Pynchon's "knewspeak"

[prozak at anus.com]

> > Enzian is more of a Nietzschean superman... A kind of meridional
> > Zarathoustra...
> > Blicero is just what Nazi fantasies tried to make of it...
> > 
> >> But one very important character, Blicero, seems to suggest Nietzche's
> >> superman, wouldn't you say?
> 
> 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.

Has anyone here read "Nietzsche Contra Wagner"? Nietzsche would have 
been split about the Nazi eventiture. He despised patriotism and 
Christian "anti-Semites" but espoused nationalism and materialism, 
including eugenics.

> > 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.

First, why are we discussing Nazis in the context of the Nietzschean 
superman? The concepts are unrelated except as linked through the 
idealism of tragedy, pessimism and strength.

Nazi superman = ideal of racial group
Nietzschean superman = ideal of human mental discipline/strength

If you want to understand the Nazis, read Schopenhauer's "The 
Fourfold Root" or "The Upanishads."

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

Nietzsche was the Western world's re-acquaintance with materialism, 
after years of artificial containers like nation-states, morals, etc.

> Bach composed a lot of stuff. Which Bach?

The guy from Skid Row, of course.

-- 
Backup Rider of the Apocalypse
www.anus.com/metal/
DEATH AND BLACK METAL