WWII in GR

[jbor]

----------
>From: muchasmasgracias at cs.com
>To: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Subject: Re: WWII in GR
>Date: Wed, Aug 9, 2000, 11:44 AM
>

> It's totally worth pursuing!  One thing in particular that sticks in my
> mind is one of those three passages (p428?) when Pokler sees the slaves and
> the narrator remarks (as I bullshit with my copy of GR on the other side of
> America) that this suffering is what has been going on behind the scenes
> while Pokler toiled away.  With the Holocaust mentioned so little this line
> weighs in pretty heavily, and it certainly reinforces the idea that the
> lack of text-presence is loaded with a lot of innuendo.  (What's been going
> on behind the scenes while we've been following Tyrone & co.?)  Alongside
> this I think it's worth mentioning the only point in the novel I can
> remember where Hitler's name comes up.  Those two guys chatting at the
> White Visitation (I think), one of them badmouthing astrology, the other
> responding that Hitler reads horoscopes, and the first retorting, "Hitler
> is an inspired man."  Stuff like that jumps right off the page at you.
snip

I agree. You *do* start counting and collecting the references to Hitler,
war, the camps etc, because they are so few and far between, and it's what
you've kept *expecting* to find. It is the general absence of such
references, both direct and indirect, which makes them so striking I think.
But even when they do occur they are quite banal or totally
decontextualised.

best