GRGR: Todorov and Buchanan on the Holocaust

[rj]

davemarc <davemarc at panix.com> asks

> So who has dismissed Todorov or his advocates, etc., etc.?

Well, after my first post about the Todorov book Derek C. Maus replied
thus:

> On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, rj wrote:
> 
> > According to A.P. Riemer, Todorov's "remarkable" and "superb" study is
> > not to be regarded as "merely another book about the Holocaust .... "
> 
> Because, geez, what's more boring that hearing *another* complaint about
> how a lot of people were systematically executed? Gosh, won't those darn
> Jews just learn to quit moping and get on with their lives? What we really
> need is another book on the Y2K crisis or another autobiography by a
> presidential candidate...

Instead of addressing the whole post, which provided detailed context
for the opening quote from the review, Mr Maus chose to divert
discussion from the book to the "tone" of a few words from the review,
though ambiguously even so, and by resorting to emotive rhetoric and
sarcasm thereby ridiculed and belittled any such advocacy of Todorov's
book that the reviewer or I were attempting to make. There is a real
burgeoning of this type of emotive condemnation by using false
association: 'Because Paul de Man was once a member of this organisation
then all pomos are suspect'; 'Edward Said isn't really a Palestinian so
don't trust anything he ever wrote' etc etc. It's nearly as bad as the
McCarthyite witch-hunts, except nowadays the persecutions are being
carried out in the popular media (i.e. populist, just like Buchanan
operates.)

> Based on my readings at the NYTimes website, Todorov's ideas strike me as
> thought-provoking rather than impeccable.  In some instances they seem to
> be inadvertently and insultingly remote from the situational realities of
> Nazi camps *and* Soviet camps.  But perhaps that's the limit of his brand
> of structural morality.

Agreed.

> 
> On another topic, I would hazard a guess that one "difference" between
> being a "race" prisoner and a "class" prisoner is that those in the former
> category are literally born guilty.  In comparison, being a "class"
> prisoner may be more contingent.  

Say wha? The distinction still eludes me, and the attempt to justify it
concerns me. Many are also born into a class. For some, that class is as
indelible as their ethnicity. Still others marry into a "race". And then
there's the issue of creed (not to mention the concept of Original Sin.)
I'll stick with Todorov on this point I think.

> I do wonder if it's time to stop dwelling on these Todorov reviews.  

*My* intention was to draw attention to the book (as evidenced in the
subject header I used), rather than the review. That the discussion got
bogged down momentarily by a spurious attack on the Australian
reviewer's tone is not down to me. I thought (wrongly) that as the book
had been published in Europe in 1991 and Nth America in 1997, someone on
the list might have read it and could offer an opinion, as it seemed to
present a historical perspective somewhat similar to Pynchon's in *GR*.
Turning to other reviews subsequently was simply a way of gathering
those other points of view which were not forthcoming on the list.  

> If the
> thinking summarized or expressed in the reviews can shed light on GR, then
> I'd like to see more focus on its application to GR.  

Would you now? (!)

from 21-9-99> 
> [Riemer on Todorov's book:] "It would be a grave mistake, however, to regard it as merely another
> book about the Holocaust. It is far more than that -- and for that
> reason it is likely to provoke some distress and more than a few
> objections."
> 
> Having decided hereabouts that GR *is* about the Holocaust, but not
> *only* about the Holocaust, this sounds a little like the reception that
> that book received as well.

from 22-9-99> 
> .... I have the feeling that the sort of approach
> Todorov is advocating (perhaps) derives from, or equates to, that in
> *GR*. It seemed to me that the ambiguity of the novel's opening section,
> which could quite feasibly refer to the Holocaust death trains as well
> as to the Blitz Evacuations, is comparable to this idea that "the camps
> revealed an environment where common human characteristics were driven
> to their extreme but never beyond the universally human." The "judgement
> from which there is no appeal" -- i.e. Death -- and that mocking voice
> which each potential addressee of the opening sequence hears -- "You
> didn't really believe you'd be saved. ... " -- seems to be saying that,
> for the individual, the ol' Grim Reaper is the ol' Grim Reaper in
> whatever shape He comes.  ...
> 
> As Todorov apparently does with his primary sources, Pynchon examines
> the points of view and conduct of his fictional victims and tormentors
> alike without beginning with a blanket assertion that all Nazis were
> intrinsically evil or that all Resistance fighters were noble. Perhaps
> it's simply my bias, but of all the characters in GR that Pynchon draws
> for us it is not Blicero or Pokler or even Pointsman, but Major Duane
> Marvy who disgusts me the most. Which is surprising in a book largely or
> even partially centred on the Holocaust. Marvy is certainly an
> iconoclastic characterisation of G.I. Joe, and perhaps, as someone
> conjectured, Pynchon is writing about the 60s and the Vietnam War and
> the atrocities reportedly committed by American soldiers there
> (atrocities committed by soldiers as individuals), and merely
> transposing this onto the WWII setting. 

from 23-9-99>
> .... 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.
....
> 
> 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?

from 24-9-99> 
> The underlying maxim of *V.* -- "Keep cool but care" -- seems to me to
> be a similar one to Todorov's.

Do you understand how I might perceive your aloof and seemingly
innocuous request for "more focus" as disingenuous, an intentional
slight even?


> No need to get lost
> in Todorov review-land....

Like we were in 'Eyes Wide Shut'-land? But, of course, you're quite
choosy with your targets, and careful with your barbs, aren't you?