Chasing ... Cutting

[Dave Monroe]

"The most effective evocations of the Holocaust seem to proceed either by
invocation, the glancing reference to an existing bank of ideas, images and
sentiments ('Auschwitz'), or, perhaps, more effectively, by indirection."

--Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), p. 165

Flip the page, as I recall, and that word, "oven," will be shortlisted as exemplary
of such "invocations," "glancing references," of said "existing bank of ... images"
effectively--esp. in this text (Gravity's Rainbow), in this context (Nazi Europe,
WWII)--evoking the Holocaust.  Evokes the Holocaust for you here, even.  It would be
difficult for it not to do it for any reader familiar with the events of WWII.
Gravity's Rainbow, that Pynchonian ouevre, plays often indeed on rather
less-than-obvious connotations, denotations, even, allusions, but it cannot
necessarily delimit that play of meaning, and certainly not to the exclusion of,
well, "obvious symbolism."  And then there are "gases, cinders," that "chimney
departure" ...

Again, that "agreement,"  a domestification, rationalization, routinization,
interrnalization, even, "against what none of them can bear," but note that dash
there, that pause, given that list of "rosutings," "beatings," "summary executions,"
that "Oven" ... well, a pregant pause, indeed, which indeed passes to "the War, teh
absoulte rule of chance, tehir own pitiable contingency"  Blindness, ignorance,
denail, indeed.  Perhaps "the narrative" does indeed "actively resist the obvious,"
but don't mistake "the narrative" for "the narrator" for 'Thomas Pynchon."  Keep in
mind who, what is being narratied at any given instance ...

... and "foregrounding" is a stronger word here than even I would use, but I
certainly do not object.  But an "explanation" is different from an "excuse," is it
not?  Or is some sort of insanity plea being entered here on Blicero's, Katje's,
Hitler's, the Third Reich's, perhaps even the Nazi-era German population's behalf?
Again, what precisely is your claim here?  About, say, Pynchon's take on the
Holocaust?  Keeping in mind, if we might, comments made a decade or so later in his
"Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
(http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/pynchon.paper.luddite.html).  No, not
rerunning the Nuremburg trials here, am just trying to elicit some conclusions that
I think you might have in mind, and am curious as to what they might be, is all ...

jbor wrote:

> ----------
> >From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
> >
>
>       How seriously is she playing? In a conquered country, one's own
>     occupied country, it's better, she believes, to enter into some formal,
>     rationalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form or
>     decent limit day and night, the summary executions, the roustings,
>     beatings, subterfuge, paranoia, shame . . . though it is never
>     discussed among them openly, it would seen Katje, Gottfried and
>     Captain Blicero have agreed that this Northern and ancient form;
>     one they all know and are comfortable with -- the strayed children,
>     the wood-wife in the edible house, the captivity, the fattening,
>     the Oven -- shall be their preserving routine, their shelter, against
>     what outside none of them can bear -- the War, the absolute rule of
>     chance, their own pitiable contingency here, in its midst. . . . (96)

>  the dramatic irony is that the obvious symbolism of "the Oven" (i.e. The
> Holocaust) goes unacknowledged throughout this whole section, is something which
> is perhaps even consciously or subconsciously denied by these characters.

> The Kinderofen allegory continues and the narrative actively *resists* the obvious
> Holocaust allusion again,

> So his Destiny is the Oven: while the strayed children, who never knew, who change
> nothing but uniforms and cards of identity, will survive and prosper long beyond
> his gases and cinders, his chimney departure. (98-99)

>  Pynchon foregrounding Blicero's (and, earlier, Katje's) putative knowledge of and
> complicity in acts of Jewish genocide. But along with the denial is the
> psychological explanation of it -- they have sought "shelter", both physical and
> psychic -- from "the War [...] their own pitiable contingency here, in its midst".

> These earlier sections are all about the various characters' attempts to wrest
> some type of Control, on however small or large a scale, away from "the absolute
> rule of chance" which is the War, and from Life and Civilisation and Mortality in
> respect of which "the War" operates as a
> synechdoche/metonym in the novel. This, to me, seems an attempt by Pynchon to
> ameliorate the extent of the "culpability" we might otherwise, automatically and
> stereotypically, appoint to such individuals.