Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Dave Monroe]

N.b.--I'm reposting this as I apparently screwed up something in my
first posting of it, rendering it virtually unredable, at least on my
mcahine here.  I would also note that it might well be a response to a
message NOT initially posted on the list, but that posting IS reproduced
below.  Apologies to jbor if I made public private remarks of his, but
(a) I did it in good faith and/or in initial ignorance that the had only
been sent to me, and not the list; (b) I've already posted them anyway;
(c) without being able to speak for jbor (from whom I've not yet heard
on the matter), I see no reason why he'd be reluctant to post
them--indeed, I suspect it was merely an oversight on his part (I've hit
the "reply" rather than the "reply all" myself a few times); and (d)
well, I do think my own comments are, a few specific refrences aside,
perfectly applicable to previously posted comments in the thread,
irregardless of the specific post I was responding to.  Thanks for
everybody's patience here ... so, well, here goes ...

... not sure just what you [jbor] 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 a
point 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 again 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