pynchon-l-digest V2 #1445

[jbor]

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

> The Holocaust
> remains at the center of the novel, physically (let the book fall
> open)

What, to page 380 where Slothrop in Rocketman costume bounds across the
autobahn screaming "Haupstufe"? That's the *physical* centre of a 760 page
novel.

Or are you still clinging to that (crackpot) theory which has Pokler
symbolically marrying a Jewish woman *as well as* the new (crackpot) theory
that has Pokler as a born-again Christian? They would appear to contradict
one another, wouldn't they?

There is quite a distance between "random" and Jewish, I would have thought.

> and metaphorically;

I'd say that the "central metaphor" of the novel (if there can be such a
thing -- seems like a pointless rhetorical maneuvre to try to prioritise
metaphors, symbols, themes etc) is probably the parabolic arc of the V-2
rocket. The ones built at Nordhausen. By the *labour* camp inmates at Dora:
the "foreign prisoners", political dissidents, 175s.

> Pynchon refers to it directly

Yes, on p. 666 he writes of the last days at the Mittelwerke as

      ... a time which was granting him [Weissmann] a power different from
    that of Auschwitz or Buchenwald ...

> and alludes
> to it throughout, and all sub-plots lead to the Holocaust

So the Blitz, the extermination of the Herero and the bombing of Hiroshima
are just filler?

Your ideas of a "nuanced" reading and "reasonable" interlocution are jokes.