Nordhausen, Vietnam, & Pynchon

[George Haberberger]

At 09:43 PM 6/11/96 -0700, Steelhead wrote:
>Andrew Walser notes:
>>        Does Pynchon, I wonder, do much better with the Holocaust?  In
>>GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, he seems content to keep the subject off to the side --
>>a wise decision, perhaps, since I cannot imagine our author exercising for
>>long the kind of restraint that characterizes the work of Primo Levi or
>>Aharon Appelfeld.
>
>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?
>
>Steely
>
A different tangent than yesterday's post on this subject, of a more
fatalistic slant.  Perhaps the reason Pynchon never spoke out against the
Vietnamese War was that he didn't think it would do any good. The war wasn't
caused by the common man's hatred of the Vietnamese, who could have a change
of heart if enough cultural voices spoke out, but rather in the boardrooms
of the military-industrial complex, who needed more profits and a larger,
more accurate testing real life testing facility.

Hmm, mebbe Ike was a member of the counterforce.

George