Episode 40 (620-677) (397-433)

Dies ist die längste und zentralste Episode des Romans. Die aktuelle Zeit ist der 9. Juli 1945, eine Analepse von mehr als 16 Jahren führt zurück ins Deutschland der späten Zwanziger, wo das deutsche Raketenprogramm als “apparently innocent club, the Society for Space Travel” (Weisenburger, p. 194) begonnen hatte.

Pöckler’s Story – Demian–metaphysics – Hermann Hesse – Pluto und Astrologie – Literatur und Links

Pöckler’s Story

Interessant ist auch der Übergang von der vorherigen Episode, der den Zusammenhang zwischen den „Schatten-Kindern” Bianca Erdmann und Ilse Pöckler herstellt. Die binären Oppositionen Film und Wirklichkeit geraten kräftig durcheinander. Wie überall in Pynchons Fiktion erlangt die falsche Welt, die neptunische Welt der Träume, Drogen, Halluzinationen und der Phantasie, wozu man auch Film und andere Medien zählen muß, Einfluß auf „unsere” Welt.
Der vierte Hauptstrang des Romans kreist um den Raketeningenieur Franz Pöckler.
Pöckler wartet in Zwölfkinder auf die Rückkehr seiner Tochter Ilse und erinnert sich. Pöckler, der Jahre zuvor den Film Alpdrücken im UFA-Palast an der Friedrichstraße gesehen hatte, hatte in der gleichen Nacht seine Frau Leni geschwängert, während er sich die im Film gesehene S&M-Szene vorgestellt hatte, bei deren Bannung auf Zelluloid, wie in Episode 39 berichtet wurde, Bianca von Schlepzig gezeugt worden war. Pöckler hatte das Kino verlassen,

“(…) thinking like everybody else only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking her into some submission. (…) How many shadow-children would be fathered on Erdmann that night?
It was never a real possibility for Pöckler that Leni might get pregnant. But looking back, he knew that had to be the night, Alpdrücken night, that Ilse was conceived. They fucked so seldom any more. (…) Thats how it happened. A film. How else? Isn’t that what they made of my child, s film? (…)

He’s waiting for Ilse, for his movie-child, to return to Zwölfkinder, as she has every summer at this time.” (397-398)

“In the Corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven valuable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as Zwolfkinder.” (419]
“Papi,” gravely unlacing, “may I sleep next to you tonight?” One of her hands had come lightly to rest on the beginning of his bare calf. Their eyes met for a half second. A number of uncertainties shifted then for Pökler and locked into sense. To his shame, his first feeling was pride. He hadn’t known he was so vital to the program. Even in this initial moment, he was seeing it from Their side – every quirk goes in the dossier, gambler, foot-fetishist or soccer fan, it’s all important, it can all be used. Right now we have to keep them happy, or at least neutralize the foci of their unhappiness. You may not understand what their work really is, not at the level of the data, but you’re an administrator after all, a leader, your job is to get results . . . Pökler, now, has mentioned a “daughter.” Yes, yes we know it’s disgusting, one never can tell what they have locked up in there with those equations, but we must all put off our judgments for now, there’ll be time after the war to get back to the Pöklers and their dirty little secrets. . . .
He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible blow. That took care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged her tip on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands already at the buttons of his trousers, her white frock already pulled above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath, nothing all day . . . how I’ve warned you, she whispered as paternal plow found its way into filial furrow … and after hours of amazing incest they dressed in silence, and crept out into the leading edge of faintest flesh dawn, everything they would ever need packed inside her flowered bag, past sleeping children doomed to the end of summer, past monitors and railway guards, down at last to the water and the fishing boats, to a fatherly old sea-dog in a braided captain’s hat, who welcomed them aboard and stashed them below decks. where she snuggled down in the bunk as they got under way and sucked him for hours while the engine pounded, till the Captain called, “Come on up, and take a look at your new home!” Gray and green, through the mist, it was Denmark. “Yes, they’re a free people here. Good luck to both of you!” The three of them, there on deck, stood hugging. . . .
No. What Pökler did was choose to believe she wanted comfort that night. wanted not to be alone. Despite Their game, Their palpable evil, though he had no more reason to trust “Ilse” than he trusted Them, by an act not of faith, not of courage but of conservatism, he chose to believe that. Even in peacetime, with unlimited resources, he couldn’t have proven her identity, not beyond the knife-edge of zero tolerance his precision eye needed. (…) For every government agency, the Nazi Party set up a duplicate.”(420-421)

