GRGR: Todorov and Clendinnen on the Holocaust

rj rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au
Thu Sep 23 01:14:53 CDT 1999


cfa:

> The Warsaw Ghetto 
> incident is simply not an element of political and/or social 
> discourse in this country and has not been in the 25 years that I 
> have lived here. I Learned of it, not from scads of Jewish relatives, 
> or even the few survivors that I met as a child, but from picking up 
> MILA 18 in the course of a heavy Uris jones. It, along with the SS 
> St. Louis history, is entirely unknown to the bulk of the US 
> population. I am unable to credit such a point based on my 
> experience.

I'm guessing that it might be more a part of common remembrance in
Israel, or Europe, than in the US. But I take your point.

> If this was the explicit intent of those who ran the camps, it is 
> difficult to see how those interred there could see it much 
> differently. TO expect moral order in such a context is exactly what 
> I refer to when I draw the distinction between those who discuss the 
> experience and those who lived it.

I think that this is one of the "several widely held beliefs" that
Todorov is questioning or challenging. And I don't think that it's a
question of moral order as it is one of moral choices made by
individuals.

> I am curious, however, why you 
> would even concern yourself with the topic - re-evaluating the 
> holocaust now, is the poster child of academic masturbation. 

I think Todorov's point, according to Riemer at least, is that
characterising the Holocaust as the greatest single horror or evil which
has assailed mankind "distracts attention from the possibility that
similar atrocities may arise" and the *fact* that they are still being
committed. As I've said, I also think that the point of view being
expressed is a kindred one to Pynchon's in *GR*. But, lest those two
reasons still be judged too frivolous, having taught basic literacy and
English language skills to refugees and displaced people from Vietnam,
Cambodia, China, Central America, Serbia and soon, I guess, East Timor,
for the greater portion of this decade it occurs to me that such
atrocities *do* continue, and that the stories that these children bring
and the traumas which have ripped them from their families and homes,
and which keep their eyes cold for months and months, maybe forever,
also need to be told. I think Pynchon is trying to do something like
this with the Hereros, tell the untold stories; not underplay or deny
the Holocaust, but to show that it is the sort of thing which has always
been around, and which is still going on. In other words, I guess, the
argument goes that "special pleading" for the Jews forces us and
governments to overlook and perhaps neglect all the other oppressed
ethnic minorities you mention, and the "language of outrage" merely
exacerbates the divisions and inspires hatred and recrimination rather
than reconciliation, whilst sloganeering is a closing off, a type of
rhetorical manoeuvring for political ends, rather than a strategy for
permitting positive remediation or even productive discourse and
mediation. Jewish rancour and hatred can be an expression of ignorance
to an equal extent that Buchanan's is. It is perhaps therapeutic, but it
does nothing at all for the people who are starving to death in East
Timor today. History, in Todorov's (and Pynchon's) terms, has a moral
obligation to do more.

Neither Todorov's book nor *GR* are "merely another book about the
Holocaust", because they look beyond the extermination of the European
Jews to other genocides and atrocities, and they ask for our moral
response to take these into account *as well as* the Jewish genocide in
Nazi Germany.

> It is an 
> issue maintined, not by jewish interests, but by some other wierd 
> dynamic, and I don't even want to guess at why. [snip]
> it is entirely appropriate for those who 
> have immidiate experience to question those who would "exploit" such 
> for academic or more generally forensic purposes.

Like I said: I don't believe Todorov, Riemer or Pynchon are out to
"exploit" anything, and, while they are three prominent, intelligent and
legitimate commentators on the issue, all of whom seem to be advocating
or undertaking a reevaluation of historiographical approaches to the
Holocaust, I don't see any malevolent "weird dynamic" operating amongst
them. Towards whom are your innuendoes here directed?

Re. Blicero and Marvy: Why would Pynchon make the Nazi more sympathetic
than the American, if not to get his readers thinking about the
individuals rather than the slogans?

*Warlock* is hard to find over here but I guess I can order it through
Amazon. I read some of the stuff in Salon about Said. The allegations
seem to me to be on a par with the sort of persecutions against
prominent intellectuals which conservative elements in the academy and
media have undertaken with gusto in the last few years.

best



More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list