman idealisation is part of, or contaminated in or
by, the Nietzschean apocrypha, Pynchon in GR doesn't adopt the conventional
historical identifications between this construct and Aryan suprematism that
another novelist might, and this certainly manifests in direct contrast to
the way he does insist on various connections between -- certain and diverse
strands, say ... of -- Romanticism (eg. Beethoven, Rozzini, maybe Bach,
Rilke, Emily Dickinson, German fairy tales, Fritz Lang, King
Kong/Godzilla/Gothic monsters etc, Disney, Caspar David Friedrich, Kathe
Köllwitz, colonialism, Marxism, religions and the instinct to religion,
nostalgia, Nietzsche etc etc) and supra-national Western epistemology. Even
if only interrogating those connections.

... Not saying ignore apocrypha, but figure layers of context therewith.

If blonde superman then in the negative, a parody thereof, taking the piss
in all respects ... Enzian-cum-Gershom. And a bit cartoon-y like Takeshi.

But, yes, Nietzsche, trés resonant, read or not.

Bach composed a lot of stuff. Which Bach?

best