Chasing ... Cutting

[jbor]

Hi Otto

> I suppose we have a different understanding of "overtly Holocaust-denial"  -
> for me the Nolte- and neo-Nazi thing comes to mind when you say it.

I don't mean that Pynchon is denying the Holocaust. Emphatically. What I'm
saying is that the narrative is being filtered through the characters'
perceptions at this point; Katje and Blicero are determined, desperate, in
trying *not* to acknowledge what is really going on outside (as with Pokler
later): *they* are trying to deny the Holocaust, and the War. Blicero *must*
know what is going on in the camps (his bureaucratic role in administering
Dora and the Mittelwerke is circumscribed in Pokler's story later in the
text), but so must Katje:

    ... her record with Mussert's people is faultless, she's credited
    with smelling out at least three crypto-Jewish families, she attends
    meetings faithfully, she works at a Luftwaffe resort near Scheveningen,
    where her superiors find her efficient and cheerful, no shirker.
                                                                (97.9)

She, Gottfried and Blicero *choose* to play the Hansel and Gretel game at
night behind the closed doors of the house "west of the Duinguidt
racecourse" in order to rationalise away the absolute horror and inhumanity
of the spectacle of cruelty and death they daily witness -- the "executions,
the roustings, beatings, subterfuge, paranoia, shame" -- *including* what
has been happening in the concentration camps, but not *exclusively* this.
Part of their rationalisation process involves the attempt to suppress a
realisation of their own *complicity* in all of this horror. But the echoes
of the Holocaust are there in the very "game" they are playing, tauntingly
so for them (who are caught up in it and choose not to see it), more
ominously for us (who are spectating from a more comfortable, and
complacent, distance, and pronouncing our moral judgements on the one and
not the other with presumption and disdain). (There is probably room here
for a commentary on how the particular Northern myth these characters have
chosen to play out is an archetype for and exemplum of the modes of
(in)human domination and subjugation which have been going on in the real
world -- and viewed as acceptable -- since the dawn of human history, also.)

Pynchon has been into this territory before, in *Lot 49*, but the treatment
of it there was too 'comic book' and stereotyped, the manic humour and
externalised pov disguising the psychological portrait contained therein.
But the "forcible acquisition of faith" with which that demented Buchenwald
internee, Dr Hilarius, has tried to blot out the horrors he witnessed and
helped along is exactly the psychological state Pynchon plumbs throughout
*GR*:

     "And part of me must have really wanted to believe -- like a child
   hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror -- that the unconscious
   would be like any other room, once the light was left in. That the dark
   shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. ...
   I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you
   imagine?" (*CL* 93.10)

He regales Oedipa with this question, and I think in *GR* Pynchon does start
to imagine himself into the minds of various individuals -- not your
Eichmanns or Klaus Barbies or Goebbels's or the top brass of IG Farben or
Shell Mex House mind you, but those much closer to that cusp between "guilt"
and "innocence" -- who, like Hilarius here, are caught up in these events.
But unlike the Hilarius scene the perspective in *GR* is from *within the
moment*. For of all these reasons Hilarius's "penance" never quite
convinces, the sarcasm (directed towards Freud rather than Hilarius btw)
complicates the message (Oedipa functions as the skeptical reader here),
though the psychological turmoil he is experiencing is real enough:

     "Yes, you hate me. But didn't I try to atone? If I'd been a real Nazi
    I'd have chosen Jung, nicht war? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew.
    Freud's vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald,
    according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer
    field, fat children would learn flower-arranging and solfeggio in the
    strangling rooms. At Auschwitz the ovens would be converted to petit
    fours and wedding cakes, and the V-2 missiles to public housing for the
    elves. I tried to believe it all. ... " (*CL* 95.16)

> The perspective of the narrator (and Weissmann's since we have crept in his
> mind on p. 98-99, so you really must read it turned upside down) is early
> 1945 when the information of the death-camps wasn't very widespread,

*Why* must we read it upside down? This is the same thing as saying that
Weissmann is inherently "evil", that he is less than human ... that he and
those like him deserve to be exterminated, isn't it? In turning it "upside
down" don't *we* become the dominators, the oppressors, the murderers?
Blicero is *human* too. Like Katje. Like the Jews. Like us.

You say "information of the death-camps wasn't very widespread" but there is
a lot of historical material which says that it was. How can we know for
sure? Kristallnacht was 9-10 Nov 1938; "undesirables" (communists and
socialists at first, then Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Catholics) had been
carted off to the camps since 1933. None returned. At the *very* least
Weissmann knows what's going on in Dora, Katje is uncovering "crypto-Jewish
families" to be incarcerated.

