V-2 -Chapter 9 - Anti-Oedipus

[alice wellintown]

The Second Falling

The age-old questions and the fruit of that repressed Tree
whose Mortal Denial brought Division into the world and all
our Woe with loss of America....

"500 hundred years of metaphysics" and science has produced a profound
historical pathology that is
indistinguishable from a psychopathology or an ominous doubling
mechanism deep in the very scheme of things.

It is great irony that as Pointsman attempts to come to terms with
this historical pathology, to maintain control,
he directs his efforts at the American Tyrone Slothrop (GR.144).

 In a limited sense, Pynchon identifies this pathology as the cultural
setting of pre-war Germany. It is the
"primitive German, God's poorest and most panicked creature" (GR.465)
or "the poor harassed German soul" (GR.426) whose
mind "for at last two centuries--since Leibniz" (GR.407) has been
strangely connected to "the rapid flashing of
successive stills to counterfeit movement....extended past images to
human lives" (GR.407). This "German sickness" is
tied to an old Pynchon concern, the influence of "texts" (books, film,
architecture, etc.) on the young mind.   (see that boy genius with
flaws and thos Tom Swift books in TSI)


Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days
wanting to be called a literary intellectual,
though it doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say,
"people who read and think." Being called a Luddite
is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something
about reading and thinking that would cause or
predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And
come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?



The same theme runs through "The Secret Integration." Tom Swift,
parental conspiracy, racist film and TV.

In GR, Kurt Mondaugen, "One of these German mystics who grew up
reading Hesse, Stafan George, and Richard Wilhelm, is
"ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics (GR.403)
and Pokler was an extension of the Rocket, long
before it was ever built" (GR.402). The sickness is also Christian and
infects and is in turn infected by the "German
mania for subdividing" (GR.448) which also infects and is infected by
a cultural linguistics (Christian/sexual-homosexual, fetishistic
language) obsessed with "name giving (note the dble irony of naming
and the act of naming--Enzian and Raketmensch), dividing the Creation
finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from
named (GR.391, GR.366, GR.320-322).

The German sickness is a Modern sickness, a pathology that Pynchon
satirizes as an epidemic of the West, but directs at an
American audience sitting in an American Theatre, an American reader
and thinker, that Pynchon admonishes by
depicting the the German male at puberty who rebels against what he
considers a "detestable Burgerlinchkeit" (GR.162)
and who, in the wake of his "Wandervogel idiocy" (GR.162), reads Hesse
and company to become ready to accept Hitler on
the foundations of "Damian-metaphysics, a "Schwarmerei" that soon
degenerates into various forms of fanaticism for
technological specialization (GR.239) and fixed control which is
rationalized by those "folks in power" (GR.238).

In a broader sense, these woes are caused by the human mind--the
subjectivity, the inwardly trapped mind that has
separated what was once whole or unified so that human  experiences
have become antagonistic.


Creation sees itself with both eyes Open.

Only our eyes are turned inwards,

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can enter through the lyre's strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. (SO I, III,
1-4) (GR.625-626)




On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Tyler Wilson <tbsqrd at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Another tidbit from that letter Pynchon wrote to Thomas Hirsch:"… German Christianity being perhaps the most perfect expression of the whole Western/analytic/"linear"/alienated shtick. It is no accident that Leibniz was co-inventor of calculus, trying to cope with change by stopping it dead, chopping it up into infinitesimals, going in to look at it, the cannonball frozen in mid-flight, little piece by little piece—no accident that Gauss, who contributed most heavily to Modern Analysis, spent his time moonlighting as a diplomatic trouble-shooter traveling from little state to little state, trying to cool off hassles among the hundred princes of the period."
>
> ----------------------------------------
>> > David Morris wrote:
>> > I think in both instances the Germans are meant not to represent nationality, but modernity.
>> -----------
>> [ Someone on the pynchonwiki wrote: ]
>> … but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony; in V., Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era.
>> At the same time, this part of the novel is a haunting indictment of Western colonialism and racism; later, in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon would emphasize this latter aspect, acknowledging the facile identification made between the Herero genocide and the Nazi Holocaust in his earlier novel as "superficial". In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in David Seed's book The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3),
>> *** Pynchon wrote,***
>> "…When I wrote V. I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. […] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration."
>>
>> http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=V.
>
>