Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Dave Monroe]

... not sure just what you are reading as "glib" and/or "judgmental,"
much less
"superior," here--in particular, what am I allegedly "judging" here?
"Glibly,"
from an allegedly assumed position of "superiority"?  Perhaps that would
be a clue
about the discussion at hand ....  Am actually trying to work out just
how a bit
of annotation in re: that Argentinian submarine escalated into a dispute
over
which injustices, which atrocities are more germane to a discussion of
Gravity's
Rainbow, is all, and am (still) curious as to why bringing up the
Holocaust, the
Shoah, would be such a flashpoint here.  Certainly, as with Hiroshima, I
agree,
the Holocaust itself, its victims, its perpetrators, the immediate
settings and
events thereof, are presented, represented, on relatively few pages of a
700+ page
novel ...

... however, and again, by virtue of the novel's setting--largely,
England and
then Germany in the closing months of WWII in Europe, remaining in
Europe through
the end of the war at large, and, in particular, the not inconsiderable
presence,
representation of the Nazi V-weapons project, which did, indeed, run on
concentration camp labor (an excellent work on this is Michael Neufeld's
The
Rocket and the Reich)--and the admitted (on your part; undeniable within
the text)
references to the Holocaust (and, I'll note, Hiroshima) therein, and
given the
novel's mapping of the potentially apocalyptic trajectory of that
emergent
"military-industrial complex" ((c) Ike)--again, note the opening and
closing, if
nothing else, of the novel--which, at LEAST in Pynchon's accounting,
seems to have
emerged as much in (synergy with, as a result of, developments in) Nazi
Germany as
in Postwar America, and given the history of genocide you yourself note
Pynchon
draws upon, a history which includes the previous German atrocities in
SW Africa
in re: the Herero, a history which culminates, at least at the period in
which
Gravity's Rainbow is largely set, in the Holocaust, and given Pynchon's
tendency
often to refer obliquely--and here the references, again, are not all
that oblique
...--to historical and/or political contexts notably germane to his
texts (and
here I'll refer you to the ongoing work of one Charles Hollander, who
seems to be
an occasional [tele]presence here as well), well ... well, again, why
would the
importance of the Holocaust as a context for the novel be apoint of
contention?
At all?  As a matter of emphasis or otherwise?

... but I will give you that the realtive paucity of direct references
to,
representations of, the Holocaust, its immediate events, its immediate
effects, is
interesting.  As is, in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon's relative silence
on such
contemporary concerns as the Civil Rights Movement (which he had no
compunction
about addressing in "Journey into teh Mind of watts," not to mention
"The Secret
Integration"), Vietnam, and, given its setting in the summer of 1964,
the
then-recent Kennedy assassination.  And here I'll refer you agian to the
work of
Charles Hollander, with whom many of you seem to be familiar.  But I'll
also
suggest, along the lines of recent--and even not-so-recent--commentaries
on not
only the Holocaust, but commentaries on commenatries on the Holocaust,
that there
is a certain difficulty in commenting on, much less representing, so
atrocious an
atrocity.  The sheer scale, the sheer horror alone ... in remembrance of
the
Hiroshima bombing (55 years ago today), I'm starting in on, at long
last, John
Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic
Bomb, and
had just arrived at the following passage before logging in today: "The
purported
inaccesibility of the experience of a nuclear bombing, its
inconvertibility into a
chain of words that might faithfully refer, represents a considerable
technical
and even ethical hurdle for those writers who profess it" (p. 27).  He
goes on to
note similar difficulties for "outiders," those who do not, who cannot
"profess"
such "experience."  I'm reminded here as well of Frances Ferguson's
notion of a
"nuclear sublime" here, of the problem(atics) of representing the
(nigh-unto, at
least) unrepresentable, esp. the sheer horror thereof ...

... and, of course, of the work of many commenting of the possibilities
and
impossibilities of discussing, representing the Holocaust, precisely in
light of
its sublime (with that sense of distance, vastness, anxiety, horror in
the Burkean
sense, even that nigh-unto-unimaginable scale in the Kantian
"mathematical" sense,
and, certainly, that, well, represntation-of-the-unrepresentable
Lyotardian
sense).  The Holocaust is, indeed, difficult, to say the least, to
discuss, to
represent, esp. ethically, responsibly.  One always, inevitably runs the
risk of
reducing the event, to, say, "mere" numbers,  to "just another" atrocity
in a long
string thereof (each demanding to be addressed in its own specificity,
hence my
reservations about that dodo pssage, although I do agree with your
excellent
observation that Franz van der Groov's rationale is very much like that
of the
Nazis, among others), the risk of denying the specifity of the victims
thereof
(though, of course, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavs as well, and
who knows
where they woyuld have stopped?  That haunting image of the ossuary
which Africa
becomes in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle ... but esp.,
pointedly,
the Jews), the perpetrators thereof, the methods and institutions
thereof ... see,
for example, the various essays collected in Probing the Limits of
Representation:
Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. by Saul Friedlander; Representing
the
Holocaust, by Dominick LaCapra; Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, by
James E.
Young ... and I think perhaps Pynchon's relative reticence on the
subject might
well be an indication of his own awareness of these difficulties.  For
starters
... in the meantime, waiting for Doug to chime in on this, as I'd like
his take on
my take on what might be going on here ...

jbor wrote:

> > But I think I've got the gist of your dispute with Doug, each
> > perhaps thinking the other according too much importance to one such
variety
> > at the expense of the other.  The question then is, well, why argue
about
> > it?
> snip
>
> personally, I don't think this particular brand of glib, superior
> judgementalism does justice to either interlocutor, the course of the
> dialogue, or the issues at stake
>
> > but Gravity's Rainbow, in particular, by
> > virtue of its setting
>
> and that's pretty much it really, isn't it? And, in fact, there are
many
> settings: the bulk of Part 1 is set in London and s-e England, much of
Part
> 2 is set in the Casino Herman Goering, and the rest of the section is
> post-War. Even in the flashbacks not all that much of the time are we
in
> Nazi Germany per se, certainly not in the stream-of-consciousness of a

> Jewish victim, rarely privy to a depiction of anyone who could be
viewed as
> an "evil Nazi" (the American, Major Marvy, being perhaps the closest
> approximation to this), and bar a handful of pages are we anywhere
near the
> death camps in particular.
>
> > does indeed more than touch upon antisemitism, the
> > instututionalization, bureaucratization and industrialization
thereof.
>
> what in particular do you have in mind here?
>
> >  Not
> > sure why it would be such a point of contention to bring that up,
emphasize
> > it, foreground it, even.
>
> I think it is the *absence* of the Holocaust, Jews, Hitler,
anti-semitism,
> "evil Nazis" et. al. which is the most striking thing about GR
>
> > But it's not a matter
> > of competing injustices, atrocities, at least not to my mind ...
>
> no of course it isn't