Am Anfang der Parabel

[Otto]

I babelfished it but it makes no sense.
With the help of Langenscheidt, AS Hornby, Roget's Thesaurus and
http://dict.leo.org/?lang=de .
I ask all colleagues to correct me.

At the beginning of the parable: Thomas Pynchon conjures George Orwell's
fighting spirit

This is a classical case of literary anger management. How a great political
author copes with his frustration, his anger, his hate, his despair. It's
about George Orwell, who had developed exactly this emotional mixture given
the state of socialism in the world. When the Soviet Union turned away from
democratic socialism it began looking like the European totalitarianism it
had fought against -- something that did not change after the end of the war
and brought Orwell 1948 to write his novel "1984": "The will to fascism had
not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even
come into its own - the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human
addiction to power..." The helpless left intellectuals had reacted to that
with schizophrenic doublethink that declared kz's and mass deportations as
right in one and as wrong in other cases.

Thomas Pynchon writes after a longer period of silence about "the road to
1984" - his introduction to a new American edition of the novel coming out
this week can be read (slightly shortened) this weekend in the Guardian. Of
course Pynchon writes about himself too, his "Gravity's Rainbow" surely
would not have been possible without the direct reference to Orwell's works
and is world. The timing isn't coincidental too, "circa 2003, for government
employees to be paid more than most of the rest of us to debase history,
trivialise truth and annihilate the past on a daily basis." If these people
have the power, "to convince everybody, including themselves, that history
never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes - or
best of all that it doesn't matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV
documentary cobbled together for an hour's entertainment."

Obviously Thomas Pynchon too has something to do with anger management, half
a century after Orwell. Orwell saw himself as dissident left who had fought
hard for his anger on the battlefields, through the injuries the fascists in
the Spanish Civil War inflicted upon him -- one is inclined to bring this
term dissent in accordance with the deconstruction. Orwell too has been
susceptible to the game of political argumentation postmodernism had turned
its attention to, to the dialectic of simplification and multiplication of
meaning. To the iridesce forms of the notorious doublethink, between
Zen-Buddhism and audacious Führer-rhetoric.
"1984" ends with the catastrophe of the individual, Winston Smith begins to
love Big Brother. But this not the last word of the novel -- an appendix
about the "Principles of Newspeak", the new standard language, which sure
enough is written in past tense and classical oldspeak and, so Pynchon
hopes, signalises that Newspeak too could be a thing of the past already.
Orwell as a master of hypertext! The photograph described by Thomas Pynchon
at the end must be seen in this light. Orwell with his adopted son Richard
Horatio Blair, taken in 1944, the year in that Winston Smith could have been
born too. Orwell looks like one of those types Robert Duvall had played, an
American archetype. Pynchon reads a faith in this picture, "so honorable
that we can imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway,
swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed."
It's no coincidence that the text appears the same day (in the Guardian)
when on an aircraft carrier close to the American coast a new phase of
political doublethink begins.
FRITZ GÖTTLER