pynchon-l-digest V2 #1662

[Doug Millison]

rj:
>The line of argument goes something like
>this: establish a connection between a company (eg IBM), a political figure
>or family (eg the Bushes), or indeed a critic (eg Paul de Man) or literary
>interpretation, and Nazism, and in that way you will discredit them for all
>perpetuity.


Actualy, there's no need for anyone to "establish a connection" (if 
by that you mean, create a connection that wasn't obvious, or somehow 
construct a connection through rhetorical or literary-critical 
argument) here -- in the case of IBM, it was the company itself that 
entered into a business agreement with the Nazis, for profit, a 
matter of historical record.  The author of this newly published book 
merely reports the facts of this business arrangement, as far as I 
can tell from reading the articles and reviews that have appeared. 
Pynchon does something like this, too, when he shows his web of 
interlocking cartels -- using companies and situations from the 
actual historical situation in his fictional GR setting --  that link 
the opposing sides in WWII.  That the Nazis committed war crimes and 
genocide, which are considered "evil" (quibble with the definition if 
you will, and certainly "evil" however you define it is something 
that resides in each of us; Pynchon writes about that, too) by quite 
a few people, is historical fact as well -- no need to "establish a 
connection" in this regard, either, because the Nazis and their 
supporters did what they did, a matter of historical record, well 
documented and testified to by a large number of observers and 
victims.

>The hidden agenda is in the promotion of some alternative
>company or political figure/clan or critic or interpretation (or, indeed,
>simply the author of the alleged exposÈ himself.)

This statement would appear to take on some interesting Pynchonian 
paranoid proportions. As Leo Bersani (another of my teachers in the 
French Department at UC Berkeley these many years ago) points out in 
his paper, mentioned here briefly in recent weeks, if They can get 
you hooked into Their paranoid game, expending your energy to find 
out what's *really* going on, buying into Their control games, then 
They've won. You have to make like Slothrop and move beyond that 
We/They interface, according to Bersani.


>The Nazis were "evil"
>therefore IBM ( ... etc ) is "evil". QED. It is a strategy which is
>simplistic and manipulative and quite offensive in its reduction of WWII and
>its consequences to the status of rhetorical instrument, to the mouthpiece
>of propaganda.


With all due respect, I don't think it's offensive to expose the 
historical facts of genocide and other war crimes,  historians don't 
(except the Holocaust deniers, of course, and other propagandists), 
and I don't think Pynchon feels that way either -- although who knows 
what he feels or thinks, nor in the final analysis does that really 
matter, we can only judge based on what he gives us to read of what 
he's written -- based on the way he's consistently dealt with 
genocide and holocausts and the Holocaust in his writings, in V., in 
GR, M&D, in his Luddite essay, & etc.  Pynchon makes a highly nuanced 
argument about the ways that technology has served, or enslaved, or 
brutalized, its creators,  in the service of the European 
colonization of Africa and other parts of the world, and in the 
service of global capital everywhere.


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