The Great German Novel

[Johnny Marr]

Interesting thought. I happen to be reading The Magic Mountain at the
moment, equally beguiled and frustrated with it.

GR also contains a couple of parallels with The Tin Drum.

On Wednesday, February 15, 2017, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> "... Yes, sort of *German*, these episodes here. Well, these days
> Slothrop is even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him
> dialects, Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thuringian
> if the Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where the central
> rocket works is located. Along with the language teachers come experts in
> ordnance, electronics and aerodynamics, and a fellow from Shell
> International Petroleum named Hillary Bounce, who is going to teach him
> about propulsion ..." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 240)
>
> > ... On its first page, “Gravity’s Rainbow” seems to make a sly reference
> to Mann’s Naphta, who claims in “The Magic Mountain” that terror is “what
> our age demands.” (...) But I would have no qualms about staking this
> book’s claim to be the Great *German* Novel; not in the sense, obviously,
> of being the best novel written by a German, but rather as a work in which
> the historical trajectory of German literary culture — the progression
> through Idealism and Romanticism to Nazi-fringed ­techno-mysticism and
> beyond — attains both its apex and its most spectacular cloudburst. I kept
> thinking, as I listened to Guidall, of a line in Heidegger’s “Building,
> Dwelling, Thinking” where he describes homelessness as the “summons that *calls
> *mortals into their dwelling.” Virtually every one of Pynchon’s
> characters is homeless or displaced, wandering the earth’s great bombed-out
> Zone in search of some abode: a homeland, house or simply bed to spend the
> night in (if you like, a coefficient). Even the novel’s insects crave this:
> We see cockroaches trying to establish temporary dwellings in the
> “mysterious sheaf of vectors” of a straw bed even as their nibbling causes
> their small “tenement-world” to crumble. The scene is reprised later
> beneath a “lambent, all seeing” electric bulb — but first time round it
> plays out in the Christ-child’s crib in Bethlehem, under that other
> annunciating star. The prevalence of cockroaches points, of course, to the
> writer (also Germanophone) to whom Pynchon perhaps owes most of all: Kafka.
> The prisoners of “In the Penal Colony” are strapped into a giant
> killing-machine that writes in code on their own skin; as they die, angelic
> children stationed by their side, they’re meant to get a final burst of
> revelation — but the only subject whom we actually watch undergo the ritual
> is granted no such grace on his demise. The same holds true in “Gravity’s
> Rainbow” ... <
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/gravitys-
> rainbow-read-by-george-guidall.html
>
> > ... Thomas Pynchon is the Richard Wagner of American fiction. This isn't
> only because his magnum opus, "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973), about the quest
> for a devastating V-2 rocket secreted inside Nazi Germany, both parodies
> and embraces the epic Teutonic insanity of the Ring Cycle. There's also a
> stylistic kinship: Mr. Pynchon's writing is startling, mesmeric, bombastic.
> He has a hideous genius ... <
>
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323846504579071433982952074
>
>
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