Pynchon & rap

[Doug Millison]

"jbor:
"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."

OK, so Pynchon sets up these situations in GR, and uses words like
"holocaust" (in the candy drill) that bring the reader, in 1973 and
afterwards, back to the Holocaust. It's a peculiar kind of "absence" that P
creates here, one that focuses the reader on the absent term.  I agree that
what Thomas and "jbor" have described here is a powerful technique, even
more important perhaps than Pynchon's many direct references to the
Holocaust in GR.  It certainly doesn't lessen the importance of the
Holocaust to the novel, however; if anything, it makes the Holocaust more
important.

As long as we're dredging up past posts,"rj/jbor" used to sing a different
tune regarding my suggested interpretation of the Holocaust as central to
GR:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9905&msg=817&sort=author
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 18:59:48 +1100 
From: rj <rjackson@[omitted]> 
To: pynchon-l@[omitted] 
Subject: Re: [Fwd: GRGR: the War continues: Balkans then and today] 


> > TRP confronts the reader with the destructive reality of the
> > Holocaust beginning with the first sentence of GR -- a missile, made by
> > starving concentration camp prisoners 

I'm going to do a little bit of a flipflop for a moment and entertain
this theory. Perhaps images of the Holocaust are a more vivid and daily
spectral legacy of WWII for Americans (where, for me at least, Hiroshima
is the one), and perhaps this scream will immediately resonate for the
American reader as alluding to the collective wail of the emaciated
concentration camp labourers who constructed the rocket, while the
doomed Evacuees will conjure an instant association with the
unsuspecting death train passengers, and the Kafkaesque condominium
which is Pynchon's vision of a post-industrial hell-on-earth could well
be the camp itself: Hotel Terminus, as Doug points out. Like others, my
doubts about the plausibility of this reading are based at the whole
text level, where the Holocaust and Hitler and the tanks and the
trenches and the POWs and the generals and so forth seem conspicuously
absent. It's certainly not _All Quiet on the Western Front_ or _The
Diary of Anne Frank_ after all. So far as I can see the novel's cast
consists primarily of mercenaries, spies, double dealers, schlemiels and
feebs -- not your common man, much less 'victims' or 'propagators' of
WWII, or not in any conventional sense -- and these are the points of
view Pynchon imagines and projects in his narrative.

There are no placenames or individuals in this opening dream, nor is the
dreamer identified conclusively; it definitely functions symbolically as
well as literally. It is multi-purpose, non-specific, indefinite. And, I
think we can certainly go somewhere other than the aether with the
interpretation that it is a vision of the aftermath of the rocket at
novel's end, or Gottfried's death-dream, because as such the novel would
impinge on the historical/political reality of 1973 (it does) as on the
reader's current political reality (Cf the subject line. Bombs, the
threat of nuclear war, ethnic purges, refugees: it wouldn't be hard to
prophesise these as ongoing from the vantage of 1973 either.)

Maintaining the conceit, however, (and I'm certain Pynchon wouldn't
suddenly drop it mid-sequence if it is there), the inner voice which
speaks to each Evacuee, the first 'spoken' words of _GR_, then, are
whose? Are these the jibes of a taunting Nazi guard, as the prisoners
enter the camp, which Pynchon has chosen to emulate at this point?

"You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are
by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save *you* old
fellow. . . . "

Reflecting, allowing the possibility, I was suddenly struck by the
monstrousness of it. Almost dumbstruck.

It's a new insight for me, but it could have credibility, and it's an
idea worth keeping an eye on through the reading. Maybe it will creep in
at the interstices of the narrative throughout the text. Apologies for
dismissing it with such haste. 

The "treatment/non-treatment/crypto-treatment" or "absence" of the
Holocaust in _GR_ is perhaps some type of spur to the reader's
conscience, then. I prefer this idea to the possibility of Pynchon's
ambivalence to it, I must admit, which is one problem raised by such a
reading: a 'moral' problem, perhaps. For Pynchon to imagistically
intertwine the fate of Holocaust victims with that of Blitz evacuees in
such a way at the outset, or even with the reader's fate, as common
instances of human mortality, suggests that no distinctions are being
made. 'Death' is the outcome, however it comes, wherever it comes, in
whatever way it comes. Does this, too, add up to something like a denial
of (the specific horrors of) the Holocaust?

Pynchon "feints, shuffles, and misdirects even as he makes his politics
plain to
readers who are interested in that dimension of his work." Perhaps it is
just that simple.

best

...
"jbor" quotes Ken McVay, the Holocaust history expert that we dragged into
this dispute awhile back: "I don't think that anything you have said in this
missive would cause me to charactorize you as a denier."

Fact remains, I didn't call "jbor" ("rjackson" was the pseudonym at the
time, actually)  a Holocaust denier. 

McVay did, in fact, correct "jbor's" ludicrous assertion that the Dora
slaves in GR weren't Holocaust victims.