Pynchon & rap

[Dave Monroe]

>From Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dead Man (London: British
Film Institute, 2000), Ch. 1, "Jim Jarmusch as
American Independent, Dead Man as Deal-Breaker," pp.
7-26 ...

"A little bit of history may be useful at this point:

Without going into detail, and merely to give a
general idea (even if we don't feel entirely justified
in rounding off figures when it is a question of human
lives), it will be recalled that in 1500 the world
population is approximately 400 million, of whom 80
million inhabit the Americas.  By the middle of the
sixteenth century, out of these 80 million, there
remian ten.[...]  If the word genocide has ever been
applied to a situation with some accuracy, this is
here the case.[...]  None of the great massacres of
the twentieth century can be compared with this
hecatomb." (pp. 20-1)

[here citing Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America:
The Question of the Other (Trans. Richard Howard.  NY:
Harper & Row, 1984), p. 133.  My ellipses.  Todorov's
writings on the Holocaust, by the way, might have
their own problematics, see, e.g. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/langer-holocaust.html

... but he is hardly one to underplay the gravity of
the Shoah (and I believe Doug mentioned taking a class
with him, even).  But I hope not to see any haggling
over his numbers concerning the Native Americans here.
 Speculative demographics at best, certainly, but I am
assuming he made use of reputable anthropolgical
sources.  At any rate, I'm sure we all can agree,
many, many Native Americans died in the wake of the
European "discovery" of the New World, and that most
died from imported diseases--"microbe shock," Todorov
calls it, in full realization of this--hardly negates
this fact, nor mitigates that many still died as the
result of direct, deliberative European aggression. 
Rosenbaum clarifies this as well, but I only cite
Todorov in order to clarify the passage I want to cite
from Rosenbaum, so, to continue ...]

"If America--the continent of America. in Todorov's
terms--is haunted by the genocide that presided over
its conquest, one thing that makes Dead Man a haunted
film is a sense of this enormity crawling around its
edges, informing every moment and every gesture,
without ever quite taking center stage." (Rosenbaum,
p. 21)  

... and I think the point that Doug and I and others
have been making is that Gravity's Rainbow is
similarly a haunted novel in the sense of the enormity
of the Holocaust "crawling around" not only at its
"edges," though, as Otto and Doug and others have
pointed out as well perhaps even at its leading edge,
in that polyvalent opening episode, in that ostensible
"dream" in which an evacuation from an air raid
seemingly shades into an evacuation to a concentration
camp, but throughout the novel, and not always (as
with that "Polish undertaker") all-too-cryptically. 
Something that can and perhaps even should be taken
into account ...

By the way, I have never taken so much abuse from
certain less-than-festive parties here than when I
posted my admiration of that reading.  Hostilities
here are hardly solely Doug's fault, and note that he
did not even bring up the subjuect most recently.  And
I wpuld note that, for the record, it's a far greater
leap from "tenors" singing "Negroe Musick" in "South
Philadelphia" to rap (vs., say, Philly soul) than it
is from the V-2 and Dora to the Holocaust, so ... but
I tire of this as well, so ...

But, really, WWII, Germany, Peenemunde, Dora, come ON
...

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> Hollander argues that the total absence from the
> text has greater meaning than presence. He argues
> that P is something of cryptic writer. The less P
> alludes to or mentions something the greater its
> significance.

... but "total absence" isn't quite right here. 
Hollander always, quite scrupulously, starts from
something in the text, on the page, and, while he
often takes as his staring points seemingly extraneous
details (names of minor characters, for example),
taking them off on seemingly extraneous tangents, he
reinforces his readings, justifies these starting
points, makes relevant these tangents, with an
accumulation of textual examples and contextual
likelihoods.  Cf. information theory, cryptography,
what have you, the idea that it is often the seemingly
extraneous, the idiosyncratic, that is potentially the
most significant.  Pynchon himself raises several such
possibilities for reading, inetrpretation, whatever. 
"Screen doors."   Now, what about that novel, V. ...



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