Holocaust as metaphor? (is also Re: answering jody

[Dave Monroe]

... aw, hell, these days I've been looking for the ugliness first, so
pardon me for not mentioning this most excellent post of yrs, Jody.
Esp., to my astrophysical eye, the lead/iron bit.  A question, though.
Not having Gravity's Rainbow at hand, is it ever even absolutely clear
that that opening bit IS Pirate's dream?  Having just scored my own copy
of David Cowart's Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1980), and, more importantly, having reread it,
I've not only been given a whole bunch of new ideas, but I can also see
where certain ideas of "mine" may have come from.   One of which is the
notion of GR AS film (Ch. 3, "'Making the Unreal Reel': Film in
Gravity's Rainbow"), as filmic, and here, after Kuloshov and Griffith,
not to mention King Kong (that quintessential twen cen "badass" of "Is
it O.K. to be a Luddite?"  Also brings in Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of
Ezra Pound to interesting effect), he mentions in particular Sergei
Eisenstein ...

This is, of course, a controversial claim here--what isn't?--but there
is a certain indeterminacy to the source of that "screaming," to the
terminus of that "evacuation," at least if that section is read
independently of the rest--the "whole," though some will argue one not
need go nearly that far--of the text.  My recollection is--indeed, my
argument has been--that it's really only the epigraph from Wernher von
Braun preceding that section (indeed, preceding the body of the text)
and the mention of the impacted V-2 later that in any way collapses (to
continue the quantum physical trope) the various possible wave functions
here to the particular possibility that that "screaming" is the V-2
(although, of course, then the V-2, falling supersonically, would
already have hit), that we are indeed reading of an air raid evacauation
...

But it seems to me now that it might also only be the mention of Pirate
Prentice draeming that in any way causes one suddenly to read that
section AS a dream, much less as Pirate's dream.  Is that the case?  At
any rate, you no doubt see why Eisenstein set me off here.  That montage
thing, any given shot taking on, or, at any rate, implying, any
particular meaning only ultimately in relation to the shots it is
juxtaposed with.  "Two film pieces of any kind, placed together,
invariably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of
that juxtaposition" (Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Scene, quoted in
Cowart, p. 58).   Sure, Pynchon spliced that WvB epigraph before, Pirate
Prentice, his dreaming, that V-2, London, WWII, even, after, but that
really only foregrounds that indeterminacy, as it it certainly never
resolved within that "shot," and it still only tenuously resolved in the
"montage" at hand ...

Hm.  Speaking of Terry Southern, recall Guy Grand's montage/detournement
technique in The Magic Christian, or, for that matter, those few phallic
frames Brad Pitt inserts to nonetheless significant effect in the films
he shows in Fight Club.  Very interesting.  By the way, recalling recent
discussion of opera in V., by all means, all concerned, see Chapter 4 of
Cowart's TP:TAOI, "'Unthinkable Order': Music in Pynchon."  Wish I'd've
had this months ago ...