Pynchon & rap

[jbor]

on 7/12/01 3:05 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> Robert has argued, and I hope he will correct me where I am
> in error here, that the near absence of the Holocaust in GR
> or its being "largely absent" from a novel ostensibly
> "about" religion (HA!) W.W.II, is demonstrative of P's
> postmodern aesthetic or whatever, he's much more articulate
> on all this than I'm giving him credit for here and
> certainly more so that Doug is giving him credit for, but
> anyway, I think Robert has argued the same for the near
> absence of Vietnam from VL and CL49 and V. the so forth for
> M&D.

Actually, it's not something I'd stick the postmodern label on. In fact,
it's a narratological observation, and I'd go further and say that it's
actually a type of realism which Pynchon is aspiring to with his text.
Pynchon's narrative perspectives are located in the moment, so to speak, and
in the minds of the various characters who serve as narrative agents (and we
will find that this is very much the case in _M&D_ also). For whatever
reasons, when Blicero and Katje are playing and thinking about their
Oven-game in Holland in 1945 they don't ever make the -- pretty obvious --
cognitive association to the extermination camps (assuming, and I think it
is a fair assumption, that both these characters would have known of the
camps). Instead, it is the reader who must make that connection. And, of
course, post-1973 when the novel was being read the fact and details of the
Holocaust are going to be present in every reader's mind in the specific
context of WWII, 1945, Nazi Germany et. al. anyway. At the time I suggested
that both Katje's and Blicero's game-playing represented a type of
psychological reversion, a conscious or subconscious denial which might have
had a self-protective edge to it, about what was going on in the real world
outside: the Holocaust, the bombing, the proximity of their own deaths etc.

The same sort of thing is happening with Slothrop when he thinks to himself
that his "tongue's a hopeless holocaust". In 1945 Slothrop could appropriate
that word in the context of a particularly unsavoury lolly he has just eaten
with absolute impunity, because at that time the term did not refer to The
Holocaust at all (and more than likely Slothrop had no idea about what was
happening in the lagers in Germany anyway); for the modern reader the
metaphor itself, and the flippancy of the tone and context of its use,
sounds terribly inappropriate.

best