questions and corrections (is Re: WWII in GR)

[jbor]

----------
millison
>

> Most of the evil Nazis remain off-stage, but not all --  Pokler works
> with some,

Is Pokler an evil Nazi? Or does his conscious guilt exonerate him? Which
character/s, of those Pokler works with, are depicted in the text as "evil
Nazis"?

> a quote from von Braun begins the novel,

Is von Braun depicted as an "evil Nazi" in the text, or is millison taking
this as a given.

> we have Blicero
> the pedophile.

Blicero is a sodomist, perhaps a pederast, but certainly not a paedophile.
Pokler seemingly suppresses urges which are paedophiliac, perhaps also
incestuous. Slothrop fucking Bianca could be described as a paedophiliac
scene.

> When Slothrop visits the Mittelwerke, at page 296,
> Pynchon mentions the Dora prisoners and their "spiritual rampage"
> after their mistreatment, torture, murder at the hands of the Nazis.
> I've previously mentioned the ghost girl who helps Slothrop feed into
> the flames the doll with the hair of a Jewess.

Slothrop feeds the flames with the doll's hair. It is the little girl's
doll. Her home has been destroyed by the rampaging Dora escapees. She is an
orphan.

> At page 428, Pynchon
> marches in the Dora slaves, "the starved bodies" & etc. , then again,
> at p. 432, exposes "the naked corpses"

Yes, it is a powerful and chilling scene.

> (in a description that could
> be a shot-by-shot description of the documentary films that were
> widely disseminated in the '50s and '60s).  A handfull of direct
> references, but enough to know, without going outside the novel at
> all, that Pynchon is dealing with the WWII of history.

We weren't already aware that it was WWII?

millison offers three page nos as proof of "a reasonable emphasis on the
place of the Nazi Holocaust in this novel". That's three over 758, give or
take. Which is 0.003958 of the novel. The statistic is miniscule, and the
explanations being offered -- too "sublime", awestruck silence, it would
make the novel too long if he put it on-stage (which is quite possibly the
most absurd suggestion of the three considering the length of the novel and
the other things which he chose to leave in, but ... ) I think that it is
this *absence* of the Holocaust from the text of *GR* which is incredibly
significant, this deliberate choice Pynchon made to keep it "off-stage" in a
novel which, for all of its 758 pages, *is* very much about (and "about")
the historical WWII, its precedents and aftermath. I don't believe it is a
sop to neo-Nazism or Holocaust denial to suggest this, and I think it is
something worth pursuing, in a calm, reasoned dialogue, if that is at all
possible, in a forum such as this.