just for fun Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1452

[Doug Millison]

"Even when overwhelmed by Pynchon's ability to decompose reality into 
fragments, many readers would agree that kindness is foregrounded as 
one of humanity's more helpful emotions; that control is evil; that 
an ecological sensitivity to earth's fruitful processes is valorized; 
that Pynchon insists on some form of non-material, nonempirical 
reality; and that he seems to approve of people's accepting both 
their own preterition and the necessity of their own deaths as parts 
of relinquishing control. I see no signs that these values are 
undercut with irony. [....] His ideology, furthermore, is widely, if 
not unanimously, recognized as coming across in the text, even when 
some form of disintegration or decomposition is being claimed as the 
text's main objective."
--Kathryn Hume, _Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow_

Just wanted to share that insight; I enjoyed reading it again while 
putting together this email. It's nice, feeling part of a community 
that shares a few assumptions about GR. I mean, of course,  the 
community of "many readers" to which Hume refers in the passage 
quoted above.

Is reading GR in light of the Holocaust a new phenomenon? Am I really 
the only person who has tried looking at GR while seeing the 
Holocaust as one in a small circle of fundamental concerns that shape 
the novel?

The Holocaust's presence in GR was noted by critics, and related to 
the novel's central themes and metaphors, very soon after its 
publication. This would appear obvious based on a cursory look though 
a book I have at hand,  the 1976 collection, _Mindful Pleasures: 
Essays on Thomas Pynchon_ edited by Geroge Levine and David Leverenz, 
a volume that advertises itself as "the first collection of critical 
essays on Thomas Pynchon."  Three of the five essays that devote 
themselves solely to GR specifically include the Holocaust in their 
discussion of the novel; some of the other essays in the book discuss 
to some degree (I haven't taken the time to tally up the references; 
I have a life, you see) the larger category of genocide of which the 
Holocaust is a specific example. In none of the essays is the 
Holocaust a primary focus; in fact, the space devoted to Holocaust 
references in these essays is very small, but these references are 
present nonetheless, and linked to the authors' central arguments.

Scott Sanders' essay "Pynchon's Paranoid History,"  focuses primarily 
on paranoia, but he manages to weave the Holocaust into his argument:

"....several mistresses of death who, like V., incarnate the impulse 
towards annhilation....Margherita Erdmann, a masochistic victim in 
her films and a murderer of Jewish children in real life" (p. 149)

"Pynchon stresses the bitter link between construction and 
destruction by situating one of his most moving chapters -- that 
involving Franz Pokler's reunions with his surrogate daughter -- in 
the Nordhausen rocket works, which were separated only by a wall from 
the extermination camp of Dora. Engineering performed astonishing 
feats on both sides of the wall, perfecting means of murder." (pp. 
149-150)

"All of Gravity's Rainbow takes place during the latter months and 
immediate aftermath of World War II, with extensive flashbacks to the 
thirties and to the earlier years of the war. This was an era in 
which paranoia was erected into state policy:  the Nazi campaign 
against the Jews, Stalin's purges, the American incarceration of 
Orientals, the early salvos of the Cold War."

In this same collection of essays, Marjorie Kaufman, in "Brunnhilde 
and the Chemists: Women in Gravity's Rainbow", in her discussion of 
the novel's female characters, mentions "Greta/Margherita Erdmann, 
the Queen-Mother of the 'decky-dance' in Gravity's Rainbow, doing her 
act in prewar German movies, with a touring company to entertain the 
troops at concentration camps, at the launching site of the Rocket, 
and finally aboard the good ship Anubis."

In his essay, "On Trying to Read Gravity's Rainbow," David Leverenz 
observes, "The German extermination of the Hereros and Jews, the 
American war on Indians, the Dutch massacre of the Dodos, are 
Pynchon's historical metaphors for white consciousness, that 'order 
of Analysis and Death' (722), the closed system that stands in fear 
of its 'dark, secret children.' (75) "

While the Holocaust is not a central focus in any of the early essays 
I mention here,  it  certainly wasn't ignored; my point is that GR's 
critics, virtually from the beginning, have acknowledged the 
Holocaust as an element to be included and considered in an 
exploration of GR's central concerns. Out of the hundreds and 
hundreds of characters, settings, episodes, passages, conversations, 
and other material available for discussion in GR, critics have from 
the start selected Holocaust-related material to feature in their 
discussions of GR.  Given how plentiful Holocaust references actually 
are in GR, this should come as no surprise.

In another book I happen to have here on my shelf, I turn only 10 
pages before Kathryn Hume refers to the Holocaust in _Pynchon's 
Mythography_ (published in 1987), when she observes of Pynchon, "We 
see him subvert German 'myths' of 're-education' as he exposes Camp 
Dora." The Holocaust is of course not Hume's primary focus in this 
book, but its presence in GR plays a not insignificant role in her 
discussion of Pynchon's mythography. Flipping through the pages to 
page  98, she notes, "Margherita Erdmann tries to kill a Jewish boy 
and may have murdered her daughter" in the course of making a more 
general point: "One of Pynchon's basic images, in fact, is that of 
Western parents killing their own and other people's children."  Yet 
again, on page 181, in her discussion of Pynchon's "new hero figures" 
(at the heart of what she calls "Pynchon's mythography"):   "Pokler 
also acknowledges some sense of responsibility towards Camp Dora when 
he leaves his ring on the woman's finger, and this too is a common 
element in Pynchon's new hero figures. Pokler, Katje, and Roger all 
recognize some form of guilt or complicity or responsibility. 
Slothrop's values, insofar as they warn wordlessly of Hiroshima and 
its implications, show his sense of involvement taking an artistic 
form."

Critical attention to the Holocaust in GR continues to the present 
day, of course. I've written a bit about a particular article in the 
current issue of Pynchon Notes. None of the authors I've read who 
have written about the Holocaust in GR has resorted to the kind of 
obfuscating and hair-splitting definitions rj has offered -- the Dora 
slave laborers not to be considered Holocaust victims?  Hogwash.

I offer these citations to support my simple, not novel observation, 
that the Holocaust can be said to lie at the center of GR because the 
central metaphor of the novel, the V-2 rocket, is itself 
fundamentally a product of the Holocaust, manufactured by slave labor 
in a factory system that treats slaves as disposable factors of 
production, the product and reflection of a fascist System that 
dominates the world of novel. I also agree with critics who see the 
novel as reflecting the time of its own assembly,  the '60s and early 
'70s, displacing many contemporary concerns (nuclear-armed guided 
missiles, a manned space exploration program, neo-colonial 
adventurism, environmentalism, to name  four) into the WWII setting.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>