Demian–Metaphysics

“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 trajectory of cannonballs through the air.” (407)

Der Ingenieur Kurt Mondaugen ist eine Figur, die Pynchon bereits im 9. Kapitel von V. (Mondaugen’s Story) vorgestellt hat. Vielleicht hat Pynchon nicht gerade eine Aversion gegen alles binäre, wie Brian Stonehill meint, aber die Beispiele, die er anführt, zeigen eindeutig, daß die massierte Sammlung von binären Oppositionen in Gravity’s Rainbow durchaus die Warnung beinhaltet, die Dinge ausschließlich in einem Schwarz-Weiss Muster wahrzunehmen und kritiklos archaische Denkmuster anzunehmen. Pynchon warnt seine Leser, die er zu recht zur aktuellen Counterforce zählen durfte, vor dem impliziten Faschismus jeglicher Ideologie, die im Tod von Menschen «für die Sache» etwas Positives sieht und das Diesseits verachtet:

“The blast demolished the test stand, killing Dr. Wahmke and two others. First blood, first sacrifice.
Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who grew up reading Hesse, Stefan George and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian–metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxydizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the cumbustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus—. (…) Mondaugen was the bodhisattva here, returned from exile in the Kalahari (…).
Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, the poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. He thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and the true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals—sensedata, feelings, memories relocating—are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of the signal zero.
“In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?” said Pöckler.
“Yes, that’s good,” Mondaugen smiled.”” (403-404, 630)

Hermann Hesse

Sigrid Mayer untereilt 1977 die Hesse-Rezeption in den Vereinigten Staaten nach dem 2. Weltkrieg in zwei Phasen. Die erste Phase ging von den Beats aus, die zweite Phase, die zu der bekannten Beliebtheit Hesses bei den Hippies führte, hat ihrer Ansicht nach damit zu tun, daß Timothy Leary die Lektüre von Hesses Romanen empfohlen hat und resümiert,

„(…) daß es gewiß nicht die Intellektuellen, also etwa die Universitätsstudenten waren, die zuerst Hesse entdeckten, sondern gerade die >drop-outs<, eben die gesellschaftlichen Außenseiter. (…) Etwa um die Zeit der neuübersetzten «Demian» Ausgabe von 1965 setzt dann die zweite Phase der Hesse-Rezeption ein mit seiner Entdecklung durch sowohl die Geschäftswelt als auch die sogenannte >Subkultur<. Diese umspannt die sich vielfach überschneidenden Gruppen von Hippies, Studenten, Teenager, also dem größten Teil der jüngeren Generation.
Seit 1963 gewinnt Hesse zudem eine neue Leserschaft unter den >Drogen-Transzendentalisten<, infolge seiner Proklamation als Meisterführer zum psychedelischen Erlebnis durch Timothy Leary.” (Mayer, p. 87)

Wie die Pöckler- und Mondaugen Episoden zeigen, bedeutet bei Pynchon der Bezug auf die Generation der Deutschen, die Hesse vor dem Krieg gelesen hatte, etwas ganz anderes als die Rezeption, die dieser durch die Hippies nach der Leary-Empfehlung erfuhr.

