To cut to the chase ...

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2000 8:58 AM
Subject: To cut to the chase ...


> ... which, unfortunately, I might not have time to do just now, but ...
> but situtate Gravity's Rainbow in its own time, its own place, its own
> situation, perhaps, in the lineage of various postwar productions set
> in, and, presumably, "about," World War II, say, to name some obvious
> ones, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s
> Slaughterhouse-Five, or, again, films such as Stalag 17, The Great
> Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Catch-22 (again ...), Kelly's Heroes or (again
> ...) Slaughterhouse-Five.     In what sense can these productions, these
> novels, these films, be said to be "about," to "represent," perhaps,
> that War after that War to End All Wars?
>
> They seem just as much to be "about," to "reperesent," even, wars after
> that War after that War, inevitabley so, as they are in the wake,
> indeed, in the midst of, those wars, say, the Cold War, the Korean War
> (the highest recorded temperature of the Cold War?  Maybe even throw in
> M*A*S*H ...), all those postwar wars of decolonization, Algeria, for the
> French, and, of course, Vietnam (for the French and then for us).   And
> do recall not only that Winston Churchill coined teh phrase "The Iron
> Curtain," but that JFK positioned himself as WC (making DDE Neville
> Chamberlain?), and teh USSR Nazi Germany (if not quite NK as AH) ...
>
> More than anything else, such cultural productions are first and
> foremost 'about," and, certainly, of, their own times, places,
> situations, in short, contexts (this can be seen acutely in so-called
> "science" or speculative fiction, in whatever media, a-and one might
> even consider Gravity's Rainbow to partake of the genre, "a world laid
> over" our own, or whatever [sorry, citation not handy]).  And more than
> just Vietnam was going on as Gravity's Rainbow was gestating (for rather
> longer than the nine months over which it largely unfolds) ...
>
> No, never claimed Gravity's Rainbow was primarily "about" the Holocaust,
> though it certainly does, by virtue of its setting, because of its
> setting, acknowledge, and, I think, responsibly so, more so than many of
> the above examples.  And note that Hiroshima (not to mention Nagasaki)
> go even less mentioned (albeit no less alluded to), despite the
> increasingly obvioulsly nuclear-apocalyptic concerns of the novel.  Not
> that anti-semitism had necessarily subsided in Pynchon's, GR's America
> (not to mention world), but ...
>
> ... but that Civil Rights movement, that Black Nationalism, that Gay
> Rights movement, the ecology movement, campus unrest, civil unrest, yr
> various subcultures (how does GR phrase it? again, will get around to
> specific citations ...), Vietnam, of course, eventually, Watergate
> (what's the timetable on that, again?  How far would things have gotten
> by the time TRP had to put GR to bed?  Certainly, RMN's legal
> difficulties do seem alluded to at the end of GR) were perhaps more
> immediately of concern ...
>
> ... but I gotta go, will be back ...

       Pynchon's Second-World-War is just a slightly disguised Vietnam-War
Doesn't the way the soldiers act in GR resemble more on Vietnam than on
WW-II? Drug use, Sex?

Does "Dear Mom. I put a couple of people in Hell today. ." (537) sound like
a letter from Europe in 1944/45 or from Vietnam say 1970/71? The undeclared
US-war in Vietnam was not a war of decolonization but has to be seen in the
context of the "rollback" of communism.
And wasn't it Nixon who ended the war Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was
sitting in office by "virtue of death" like Harry T., lead the US too?

Hiroshima is mentioned several times:
"I want only to be with Michiko and our girls, and once I'm there, never to
leave Hiroshima again. I think you'd like it there. It's a city on Honshu,
on the Inland Sea, very pretty, a perfect size, big enough for city
excitement, small enough for the serenity a man needs." (480) sez Morituri
and, later the narrator:
"We must also never forget the famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting
by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his control-finger
poised right on Miss Enoly Gay's atomic clit, making ready to tickle 100,000
little yellow folks into what will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of
fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of their city on the Inland
sea. . . . " (588)  - Plus the mentioning down on p. 642 and p. 693-94.

Considering what has been done to this city can drive you to tears. Okay,
like Hamburg, Lübeck and Dresden it helped to end the war sooner but taking
such a decision. . . . It's to remember Young America that a civilized
country very easily can fall back into barbarism, like Germany and Japan had
and America was (at least it seemed so in the sixties and seventies) on its
way to.

Auschwitz cannot be mentioned because these things later became obvious for
the public.

Elvis is singing *Good Luck Charme* on the radio. . . .

Otto