Pynchon's List

[Andrew Clarke Walser]

	Steelhead discerns one of the most important meanings of
SCHINDLER'S LIST:  the film's implicit endorsement of "enlightened
self-interest."  The story of Oskar Schindler reassures Americans that
greed can lead them to morality, money-grubbing to grandeur, and this
reassurance seems central to the film's acceptance here as a Great Work
About The Holocaust. 
	What mythologies, I wonder, does Pynchon prop up?  Why have
literary Americans, for instance, so readily elevated him to the status of
Great Author?  That stature may not seem so evident to those outside
of the European diaspora . . .

				Andrew Walser
				University of Illinois-Chicago