WWII in GR

[jbor]

monroe

> Fair enough.  Just that I don't feel obligated to argue with your
> readings, beyond your dismissal of mine and Doug's and maybe even a few
> others' here, insofar as we mention the Holocaust and related Nazi
> atrocities.  Do not understand your ... vigor in this regard.

No more vigour than that with which you've been harrying me with in the last
week and a half. Think you'll find I mention the Holocaust (used
specifically to mean the extermination of c. 6 million Jewish people in Nazi
Germany during 1940-45) quite often in fact.

We seem to accept that there are readings of the text which have "more
credence" one than another, such as reading Leni's whispered reference to
Pluto's discovery and astrological ascendancy as indicative of the rise of
National Socialism in Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as
extending the character portrait of both herself and Franz Pokler (whose
story the passage is inserted into the middle of) ... more so than reading
it as a reference to the Pipe Line Under The Ocean, or Disney's cartoon pup,
or a frankfurter on a stick, or plutonium, or Plutarch. (This is not to say
that the idees traces are not there or were and are not in Pynchon's or our
minds at the very mention of the word "Pluto", or that corroborating
examples in the text cannot be found -- that a case for each cannot also be
made -- for all of the less credible examples I cite here.) But we were also
discussing the overall context of the novel -- the whole text level -- I
believe, and this is where you are implicitly and explicitly arguing with
*my* reading of the novel and just as avidly defending it with your own. So
I really can't see any fairness or equanimity in seeking to vindicate your
particular interpretation of the overall context of *GR* by the repeated
assertion, a constant insinuation at the very least, that I am trying to
deny "the Holocaust and related Nazi atrocities."

There is an opportunity cost in offering any interpretation/s of a
particular section of text, other potentialities that needs be are left
unwrit, and we each decide the extent of that cost (in our personal
reinscriptions of the text) and whether or not it is too great. I thought
that the opportunity cost of reading the Argentine anarchists *hijacking*
(no "return trip" in that word, fella) of the German sub as the only (and it
was all that was offered at the time) pertinent point of that particular
narrative thread was too great, and said so. There is so much more, such as
Ombindi's "jive" allegory of innocence and "Gondwanaland, before the
continents drifted apart, when Argentina lay snuggled up to Sudwest"
(321.20), in the novel which lends greater credence to alternative readings
of the episode. Imo.

There are larger issues at stake, certainly, which revolve around the
guilt/complicity or otherwise of those such as von Braun, those who have
employed von Braun, those who did and still revere von Braun (and the Cold
War "victory" which he, at least partially, has enabled for the US) and name
their schools in his honour. I'd suggest that Pynchon is asking us to attend
to these issues as well in *GR* -- that's *my* reading -- and that the
*absence* of "the Holocaust" as a narrative device in the novel is both sign
and symptom of the context which Pynchon is establishing for the reader.

best