WWII in GR

[jill]

I concede that the rocket building concentration camp/camps don't get
described or portrayed with proper deference to the suffering of the
workers but read on. So many flashbacks to earlier times fill the book
however, and at these early flashback periods in history what was accepted
was not "the Holocaust" as we now refer to it. What would have passed to
describe the events going on at that time in the flashback times would be
sadism, brutality, moral decay, hoplessness and submission. And somehow
Pynchon decides to do it with "we're all going crazy" kind of shuffle off
to buffalo humor. I get the feeling that at this time the Nazis, many of
whom in power knew of the camps, had grown so calloused and inattentive to
human needs, ones like Franz, Blicero etc. that they had become good at
ignoring their state of culpability, that not reacting to the horror of the
camps became just a way to get through the day, easier not to care, we are
going to loose anyway, grind down emotions and focus on science damn it.
Look the other way if it bothers you kind of sickness. I think these
relationships exist today albeit on a tiny grain of sand in comparison. And
it is that underpinning of how relationships that we swim around in all day
long, whether it is slavery and captalism -- are not pretty things to swim
around in. They are all around us but absent--depending on how do we choose
to look at these things--or our buy-in to the surface appearance of things.
How did the US South get so many pretty big stone walls and large old
houses? Although many were torn or burned down during the US Civil War a
condition of atonement didn't include tearing them all down. We let them
stay there and tour them. How do corporations make so many nice pretty
sneakers? We don't add 5 bucks on the price in a kindness charity towards
fixing Malaysias economic problems and cause their economy to be the same
standard as ours, and we run in our sneakers. etc. I am suggesting that the
discussion has been tempted to argue whether or not it is "good" or "bad"
that slaves and death and starvation are not more frequently mentioned in
the novel. I don't have the answer, but it is a good  discussion and I am
glad it is happening. Makin and jbor please keep building and knocking
down! And I also am thinking that the Crownshaw article was confusing since
(i did not read it) the excerpts hinge on the vocabulary words like
"subsumed" and "transmission of trauma" what does that mean? Well that's my
2 cents worth.

Jill

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Dave Monroe makes an interesting point that dovetails nicely with one
> of the ways that I  read GR (which is, after all, a novel that can be
> read many different ways, rich as it is).
> 
> Pynchon has chosen an historical setting for GR, he starts with a
> setting that we know and creates his fiction largely within those
> parameters. This is not Dune, a world invented from scratch.
> 
> "Where are the Nazis?" rj asks. "Where are the Jews?"
> 
> It's true that most of the Nazi Holocaust remains off-stage in GR --
> most of WWII remains off-stage, after all. Even in a novel as big as
> GR, Pynchon can't include all of the events, characters, settings,
> etc., that comprise the actual, historical, real-world WWII; he'd
> soon run into the problem of the map growing as large as the
> territory. But,  Pynchon includes enough of the WWII of history in
> the novel, and bases much of his fictionalized WWII story on
> documented WWII events, to create the vivid impression that the novel
> does in fact take place in WWII.  (Part of the charm of the novel is,
> as more than one person has noted in our Pynchon-L discussion over
> the years, the way Pynchon then inserts wildly fantastic,
> surrealistic elements into a fiction that in many ways would appear
> to adhere to the norms of historical fiction.)
> 
> Most of the evil Nazis remain off-stage, but not all --  Pokler works
> with some, a quote from von Braun begins the novel, we have Blicero
> the pedophile. When Slothrop visits the Mittelwerke, at page 296,
> Pynchon mentions the Dora prisoners and their "spiritual rampage"
> after their mistreatment, torture, murder at the hands of the Nazis.
> I've previously mentioned the ghost girl who helps Slothrop feed into
> the flames the doll with the hair of a Jewess. At page 428, Pynchon
> marches in the Dora slaves, "the starved bodies" & etc. , then again,
> at p. 432, exposes "the naked corpses" (in a description that could
> be a shot-by-shot description of the documentary films that were
> widely disseminated in the '50s and '60s).  A handfull of direct
> references, but enough to know, without going outside the novel at
> all, that Pynchon is dealing with the WWII of history.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Is rj suggesting that Pynchon sets GR in a  WWII where Nazis are not
> killing 6 million Jews and other undesireables? That would make
> Pynchon the Holocaust denier, wouldn't it?
> 
> In fact, such a suggestion (if rj is suggesting it -- maybe he's not,
> I'm just trying to respond to what he's written in this thread) is
> absurd.
> 
> I don't argue that the Holocaust is the only thing going on in GR --
> that's the straw man that rj (and Mackin) keep putting up and
> knocking down.  But I do think the Holocaust holds a central place in
> GR -- physcially, in the middle of the book, plus the way it pulls
> together so many characters and plot lines in the novel.
> 
> No Nazi Holocaust = no Dora slaves = no V2 rockets = no GR. Along
> that spine Pynchon hangs an amazingly multifaceted fiction, and
> without it.....?
> 
> --
> 
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>