WWII in GR

[jbor]

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millison:

> 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)

Er, well this isn't quite accurate either. The 'tourists' inside the
Mittelwerke (including Slothrop, so it is an excursion within the narrative
space of the novel) seem more interested in "the elegant Raumwauffe
spacesuit wardrobe" and "the Space Helmets!" But, after expropriating an
extravagant sum, "Oily Micro" will hijack his "mark" and take him/her
through to Dora, which is where he describes how the "liberated prisoners
went on a rampage after the material" and provides instructions in case of
"any encounter with the dead". He's like a sideshow attendant on a ghost
train.

> 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."

I have real doubts about this "allegorical recognition of trauma". It seems
Crownshaw is referring to Oily Micro's "hurried, basic instruction" to the
"marks", or suckers, he has fleeced, "[o]ne of many hustles" (295.24) going
on immediately after the Allies have moved in to the Raketen-Stadt complex.
Micro is talking it up. There are no ghosts on p 296, no "memory" of what
actually happened. The "allegory" is in fact a tale of exploitation, of
those who would make money out of the suffering experienced by the victims
of the Holocaust (including, I suspect, those that write about it).

Btw, a correction from yesterday:
The Toiletship is actually an abandoned derelict, only partly submerged, in
the Kiel Canal, and this is where Horst Achtfaden is dropped off by Enzian &
co. He will probably need to get two buses to get to Argentina from there:

     With the technical spies of three or four nations after him, he
   has had the disastrous luck to've been picked up by the Schwarzkommando,
   who for all he knows now constitute a nation of their own. (451.28)

Is Enzian (still?) an "evil Nazi" at this point in the text? Was he ever?
What about the rest of the Schwarzkommando -- Andreas, who suggests that
they should "[s]tuff him [Achtfaden] down the waste lines"? Is that what
should be/have been done to "evil Nazis" like Horst? is that what Pynchon is
suggesting in *GR*?

This sequence also tells of von Braun. Achtfaden recalls a conversation with
Narrisch in the "last days". His "friend", who is later quite heroic I
think, says:
     "I couldn't go with von Braun . . . not to the Americans, it would
   only just keep on the same way . . . I want it really to be over, that's
   all . . . good-by, 'Wenk'." (456.21)