Pluto und Astrologie

“The new planet Pluto,” she had whispered long ago, lying in the smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the moon that ruled her, “Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws. It moves slowly, so slowly, and so far away . . . but it will burst out. It is the grim phoenix which creates its own holocaust . . . deliberate resurrection. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God. Some are calling it the planet of National Socialism, Brunhubner and that crowd, all trying to suck up to Hitler now. They don't know they are telling the literal truth . . . Are you awake? Franz. . . .”) (415)

Der Astrologe Douglas Lannark schreibt zur Entdeckung des Pluto in Bezug auf Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Pluto was discovered on Feb 18, 1930 at 16:00 MST (= 23h GMT) in Flagstaff AZ (35N12, 111W38) by assistent astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. Actually the existence of Pluto was more “confirmed” than discovered. Due to irregularities on the gravitational pull of Neptune, astronomers had been reckoning with and searching for the existence of the celestial body. They had calculated the approximate position and had been running a series of photographs until Tombaugh finally “spotted” it.
The proposal to name (the “act of naming”) it Pluto was made shortly after breakfeast (8:05 MST) on March 14th (Einsteins birthday), and if I am not mistaken, by Lowell’s or Tombaugh’s young daughter, it was a young child who originally suggested the name Pluto and had a dream the previous night! – where did we hear this story before...?!
The name Pluto was formally adopted May 1st 1930.
Astrologers had assumed the existence of Pluto for decades and believe that when human consciousness is ripe & ready, a new planet will be discovered. Pluto is the Lord of the Underworld (Hell, death realms), Hades in Greek Mythology, but also the Phoenix of transformation & ressurrection; birth, death and rebirth). In Astrology Pluto rules Scorpio & the 8th House, the house of sex, death and the Tax-Man!!
Pluto also rules the collective unconsciousness and mass-consciousness, depth psychology.
This was one of the major focal points Fritz Brunhübner described in his book “Der Neue Planet Pluto” [1934], calling Pluto at that time the Planet of National Socialism. He had just turned 30, theNazis were sympathetic towards astrologers (Hess & Goering especially), so some “asshole appeasement” was going on from his side. In 1962 FB published a second Pluto Book, “Pluto Der Planet unserer Zeit” where he revised many of his “YOUTHFUL FOLLY” mistakes. Pluto is still considered to rule mass consciousness and how that is, can be manipulated – advertising, global companies, military suppression or through mafia, underworld structures. Pluto is definitely more a “guardian Demon” (Qlippoth) than a guardian (hells) angel.
Ecology is the main positive force of Pluto, transforming, recycling waste and decay back to nature....25,000 years.” (Pynchon-list, 9.8.2000)

Daraufhin schrieb ich auf der Liste:

“Hello Douglas, as you said, they had photographs, so Pluto was the first planet to be first viewed on a negative image?”

und Douglas antwortete:

“Yes, Otto, Pluto was discovered on a “negative,” a series of negatives! Great point there!
The name Pluto was found in a dream by an 11-year old English girl, Venetia Burney, in Oxford, England, shortly after the publication of the discovery (some mystical tongues say that it was on the same night as the discovery!? I am not that far yet in my research, but could hold true). Her father sent a letter to the Lowell Observatory and keeping in line with the other names of the planets They (whoops, another “They” there!) did decide to name the Planet Pluto on March 14, officially May 1 1930. The symbol in use remained a combination of a capitol L and a capitol P ... the L first with a P loop on top. Most astrologers disagreed with this symbol and now Pluto has the symbol of a tiny circle inside a horizontal half circle above a cross. This symbolizes spirit within the soul above matter or the collective unconscious(ness).” (11.8.2000)

Literatur und Links

Sigrid Mayer: Die Hesse-Rezeption in den Vereinigten Staaten, in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Text und Kritik, Zeitschrift für Literatur 10/11 (Hermann Hesse), edition text+kritik, Göttingen und München 1977, 86-100.

Brian McHale: Modernist Reading, Post–Modern Text – The Case of Gravity’s Rainbow

Brian Stonehill: Pynchon’s Prophecies of Cyberspace

Pynchon–List – die Pynchon-Diskussionsrunde im Internet. Eintritt nicht für jedermann, möchte man in Anspielung auf Hesse sagen …