Sanders, "The Politics of Literary Reinscription ..."

[Doug Millison]

Dave, thanks very much for taking the time to transcribe those excerpts --
very illuminating indeed. I like Sanders' grasp of some relatively
straightforward apprehensions that tend to get awfully tangled up her on
Pynchon-L as some of us mire the discussion in often pointless
deconstructions and flip-flops apparently for no reason other than to
prolong arguments:  

" The 
Europeans, who enact their sexual fantasies within the walls of Foppl's 
castle, are, by Pynchon's account, typical of European colonizers in 
general. "(83)


That's obvious enough. 

"Marx's analyses betray none of the 
pleasures that go with colonialism."  
...as Pynchon says, quite pointedly in a famous GR passage, where he (and
the narrative voice does appear to be Pynchon's at that point, many have
agreed in our previous discussions here) chides Marx for leaving out the
sexual element of the colonizers' program -- a point he develops in GR with
Weissmann/Blicero's sexual relationship with Enzian, a relationship that's
possible only because of the colonial power structure which gives
Weissmann/Blicero acess to the boy in the first place and which gives W/B
power over him and gives him prestige in the colonized subject's eyes.



" The preliterate accounts of Africans, in 
Thomas Pynchon's view, have been excluded. (83)

Yes, Pynchon here, later in GR, and again in M&D, lets the voice of the
colonized be heard, even as he plays with the structures of historical
representation as Sanders discusses in the passages Dave cites.  In doing
so, Pynchon would seem to be acting to undermine the authority of a colonial
system that would keep them silent, and, indeed, he goes to great lengths to
show how the colonial system works to make the colonized subject his or her
own worst enemy as he or she takes on the European sickness.

"There are, as Pynchon realizes, the makings of a story other than the one 
told by the colonialists." (86)

The fiction that the colonized subjects freely choose suicide -- as opposed
to choosing it in response to the terrible alternatives that the colonists
impose, or because they have been mentally, spiritually, emotionally
devastated by the colonists and the colonial system -- would be the story
told by the colonialists.  I do not believe, contrary to the assertion made
here repeatedly by "jbor", that Pynchon agrees with or favors this
colonialist story -- a storyt which blames the victim and exculpates the
perpetrator -- of why the Herero are dying. 

Ethically, Pynchon experiences a dilemma: he wants to restore historical 
agency--ultimately their ability to represent themselves as victims of 
european colonialism--but if he does so he risks travestying his agents.
[snip].... (92)

A challenge Pynchon faces, and successfully overcomes in my opinion, in GR,
where Pynchon manages, in Pokler's encounter with the dead and dying
Holocaust victims (Dora slave laborers), to make real the horror of this
situation, their suffering, and the crime that has been committed against
them (by the Nazis and their collaborators inside and outside of Germany)
without himself (Pynchon) being guilty of objectifying the victims or
reducing them to mere metaphors.