antw. Re: Is this Book just a book? (was re: Religious Fundamentalism in Orwelland Pynchon)

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

Terrance schrieb:
> I've never read a convincing critical reading of GR that argues that the
> War in SE Asia plays a role in GR. Can you point me to one or can anyone
> point me to a few passages in the novel and explain to me how these
> passages support such a reading.


  ach terrance, does this bring us anywhere?! wie auch immer: it has already   
  been said here that some of the war scenes read a lot more like vietnam than  
  like ww II. and last year i asked the list whether one could say that the   
  schwarzkommando from gravity's rainbow is echoing the afro-american vietnam   
  experience. the one answer i got was from paul mackin who seems to have no   
  problem with this perspective. note also that the counterforce is, unlike in v 
  and the early stories, not simply a beatnik crew from the 1950s but a 
  metaphorical incarnation of the post 1945 countercultures in general which 
  thus includes the anti-war movement. and then there's this guy asking what? 
  yet most important here is the dimension of technology: 'rocket-gnosticism' is 
  not limited to nazi germany, no, not at all ... in this context the modern war 
  never ever stops. each 'new' war is just there to bring up the current 
  technology to the next level without changing the real masters and this - not 
  so much the war profits - keeps the whole bad thing running. "nur der krieg 
  macht es möglich, die sämtlichen technischen mittel der gegenwart unter 
  wahrung der eigentumsverhältnisse zu mobilisieren" (walter benjamin: das 
  kunstwerk im zeitalter seiner technischen reproduzierbarkeit). as i said, you 
  won't find the word "vietnam" in gr, but then again not even you will go for  
  the thesis that the rainbow is a historistic novel about ww II, oder etwa    
  doch? perhaps it helps to think of another author for a minute: thomas mann   
  wrote, between 1926 and 1943, among other things (check out the goethe-novel  
  "lotte in weimar" from 1939, perfect in composition and incredibly funny!), 
  the novel-tetralogy "joseph und seine brüder" that deals with the biblical 
  story of joseph and his brothers; its last volume "joseph der ernährer", 1943, 
  is also - although you cannot find a direct hint - about FDR (whom thomas 
  mann met and admired) and the new deal. so great novels can be short-cuts 
  between places and times ... just remember that keith recently described here 
  how well his first gr read fitted to the tv experience of the gulf war in 
  1991. true, between the novel and our every-day-life there's no 1:1 relation, 
  and pynchon is neither a historian nor a sociologist nor a philosopher. 
  however, radical art matters, and if you just want some entertainment after 
  your ninetofive you better take the grisham ... great art, in contrary to   
  this, is always 'philosophical' which goes especially for great novels with   
  their necessarily discursive nature. where everything is bad it must be good  
  to know the worst, as an english hegelian once said. now it's your turn ---

 KFL +