Nordhausen, Vietnam, & Pynchon

[davemarc]

At 09:43 PM 6/11/96 -0700, Steelhead wrote:
>
>This has been bugging me for the past six months or so, as I have burrowed
>deeper and deeper into the role US corporations, politicians, newspapers,
>and financiers played in the rise of the Third Reich and the salvation of
>some of its more vicious supporting cast at war's end. For example,
>Pynchon's many pages on Nordhausen (following both Pokler and Slothrop)
>hardly convey the scope of the atrocity going on there:  forced starvation,
>bodies piling up, stench, beatings, shootings, etc. It's hard to imagine
>Pokler's pleasant lunches in the Nordhausen commissary depicted in GR.
>
>A similar question can be asked about Vietnam. Where is it in Pynchon? Why
>didn't America's greatest writer--and one of the leading voices of the
>counterculture--use his enormous talents to speak out against the war?
>Is it all a complex enthymeme, as Chuck Hollander suggests, lurking there
>under the surface of the text, and gaining more force and power through
>its absence? Perhaps, but that's not entirely satisfying to me. Any ideas?
>
I've heard that a conversation with vet Pynchon inspired Harlan Ellison not
to pay his taxes as a protest against the war.  

davemarc