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

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Dave Monroe 
  To: Otto ; pynchon-l at waste.org 
  Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 7:00 PM
  Subject: Re: Am Anfang der Parabel


  Any chance you can give us a recap in English?  Thanks!

  Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote: 
    Der Zorn der Dissidenz
    Am Anfang der Parabel: Thomas Pynchon beschwört den Kampfgeist von George Orwell ...