answering jody Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1582

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

I don't want to intervene in the "American" discussion about GR or if the 
Holocaust "appears" in GR or not. I just want to tell you as I read GR in 
German translation for the first time (in autumn1981 when it was published by 
the Rowohlt Verlag) as a young man of 22 it was "of course" full of 
references to the Shoah, not in the concrete content, but as a kind of 
permanent background. Surely you can say: for a German reader nothing 
extraordinary, how should he/she read it in another way? But for me as a 
young man, twenty years ago, reading "Dialectics of Enlightment" of 
Horkheimer/Adorno at the same time, the Holocaust was less "singular" that it 
is for me today. As Doug says: the industrial system brought with itself its 
own nightmares, and there was no difference for me in throwing an atomic bomb 
on Hiroshima or using Cyclon-B in Auschwitz for killing the jews (to repeat 
it: now I have got another view on that things). As a famous chapter in the 
"Dialectics of Enlightment" is called: "Enlightment as mass swindle" 
(Aufklaerung als Massenbetrug). This kind of system is self-referential, 
there is no "outside" or "exit" to get off this "syndrome". The Critical 
Theory and Pynchon have in common that paranoia is the only "adequate" way of 
thinking about it. PoMo was a consequence of this resignative realization: if 
you cannot change the world, you must interpret it - a question of 
"perspectivsm". And in this context you can say that GR ist "about" the 
Holocaust. If  Pynchon only wanted to write about the "industrial-military 
complex" or something like that he would have written a polit-economic or 
sociological book about it; but he wrote literature, and there was a 
"double-problem" for him: on the one hand: which structures are responsible 
for the desasters of the 20th century, and, on the other hand, how  can you 
write about it in a "correct" artificial representation? Both - the problem 
of analyzing it and the problem of representation - you can find in GR. And 
the discussion which view is the right one and which the wrong (in the shape 
of: PoMo against "political correctness") is something that we call in German 
a "Gespensterdebatte" (ghost debate).

kwp