Chasing ... Cutting

[jbor]

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>From: "Otto Sell" <o.sell at telda.net>
>To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Chasing ... Cutting
>Date: Wed, Aug 30, 2000, 1:00 AM
>

> I'm talking about this sentence and this opinion is wrong in my opinion:
> "This is overtly Holocaust-denial; it is 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 ... an attempt by Pynchon to ameliorate" (28.08.2000) - I was just
> disturbed by some words, "denial" and "ameliorate" which, I believe, are not
> accurate descriptions of what I've read in the novel in question.

Hi Otto

Again, the "This" referred to the process of rationalisation that Blicero,
who imagines himself into the Oven, then to gas and cinders, and then up and
out the chimney, has undertaken. This is part of the "game": he can envisage
his own demise in terms of the old witch in the gingerbread house. The
imagery is Holocaust imagery to us as readers, and Pynchon has deliberately
orchestrated it this way. But the text actively *resists* the Holocaust
reading by explicitly foregrounding the Hansel and Gretel narrative which
the *characters* have selected. Blicero denies the Holocaust, not Pynchon;
and he does it to exonerate himself and protect his sanity.

It is the reader who must decide the extent of Blicero's culpability, who
must *judge* him. The text is very careful *not* to judge or condemn
Blicero; to ensure that at no point in the text is he directly responsible
for the death of anyone (except his lover/son, Gottfried, whose willing
sacrifice is a futile grasp for transcendence). This is unlike Katje, who
*explicitly* sends three families to their certain deaths. Katje is the
Resistance double agent; Blicero is the Nazi. The stereotypical "heroism"
and "evil" of the one and the other category (both in the historical *and*
the popular imagination) is what Pynchon challenges and subverts imo.

best