GRGR(5) Katje and the Nazis

[MalignD at aol.com]

Random thoughts on this string.  

A good metaphor resonates.  A great metaphor may resonate on many levels.  To 
argue over whether the fall of the Crystal Palace refers to A. Kristellnacht 
or to B. the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park is without point.  The words allude 
in both directions; Pynchon was shrewd and felicitous.  Correct answer?  C. 
Either, both, or other (so long as a reader reads it so).

One could agree with much of what Millison is saying would he not be so 
insistent on the issue of what is "central."  I think, like him, the Jewish 
extermination is alluded to throughout the book; "alluded to," because it is 
not "central," at least as I would use the word.  The extermination isn't 
central to GR as it is to, say, the writing of Primo Levi or even to 
Schindler's List.  It strikes me that, had Pynchon made the extermination 
central, i.e., included scenes of death camp atrocities, it might have 
capsized and overwhelmled much of what is otherwise powerful and in balance.  
There is something horrible and shocking in the slaughter of the dodos, not 
only metaphorically, but on its own terms, and when the parallel to the 
holocaust strikes a reader, the shock and horror increases.  It's likely that 
that power would be mitigated if followed or preceded by scenes from Dachau 
or Treblinka.  (Too bad about the birds, but ...)  

One might argue that using the holocaust implicitly rather than explicity, 
doubles the direction of the metaphor.  Not only does the dodos slaughter or 
the killing of the Herero represent the holocaust; the holocaust informs our 
understanding of those incidents.  One might say further that the holocaust 
functions in GR as an implied metaphor to all that occurs (although even to 
write "Holocaust as metaphor" is repulsive.)     

The holocaust is in the background, always in the background, which seems apt 
to me, given much of what is at play in the novel.  The Amercian corporations 
that were doing business with the nazis were not likely in favor of the 
extermination, but neither were they likely ignorant.  They chose rather to 
ignore it, or try to.  Pynchon's narrative strategy is perhaps along similar 
lines, to place the reader in the position of forgetting or ignoring the fact 
that the extermination continues throughout the time that GR is taking place. 
 The reader gets caught up in the mystery of Slothrop's erections, outraged 
at the duplicity of US policy, notes that such duplicity will continue after 
the war when the the need for German rocketry technology takes precedence 
over larger moral issues, only to awaken to the point that this string notes 
-- that, all along, Jews are being slaughtered.  (Did you forget?)

I'm reminded somewhat of an experiment done (in the early sixties by Stanley 
Milgrim; Obedience to Authority, his book about it) at Yale in which 
volunteers were asked, at Milgrim's behest, to deliver electric shocks to 
test-takers, believing the study to be about the relative efficacy of 
punishment in learning.  Most of these volunteers continued to adminster 
shocks when asked to, even as test-takers screamed in agony.  Only later were 
the volunteers informed that they were the subjects; the test-takers were 
plants, and the experiment was intended to discover how long the volunteers 
would follow orders in the face of the test-takers' pain.  In short, their 
morality was what was being evaluated and most of the volunteers, to their 
dismay and horror, flunked.

So might Pynchon, with rather merciless irony, be placing the reader in a 
similar position, the bomb landing on our heads in the end, our just dessert 
for not noticing.  (Millison, at least, gets a passing grade.)  And, to be 
scrupulously open, perhaps it is Pynchon, caught up in the web of his own 
narrative, who failed to see the small potatoes aspect of his own material, 
set beside the overwhelming horror of millions exterminated.  

One other note:  the idea that historians were more-or-less clueless about 
the dirty hands of American corporations until the appearance of GR in 1973 
is false.  These facts came to light immediately after the war when the 
allies had access to IG Farben's files, as Millison knows.  The book The 
Sovereign State of ITT, also published in 1973 and not even a scholarly work, 
talks about Sosthenes Behn's and his company's trading with the Germans 
throught the war.  It was no great secret.