V-2 -Chapter 9 - Anti-Oedipus

[Robin Landseadel]

On Oct 29, 2010, at 12:23 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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).


"Wandervogel Idiocy," that's a rich way of putting it. And there's  
that American audience, all hipped to Hesse by the time Gravity's  
Rainbow was rolled out, long-haired freaks with their deep spiritual  
connections to the Wanderfogel movement. The Hippies and these young  
'n' foolish Krauts were both Cynics at heart when young, soon enough  
trading that vision for the middle-class reflexes they were born into,  
buying into overt clowns such as Reagan while crack gets shoveled into  
the inner cities. The extermination proceeds only more slowly, with  
greater civility -- a Kinder, Gentler holocaust.

It's one of those themes I always see in my "Magic Eye" readings,  
seeing how close American Empire is to those Empires that immediately  
preceded it. The American Empire is not "just" similar to the Nazi  
Empire -- it's foolish to pretend that we are suffering as those  
before us because we are not and in any case there are other players,  
there always were other players, a lot of those players were in the  
good old USA. Pynchon goes to great efforts to demonstrate the players  
of the mammoth Multi-National Corporations in Gravity's Rainbow. The  
Third Reich wasn't built in a day and it wasn't built alone, much as  
the constant, world-wide Drug War wasn't built in a day or alone.  
There are such things as global conspiracies, among the author's  
favorite topicks.

But I really don't see a polemicist here, I see a poet, a poet that's  
carving his poetry out of history while he's looking for ways the  
patterns of history overlap -- the moiré patterns of history.