WWII in GR

[Doug Millison]

Mark Wright AIA said, "Perhaps the way the Holocaust comes sloping in 
and out of view, through as sort of textual reflection and 
refraction, indicates that P felt that the Holocaust is such an 
enormity that if it were confronted more directly it would trump the 
moral complexities he intends to demonstrate?"

Richard Crownshaw addresses this issue in his fine article, 
"Gravity's Rainbow:  Pynchon's Holocaust Allegory" in Pynchon Notes 
#42-43.

Of Slothrop's visit to the Mittelwerke (p. 296), Crownshaw writes, 
"Memory is on the rampage, inducing mental imbalance, disrupting the 
visitors' historical imagination of the shocking events that occured 
at Dora -- the shocking, unprecedented conditions of life, work and 
death in Dora and, more generally, during the Holocaust. The 
visitors' shock is, of course, a secondary shock or trauma. Dora's 
prisoners felt the first. Nevertheless, those who participate in a 
collective memory shared with witnesses of the Holocaust are still 
subject to reverberations of what those witnesses felt. The shock of 
remembering disrupts attempts to place memories of these witnesses in 
an appropriate discourse." (PN p. 205)

The problem comes in trying to write about such events later; 
Crownshaw continues,
"...if narrativity is not disrupted by the shock of what it attempts 
to describe, language ultimately fails to translate traumatic 
experiences for those who have not experienced them."

Crownshaw goes on to discuss how Walter Benjamin's concept of 
allegory might serve, an analysis I won't try to summarize here, and 
he shows how this works in the case of Pokler's confrontation with 
the dead bodies of the Dora slaves.  It's worth reading.

Crownshaw concludes:  "Where Pynchon dramatizes how the Holocaust is 
recalled only to be subsumed in an official History which 
rationalizes or mytifies the evolution of the American 
military-industrial complex, the allegorical recognition of trauma 
allows a disruption to take place. Allegory recognizes the 
transmission of trauma from Holocaust memory to the narratives (and 
agents) that rewrite it. If Holocaust revisionism depends on the 
resolute conclusion of such narratives, trauma disrupts this process. 
Therefore, where Holocaust history and memory are recalled only for 
their suppression, allegory can render this erasure incomplete."

Isn't it interesting how material that occupies such a tiny portion 
of GR, in terms of page or word count, can serve to illuminate major 
themes that run through Pynchon's canon --  to see what can happen 
when, instead of disregarding these details as somehow marginal or 
peripheral to GR, a critic chooses to focus on them.   I'm no 
literary theorist, and I recognize how Crownshaw uses a fine-tipped 
brush where I have only a sledgehammer, but I have been glad to see 
in his article what appears to be recognition of the importance these 
direct Holocaust references carry in GR, and, perhaps, confirmation 
of my suspicion that they are somehow fundamental to a deep 
understanding of this novel.
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