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

[Can't Wait]

"Am I really the only person who has tried looking at GR while seeing
the Holocaust?"


Well, even if you were, would it really be something to be proud of?

'Jewslaves made the rockets, ergo, Ergo, ERGO, ERRRRRRRRRRRGO, E  -- 
R  --  G  --  O,

E
R
G
O
,

that screaming that is a comin cross the sky? --Cleary the yelps of
the anguishing jews.'

But I'm not one to complain:  For years and years I thought The
Brothers Karamazov was about two Italian kids from Brooklyn.


cw













--- Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com> wrote:
> 
> "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>


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