Queer Dora

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, J Suete wrote:

> “They are 175s---homosexual prison-camp inmates.” 665

> 
> Why homosexuals? Well, why not? Does Pynchon have in mind, perhaps, maybe,
> the conventional Anglo-Saxon/Patriarchal political theory that dismisses
> Nazism as an irrelevant aberration, a lunatic episode, in the history of
> the West? All very Greek to me I’m afraid---like Aristotle’s patriarch
> and Plato’s fraternity. Or maybe Sparta? Fraternity as opposed to
> patriarch or maybe some homo-mmatriarch (is there such a thing?)

Well, if there wasn't, a great opportunity was missed. What a chance for
bonding and high level networking. Plus the leadership would be trusted
and confided in by the female half of the population for a change.


>  Why is it that the men can’t bear “to be out of Dora—Dora was home,
> and they were homesick. Their “liberation” was a banishment.” What?
> That’s rather strange, isn’t it? Does this narrator suggest that these
> boys actually long to be slaves? 

Don't know about the narrator but the author liked the construct so much
he repised it in Vineland although with a homier more benign twist. The
passage concerning Brock's insight was quoted yesterday I think on the
p-list.

This is p-style par excellence. On first blush there seems to be a kind of  
REVERSAL. Were the inmates there for their own good. Did they actually
enjoy the slavery. Well, yes, let's say in a way they actually
did. But this shift in gears is also felt not as a REVERSAL of what was
primary--forced captivity--but as a DOUBLING of forced captivity, a
doubling of the horror. Slavery is both good for you and habit-forming. 

I had a thought yesterday in the Holocaust donnybrook that might be
related to this "adding on to the horror idea" but couldn't think of a way
to express it and not be misunderstood. But let me just say it. The
Holocaust was horrible enough in itself--but for the survivors and those
otherwise most affected or most sympathetic it may run the danger of being
too associative, having too much of a tendency to swamp thoughts that
might better be entertained separate from it. Who knows what was in the
Nazi mind, what the motivation was, but if it was to do the maximum evil, 
then the perpetual effect their actions might have on the Western
consciousness was not the least consideration. I believe I may have picked
up something like this idea from one of the recent Holocaust books. Not
the  latest one but the one before.

Like Jane still enduring the clammy weather.

				P.