So Greta is describing her career to Slothrop onboard the Anubis, eventually arriving at a movie calledJegund Hepauf (“Young Up”??) in which she starred alongside the real Max Schlepzig. There is purportedly a scene in the film in which the two ride a bathtub down a river, but Greta confesses that she never actually got on the river – the stunt doubles did the whole scene for her and Max. Then there’s this quirky little paragraph here, a little paranoid rumination on the way it might have been for those stunt doubles:
“…And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows…all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have left….or never even arrived…and what was that the currents just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was that thud, so stiffened and mute?” (492)
This passage seems to be like a miniaturization of what goes on in the Zone. We have the omnipresence of the cinematic as a framing device (“I’m not German…I’m a Lombard.” “Close enough, sweetheart.” [452] Gerhardt von Göll, Alpdrücken, King Kong, Rocketman, the constant imposition of “soundtracks” etc.) but it is complicated by the reality of the actors (the humanity Pynchon seems desperate to sustain?). Slothrop is repeatedly thrust into roles of doubles – Max Schlepzig, Ian Scuffling, Rocketman even (the outfit was there already…whose was it first?) – and his paranoia follows their arc: is he the star of his own kaleidoscopic adventure, or is he just a guy lost on the set?
So this is all well and good on its own, but my take is that it must be some sort of diagnosis of a peculiarity in the postwar human condition, perhaps linked to the nationless mercenary corporations (represented in GR via IG) that have in some way, a hand in everything that happens in the Zone, without ever really being present (culpable? Reassuring?) It is probably also tied into that other way that doubles function in the novel, less as stand-ins and more as mirror images, or opposites.
INTERLUDE: I’ve been thinking about Enzian since your last comment, and I would have made a point in posting on him, save for his relative absence in the last 100 or so pages I read (only see him on board the Toiletship, I think?). Apparently he is named by Blicero after a flower referenced in Rilke, and then when I stumbled upon a description of Slothrop’s penis as his “unflowering cock” which I unfortunately decided was not worth writing down the page number. Either way, it brought with it some new ideas about pairings of people.
To continue in a nearby vein, I started to reconsider Slothrop, who I had wanted to consider an “individual” in the Zone (a bad impulse, I know) as maybe the “double” of Pökler. But doubles and opposites, I’ve learned, require an “interface,” or a meeting point (as learned at the White Visitation à la Peter Sachsa, and through Maxwell’s Demon, for starters). Slothrop and Pökler’s would be Ilse/Bianca.The two worlds that she straddles would be the world of those who watch the film (the circumstances of Ilse’s conception, 404) and of those who live in it (their sex, and Slothrop’s subsequent love of Bianca, 476-80). There are definite similarities between Slothrop’s and Pökler’s situations; for one, they are both “allowed” reprieves, little vacations from the war: Slothrop get un perm’ on the Riviera, Pökler gets his yearly trip to Zwölfkinder. Both are paranoid that they are not so much lucky as part of a complex and precisely orchestrated system of utility. But here’s the thing:
“There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries – since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now Pökler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been extended past images on film, to human lives.” (413)
I wanted to get to the orgy on the Anubis/Morituri too, but it just seems sort of excessive at this point.
Be back with more Zone-findings soon...getting a little anxious about finishing up the novel
Matt
Your comments about cinema-as-representation seem important, and perhaps worth following up on later. (You are, I hope, starting to think your way toward a final paper-ish way of thinking. The paper can be able any or all of the novels, of course.)
ReplyDeleteI wonder, though, about how narrow you want to make your historicisim. Certainly TP's skepticism about individuality/unity/community gets a workout in the manic Zone -- but is that simply something IG Farben has created? Or is the experience of self-losing that you isolate via the stunt doubles on the river more basic to the human condition, the partial-being in history that seems to be old Tom's master-trope in all these big fat books?
Let's look for Enzian when he turns back up, and also the Counterforce should be here soon. For every They-system, a We-system, even if we can't always tell them apart.
The Slothrop - Pokler reading is very strong. Interesting: you make this section of GR sound like a sentimental family tragedy. He does play around with sentiment more often than we sometimes remember (as you already noted in the Roger-Jessica plot). It might be worth trying to figure out what he's doing with these emotional box-constructions. All versions of that cramped compartment in the nose of the final V-rocket?