On V. the sign.

[matthew cissell]

Hello Joseph,

I don't think there is any way to confirm whether TP came across
Klemperer's LTI. However, one can check to see if there was a copy of the
German text at the libraries at that time.

20 years ago in Germany I was talking to some people about Thomas Mann's
Doctor Faustus and I mentioned how impressed I was with his erudition,
specifically the way he made use of his knowledge of Nietzsche. One of the
listeners responded that Mann was very good at making use of what appeared
to be deep learning; her point was that like many Mann had been drawn to
the flame of Nietzsche's growing reputation but he was not what we would
call a Neitzsche scholar.
     After that I came to see that something similar was at work in regard
to Joyce's use of Vico (Joyce had read Vico but was no Vico scholar in the
true sense of the word).

I have come to think that that same phenomenon is present in Pynchon's work
to some degree. Yes, we know he has lines and references to Rilke and
Wittgenstein, but that doesn't mean he read deeply, meaning TP is no
specialist on that Bohemian poet or the austrian philosopher.

So might he have come across the text and browsing through it found the
part about V? Yes, but speculation of that sort doesn't hold much water in
academia. It just shows how that sign and Symbol is so Protean that readers
will find any number of signifieds to attach to the mighty letter.

It would be great to be able to run these things past TP, he might get a
real chuckle.

ciao
mc


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On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 11:25 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Wow. We know he was aware of German documents for V and GR and that he had
> read Wittgenstein and Rilke. But is it known whether he read these from
> German texts?
> > On Dec 11, 2018, at 4:54 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Howdy All,
> >
> > Not long ago and by complete accident I came across "The Language of the
> > Third Reich (LTI)" by Victor Klemperer, a jewish philologist who worked
> in
> > Dresden and documented the linguistic shift that occurred during the
> > dictatorship.
> >
> > In a section called "From the Great Movement Forward" Klemperer writes of
> > the LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) that "Its entire vocabulary is dominated
> by
> > the will to movement and action." (p. 210) At the end of the chapter he
> > writes: "And finally, ossified into a scientific formula and tirned into
> a
> > spell, there was the 'new weapon', the magic letter that could always be
> > heightened. (...)
> >   The final paragraph of the chapter starts: "The magic letter takes a
> > strange revenge: V was originally the secret code used by the illlegal
> > freedom fighteres in the occupied Netherlands to identify themselves, V
> > stood for *Vrijheid*, freedom. (...) And then, in the final phases of the
> > war, V became the abbreviation for *Vergeltung* [vengence], the emblem of
> > the new weapon whic h would avenge and bring to an end alld the suffering
> > inflicted on Germany.
> >
> > Publication information that I have found indicates German publication in
> > 1947 but other info states 1957. However, as far as I can tell the
> English
> > translation only became available in 2000. Would TP have had access toa
> > German edition in California as he planned GR? Hard to see and without
> > library records there is no way to confirm it.
> >
> > That said the LTI text should be included in some essay on possible
> > references for V as a mulitfaceted and polysemic signifier leaping from
> > signified to signified.
> >
> > peace
> > mc otis
> >
> > <
> https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail
> >
> > Libre
> > de virus. www.avast.com
> > <
> https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail
> >
> > <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 2:06 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> https://twitter.com/PeterSokolowski/status/1068258206957346817
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>