NEIL SCHMITZ
115
century flesh-despising Puritans, the Scurvhamites, who were ultimately all
seduced by the Demiurge and brought over into darkness. In
V.
there is a
"Bad Priest" who teaches the young girls in Malta "to become nuns, avoid
the sensual extremes-pleasure of intercourse, pain of childbirth," who
similarly advises the boys' 'to find strength in-and be like-the rock of their
island," telling them that the "object of male existence was to be like a
crystal: beautiful and soulless." Children are readily drawn to a Manichean
conception of the world, it is noted in
V.
,
particularly children who must deal
with the inexplicable cruelties of war. The allure of Gnostic and Manichean
thought in Pynchon's writing is obvious. For the Manichean stands outside
history, free, not at all surprised by the evil he discerns in this sublunary
world. In
v.,
while the revolt of the Bondelswaartz swirls around him in
Southwest Africa, Kurt Mondaugen steadfastly pursues his scientific
experiment with sferics (atmospheric radio disturbances), quixotically trying
to decode a message from the random crackling. The time is 1922, but this
revolt has occurred before, at the beginning of the century, and it will recur all
over Africa, Asia and Latin America. Bombing the poorly equipped Bondels,
the Germans rehearse for Guernica and Rotterdam. Inside Foppl's farm,
where a continuous orgiastic party is maintained for the duration of the
conflict, the colonials frolic like decadent Berliners . Outside their walls an
entire race is exterminated . Is there a suprahuman language spoken in the
ether, an utterance that, once transcribed, will either judge or justify this
barbarous spectacle? Weissmann steals Mondaugen's logbooks and graphs,
playfully interpolating his own interpretation into Mondaugen' s disguised
theological quest. In creating this world, the horror that surrounds
Mondaugen, what did God mean? Weissmann's decoded text breaks down
into two readings: GODMEANTNUURK and DIEWELTISTALLESWAS–
DERFALLIST. Placed in this specific historical context, Wittgenstein's
statement : "The world is all that the case is, " becomes a chilling oracular
response, at once a confession of the circularity oflanguage and a relegation of
the human to the natural. In Weissmann, who is portrayed as a transvestite,
the heresiarch makes his traditional appearance. Like his predecessors who
interpolated and excised the Gospels (Marcion cut from Luke all reference to
the physical generation ofChrist and Manes simply took what he needed from
the Scriptures and synthesized it with Zoroastrian texts), Weissmann is a deft
exegete, the exemplary shape-shifter. And in
V.
he already belongs to the
great heresy of our era, Fascism, a movement that begins conspiratorially–
not unlike the Trystero System that beguiles Oedipa in
Lot 49 .
Not all the confusion in this important novel is contrived. In the Trystero
symbol of the muted post horn Pynchon ambivalently renders at once the
notion of resourceful and healthy subversion (the breaking of a postal
