Letter to Thomas F. Hirsch

[Dave Monroe]

Well, flying blind here, presumably, you're all on to V. now (but of course 
...), but this is certainly relevant to at LEAST both V. and GR, so ... but 
why didn't anybody mention this?  Or did I miss it?  Well, found it today, 
that's for sure ... selected citations from "Appendix: Pnchon's Reading for 
Gravity's Rainbow," a letter from Thomas Pynchon to on Thomas F. Hirsch, 8 
January 1969, 'reprduced with Pynchon's permission," in David Seed, The 
Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988), pp. 
240-3.  I edit only to save my carpally-tunneled hands ...

When I wrote V. I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress 
rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30's and 40's.  Which 
is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as 
superficially as I did.  But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff 
here and there on comprative religion, I fell now the thing goes much 
deeper.  (240)

But I feel personally that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans 
i the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and 
what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian 
minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing 
analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration. 
  (241)

It is impossible, i think, to consider the Herero apart from his religion, 
which is in turn governed [by] his social organization.  Their villages are 
circular [...].  Their god embodied male and female, creation and 
destruction, life and death.  The missionaries came in and set up 
dichotomies, busted up that unity, created categories, and historically 
nobody has been better at this than the Germans.  Both in mathematics and in 
politics [...].  Contrast the shape ofd a Herero village with the Cartesian 
grid system [...] read Lewis Mumford [...].  The physical shape of a city is 
an infallible clue to where the people who built it are at (241)

[Seed's endnote here, by the way, says Pynchon has denied reading Mumford, 
but that he did consult Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American 
Cities.  Terrance's notes in re: LM's Technics and Civilization, in any 
case, are eminenetly relevent nonetheless]

I doubt it was only firepower and aggrssiveness that beat the Herero during 
that "complex and terrible" time.  I think the Hereros had as much to do 
with it as von Trotha did. [... W.P. Steenkamp, Is the South-West African 
Hereor Committing Race Suicide?] attempts [...] to discount the notion, 
apparently widely-held at the time, that the Hereros were deliberately 
trying to exterminate themselves.  But I find that perfectly plausible, 
maybe not as a conscious conspiracy, but in therms of how a perhaps not 
completely Westernized people might respond. (241-2)

[...] their cattle had souls, the same souls as their own [....] But they 
had no hangups sacrificing cattle [...] so it's doubtful if they'd have any 
hangups sacrificing themsleves, either, given a unified concept of creation, 
which shows up in religions all around the world, Christianity being a 
glaring exception.  And German Christianity being perhaps the most perfect 
expression of the whole Western/analytic/"linear"/alienated shtick.  It is 
no accident that Leibniz was co-inventor of calculus, trying to cope with 
change by stopping it dead, chopping it up into infinitesimals, going in to 
look at it, the cannonball frozen in midflight, little piece by little piece 
[....] (242)

This may all sound irrelevant, but it's not.  I don't like to use the word 
but I think what went on in Sudwest is archetypal of every clash bewteen the 
west and non-west, clashes that are still going on right now in South East 
Asia. (242)

[Seed notes that he "made a minor excision here"-right after "South East 
Asia"--"at Pynchon's request."  This is the only "excision" noted]

Hopefully, this will all show up, before long, in another novel. (242)

Far from being a minor side-show in African history, I think it could be 
vitally important to people's undersatnding of what's going on in the world 
these days.

Yours truly,
Thomas Pynchon (243)

... quod erat demonstrandum?  Still, one (meaning me) is tempted to 
deconstruct a few things here (e.g., east/west, unity/analysis, 
preliterate/literate, consult yr Of Grammatology, the number Derriad does on 
the head of Levi-Strauss in re: the number L-S does on the Nambikwara in 
Tristes Tropiques), but ... but, well, veddy, veddy interesting, methinks 
...


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