WWII in GR

[Dave Monroe]

Kathryn Hume makes an interesting point in her Pynchon's Mythography: An
Approach to Gravity's Rainbow, in re: death.  "Death is generally
recognized as one of Gravity's Rainbow's main concerns--some voices
would say The Concern" (p. 128), but, citing Louis Mackey's "Paranoia,
Pynchon and Preterition" (q.v., esp. on the rhetorical figure of
parleipsis, a.k.a. praeteratio, which I might paraphrase as the
conspicuously unspoken) she notes that (Mackey notes that) "Gravity's
rainbow is obsessed with death.  And yet deaths (singular deaths,
terminations, fulfillments) are not narrated.  They are sometimes
reported after they happen ....  There are, however, hardly any actual
corpses in the novel, since what is significant is less the 'mere' brute
fact of death, than people's attitudes towards death"  (Mackey, cited in
Hume, pp. 128-9).

While I don't necessarily disagree with Mackey's notion of what is
"significant" here, I think that conspicuous absence of "onscreen"--or,
at any rate, onpage--deaths is, indeed, significant, esp. in a novel set
in a theater of war (and do note the offscreen--literal, figurative,
whatever--deaths--Gottfried, the audience, Richard M. zhlubb,
even--impending at the Orpheus Theater at the novel's end), esp. a
theater of war so littered with corpses as Europe, as anywhere, in
WWII.  And Mackey stresses--as does, albeit to different ends, albeit
without using the term--how Pynchon often writes in paraleipsis (= Latin
praeteratio), conspicuoulsy not speaking of something (cf. Hollander's
enthymeme).  As perhaps the Koran does camels (see Jorge Luis Borges,
"Tradition and the Argentinian Writer"), perhaps Gravity's Rainbow
assumes, asks, demands, even, that the reader will keep in mind the
context implied by, occasionally manifesting itself overtly, explicitly
in (that abject, traumatic intrusion of the real (Kristeva, Zizek)) the
text ... one can imagine (can one? well, I've tried, at any rate ...)
that "Now a Major Motion Picture" adaptation, with WWII actually (in
representation) occuring all around, nigh unto constantly onscreen ...
an interpretation, yes, but that all we are offering, all we have to
offer ...