Homer, hyperbole & ad hominem

[jbor]

----------
>From: "Otto Sell" <o.sell at telda.net>

> 
> I do not see jbor's posts as an accusation of Dave or Doug, but as a warning
> of falsification, as he says to keep the integrity of the text, not to
> overload it with too big images or a misuse of the Shoah as a metaphor.


Thanks Otto. It's a relief to know that there are indeed some people out
there who are capable of reading text accurately and without prejudice. But
I do certainly agree with you about the "numerous little references", almost
incidental to the main narrative, to what was happening to Jewish people
during WWII, such as Blicero's contemplation that: Katje's "record with
Mussert's people is flawless, she's credited with smelling out three
crypto-Jewish families." (GR 97.9) It's not central in or to the narrative
but rather tangential, Blicero's aside to himself, and all the more powerful
for being so. The text doesn't follow up on what happened to these families,
but the reader *knows*, and this is the way Pynchon intended it to be.

As you say, at the time the fate of the Camp victims was largely being
ignored, consciously or not, and Pynchon's narrative strategy (for the
larger part of the first three sections at least) is a character-centred
rather than omniscient one. Ken McVay emphasised much the same point as
Naumann and yourself when he was contacted to clear up once and for all the
false accusations and insinuations of Holocaust-denial which millison (and,
since then, monroe) have *constantly* unleashed in order to
quash any open discussion of these issues:

    Even when Allied leaders _knew_ what was
    going on, they shied away from public statements/actions because they
    were afraid of being accused of fighting only for the Jews.
                                                    (Ken McVay, 4.10.2000)

With the opening sequence of _GR_ I think it's also important to keep in
mind that it's Pirate's dream, and this does serve to make a number of
logic-defying or physics-defying possibilities valid, at least potentially
so. But, as a number of people have now commented, the notions that Pynchon
relegated the Holocaust to the status of a symbol or metaphor in his novel,
or that he intentionally reduced its historical/moral significance to equal
that of the Evacuation of Londoners during the Blitz in that opening scene,
are, in fact, quite offensive.

best


~~~
    "By 1945, the factory system - which, more than
     any piece of machinery, was the real and major
     result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
     extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
     German long-range rocket program and the death
     camps, such as Auschwitz.It has taken no major
     gift of prophecy to see how these three curves
      of development might plausibly converge, and
                before too long. ... "
                                 (T. Pynchon, 1984)
                                                     ~~~