> and to
> the rocket-story it fits better that Weissmann is commanding a
> rocket-battery instead being KZ-commander and Gottfried a Jewish boy . . .

I think it's important that they are who they are.

> And wasn't it withhold by the Allies with the argument that no one would
> believe it, that this would weaken and not strenghten the war efforts?

So then, *someone* knew. On both sides.

> We as readers of this post-war novel have all this information.

Yes.

> It is
> obvious that through the following remembrances to Südwest and "the great
> Herero-Rising" Pynchon is not at all denying the German Holocaust of
> Auschwitz and Treblinka.

I think he's very concerned to depict the holocaust in Sudwest in *its own
right*.

> There are lot of things he leaves to the reader to
> fill in. He's not pointing directly but indirectly. Supposing that nobody
> who really denies the historical facts will ever read GR it's absolutely
> legitimate to do so as an author. Additionally I think it's extremely
> important to tell that there have been earlier, call it "minor" German
> genocides in history. First the Hereros have hardly been recognized as
> victims over here and it's only fair to bring them to attention. But
> furthermore, all we have been told is that the British, the French, the
> Dutch and mostly the Belgians have been "bad colonists" but the Germans
> always have been good ones. No von-Trotha in our history books.
> Nolte had tried to explain the Holocaust with "Asian" models - Hitler
> inspired by Stalin or so - but Pynchon makes clear that there was no need
> for a stalinistic pattern - we've got all we needed in our own history.
snip
>
> Weissmann as Hitler: agnostic but superstitious, note the repeated use of
> the word "Destiny" on p. 98, one of Hitler's favorites:
> "Die Vorsehung hat mich auserwählt." - "I was elected by providence." For me
> the words "destiny" and "providence" are not that far apart from each other
> considering the implicit and necessary "control" they both express.

I don't see Weissmann as a cipher for Hitler at all. Weissmann is on the way
*down* the Nazi chain of command; he has fallen *out* of favour. He reads
Rilke, not *Mein Kampf*. His visionary utopia is idealistic, romantic.

> Pointing to individual guilt is always done by those who tend to deny the
> Holocaust or keep up the fairytale of the "good Wehrmacht" versus "bad SS"
> when it comes to speak of German war crimes. People may have different
> reasons for taking part but it's "They," the system that makes Weissmann's
> little perverted game possible. Above and behind all the personal
> responsibilities, even Hitler's, there were other reasons, motivations and
> attempts to control: money, economy, parties, churches, "Preussische
> Landjunker" and so on. But this is no amelioration of the personal guilt
> someone who has "really" taken part bears, no matter how he presents his
> "fairytale" to his grandchildren.

I think these things you are expressing as certainties are questions Pynchon
is raising.
>
> The margin in my *Die Enden der Parabel* has a note from 1982:  "Auschwitz
> ?" - I see the first mentioning of the Holocaust on p. 3-4 in Pirate's
> dream, dreamily disguised as London-evacuation. The images that come up are
> of deported Jews. Remember Pirate's special talent explained in Episode Two.
> This is what millions of Jews encountered at "die Rampe," at the real "oven"
> at Auschwitz, where the final selection, the final judgment without appeal
> took place:
>
> "(...) places whose *names he has never heard* . . . (...)" (3. italics by
> TRP)
> "(...) they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is
> a judgment from which there is no appeal.
> The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are
> ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them
> wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old
> and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they
> have come here. (...) . . .  the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator--a
> moving wood scaffold open on all sides (...)." (4)
>
> The double-meaning of *scaffold" should alarm every reader at once.
>
OK. But run with this insight a little further. To what uses are Pirate's
special talent being put by the War Office? If Pirate dreams it then don't
the English doctors who monitor him daily know about it? And, how does his
"gift" actually function? He experiences the fantasies of others -- he
steals their dreams so to speak -- it is his ability to "take over the
burden of *managing* ... their exhaustive little daydreams for them". (12)
Does this mean the victims no longer face the horror of that mocking voice
on p.4:

     "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who
    we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save *you*,
    old fellow. . . . "

Perhaps Pirate's actual sleeping dreams are of a different timbre to the
conscious gift he has nurtured, however, if this is Pirate *intercepting*
the dreams of the Jewish prisoners it means that they *aren't* having them
at all (cf. the Rumanian royalist on 11.12, Lord Blatherard Osmo on 16).
Doesn't this imply that that moment of horror that the death camp victims
suddenly experience at the realisation of their fate *isn't* real for them?
Or is it only that their misgivings about where they were going which have
been intercepted?

I can accept the possibility of this interpretation of the opening sequence
but I still find it problematic.

best