Nordhausen, Vietnam, & Pynchon

[David Casseres]

>Steely:
>
>> 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 come across various critics accusing TRP of ethical relativism, 
>eg. for implying that Abraham's 'invention' of monotheism is on the 
>same logical 'timeline' as the Holocaust, etc etc. 
>I tend to think that Pynchon's awareness of "the man's office in our 
>heads" accounts for his, er, sceptic? ambivalent? attitude towards the 
>counterforce / counterculture. Also, that some things are simply too 
>obvious for America's greatest writer to spell out - he doesn't quite 
>stoop to that level, as Steely pointed out recently.

I agree.  It's always seemed to me that the judgments of right and wrong 
are implicit in the narrative.  Pynchon isn't much interested in telling 
us what we've already been told, and told each other, many times over.  
So he doesn't tell us that Nazism is evil, but he does make sure we know 
about some of the less-publicized American complicity in Nazism.  He 
doesn't tell us the story of the Vietnam War or the Nazi holocaust; he 
assumes rightly that his readers are pretty damn familiar with them.  But 
he does make sure we find out about the colonial enslavement and genocide 
of the Herreros, a little-told story that in many ways prefigures Nazism 
and the complicity of the European and American powers in crimes 
committed under the German flag.  He leaves it to us to connect the dots 
and figure out how the Vietnam war fits in -- after giving us a lot of 
lessons in how to connect dots.


Cheers,
David