hyperbole and ad hominem

[Doug Millison]

Whether or not rj or anybody else agrees with anything I have to say 
about GR is beside the point and of little consequence to me; what 
somebody else thinks of me is, after all, none of my business.  If it 
makes rj feel better to call me names, so be it; I just hope that, 
sooner or later, he gets the kind of counselling that will help him 
get over it; I do see signs of progress, at least he's not continuing 
to claim I hacked into a personal computer down in Australia or 
messed with the P-list archives or broadcast radio signals into his 
brain, and all those other silly allegations he was flinging about 
not that long ago.

That anyone might take seriously rj's sophomoric PoMo 101 cliches 
serves only to demonstrate how far the Pynchon-L discussion has 
fallen -- perhaps one in ten thousand posts, if that many, contains a 
nugget of information or insight worthy of mention in Pynchon Notes 
or other serious publication; the discussion here generally ignores 
what scholars actually do have to say about Pynchon's work -- God 
knows that Terrance, and others, try to bring that sort of material 
into the P-list discussion, only to be studiously ignored by the 
yahoos who currently dominate the discussion. Anybody who's actually 
up to speed on current literary critical trends will certainly find 
Monroe's musings and bibliographic pointers far more fruitful than 
rj's tired lit-crit rewrites and watered-down old school PoMo 
platitudes.

More to s~Z's  point, rj might easily -- without hyperbole -- be 
*compared to* a neo-Nazi, because of the way he tends to spew 
anti-Semitic slurs (last fall and in his earlier campaign against 
Hollander),  the way he echoed Holocaust denier rhetoric and 
hair-splitting definitions to argue that the slave laborers in the 
Mittelwerke were not Holocaust victims (to name only the most glaring 
example from his tortured, revisionist arguments of last year), and 
the way he tends to start shouting and call in the dogs when somebody 
starts saying something he doesn't want to hear (as he did from the 
earliest suggestions that Pynchon included the Holocaust in GR's WWII 
setting).  If that's the kind of discourse you all prefer  -- and I 
certainly didn't hear any objections when rj called Monroe and me 
Nazis yesterday, your scorn targeted my response instead -- go for 
it, rj certainly has an unending stream of that kind of persiflage to 
share. I'll pass, however, although I will speak up as necessary when 
the ad hominem attacks become too egregious.

To refresh your memory, here's what I was responding to:

Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2001 08:44:40 +1100
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
Subject: Re: Speak, Memory
[snip]
" Why, I'd even venture that it's a crime of the same order and
magnitude as, say, "translating" (in terms vouchsafed by Derrida -- M.
L'oeuf-tÍte himself -- anyway) Benny Profane's entrance in _V._ as a
reincarnation of Baudelaire's poet-outcast from _Les Fleurs du Mal_, or the
rocket scream which comes across the sky to open _GR_ as that of a Holocaust
victim or group thereof. It does do "violence" to the original text, and
flies in the face of that recapitulation of the invocation (to the "daughter
of Zeus", at lines 11-12), just as those attempted "translations" of Pynchon
fly in the face of the immediate textual recapitulation and elaboration (let
alone whole text readings!) of the character or incident. What's more, such
"translations" -- interpretations, really -- which attempt to construct an
idiosyncratic meaning *in opposition to* the textual data do violence to the
*spirit* of the text; I'm reminded of the way the Nazi intelligentsia
similarly "translated" and then enlisted selected excerpts from Nietzsche's
works to justify their conceptions of Aryan supremacy in the 20s and 30s,
and the subsequent campaign of ethnic cleansing they put into practice. "

......As long as we're talking about hyperbole, Keith, what do you 
make of labelling as a "crime" an interpretation that compares Benny 
Profane to "Baudelaire's poet-outcast from _Les Fleurs du Mal_"?

-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>