WWII in GR

[Dave Monroe]

... and do note that not only (as a friend points out) is that "oss-" also
a Latin root for "bone" (see also The Crying of Lot 49), but note that the
OSS largely provided that so-called "ratline" for not only your Nazi rocket
scientists, but your Schutsstaffel types as well.  Do do do see Alexander
Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press,
esp. chapters 6 and 7, on, respectively, Operation Paperclip and Klaus
Barbie.  If anyone is interested in a concise and damning account of how
the US gov't, and often in collusion with South American gov'ts (Argentina,
Bolivia, here), more or less laundered some of the most vicious Nazi war
criminals NOT to be tried at Nuremburg (which is what we COULD have done,
Jody, they needed not be handed over to the Soviets ... see also John
Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations ... and I wouldn't rely on a
"feeling" of Freeman Dyson's in re: Heisenberg, really, read not only
Powers but Walker and Rose as well ... even the Farm Hall transcripts by
themselves are revealing), well ... and I imagine that Pynchon is precisely
the kind of guy to have kept up on this stuff (again, I refer you to the
work of Charles Hollander and David Thoreen on Pynchon and US covert ops)
...

... but "sloping in and out of view," indeed, will have to get that issue
of Pynchon Notes under discussion here, but I also recommend taking a look
at, more generally, recent work on Holocaust literature, the problematics
of representing the Holocaust.  Probing the Limits of Representation:
Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. by Saul Friedlander (coincidentally,
like Pynchon, one of those MacArthur Foundation grant recipients), which
features essays by many of the major figures in the discussion, covers, as
far as I can tell, the major issues, the major debates, and then some.  But
here's an interesting observation from Reading the Holocaust by Inga
Clendinnen: "The most effective evocations of the Holocaust seem to proceed
either by invocation, the glancing reference to an existing bank of ideas,
images and sentiments ('Auschwitz'), or, perhaps, more effectively, by
indirection" (p. 165).  Indeed (and I'd note that that Nazi
Germany-to-Argentian ratline is indeed part of the 'existing abnk of
ideas," to the point that the, er, political--albeit non-Nazi (I mean, it's
joe Flynn, fer chrissakes)--refugees at the end of How to Frame a Figg (Don
Knotts, Elaine Joyce, 1971) end up in Buenos Aires ... and I got the
reference even as a kid).  By the way, she also mentions the "mythinc
potency [that] hs come to suffuse normally bnal words--'oven', 'chimney',
'smoke', 'hair'--when those words are invoked anywhere within the broad
range of the Holocaust context" (p. 166).  "Hair"?  Well, of course, the
sahved heads of the concentrartion camp prisoners, the use of their hair
in,as I recall, stuffing pillows, among other things, but, also, that Paul
Celan poem, "Death Fugue," with its allusion to Goethe's Faust, "your
golden hair, Margarethe," which Celan couples with "your ashen hair,
Shulamith."  What was that passage about the doll in GR ...?

... also pulled Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture,
and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, as well as Monika Rennenberg
and Mark Walker, eds. Science, Technology and National Socialism, all sort
of inetresting stuff about the reconciliation of Nazi "spiritualism,"
mysticism, irrationalism, with science, technology and, esp. engineering.
Which kinda makes me wonder a bit about Enzian et al., and their own
seemingly mystical take on engineering, but ... but I think there might be
a pointed contrast to Nazi "reactionary modernism" being made there (and do
again note that epigraph from von Braun).  Will work on it.  See also the
paper by Mario Biagioli (he of Galileo, Courtier), "Science, Modernity, and
the 'Final Solution'" in the Friedlander volume.  These are all indeed
topics, topoi, well worth exploring, mapping ...

Mark Wright AIA wrote:

> Howdy
> --- Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com> wrote:
>
> > Dave wonders how this whole thread started. I'd date it to the
> > beginning of GRGR, when I suggested that the "Ss" in "cast-iron
> > pulleys whose spokes are shaped like Ss"  might be read as an
> > allusion to the Nazi SS, and that it might be possible to read the
> > opening of GR as an allusion to the death trains on their way to the
> > concentration camps --  rj ridiculed that suggestion and went on to
> > talk about the absence of the Holocaust from GR. As RJ has so
> > consistently tried to minimize this aspect of the novel if not erase
> > it from consideration altogether, I've made it a point to lift this
> > material up for consideration.
>
> And *I* would like to highlight the sensitivity of my own symbolical
> dowsing rod by reminding one and all of my perspicacity in pointing out
> back then that not only are the "Ss" in the pulley an unmistakable SS
> reference (nods to Doug), their circumscription by the "O" of the
> pulley makes the entire image also a reference to the OSS (Office of
> Strategic Services) which figures later in the text.  The density of
> meaning in those details which seem least significant makes this
> passage a spendid 'scription of Freudian dreamwork.  This density of
> meaning also characterizes the work as a whole.  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? A light touch
> on the Holocaust allows him to illuminate the "Racketenstadt" within
> which we all live, and allows us to see WWII as somehting more than an
> Us (Good) vs Them (Evil) structure?
>
> Mark (Murk)
>
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