Pynchon & rap

[jbor]

on 7/12/01 9:55 AM, Doug Millison at DMillison at ftmg.net wrote:

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

You'll be hard pressed to find any such assertion in the archives, of
course, because it was never made. One aspect of the dispute, as I recall
it, centred around the difference between Dora, as a *labour* camp, and
extermination camps such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz. The latter camps,
though mentioned, are not depicted, and in fact the text of _GR_ makes a
rather important distinction between the Mittelwerke/Dora camp and Auschwitz
and Buchenwald at 666.39.

_GR_ does not depict what was happening at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and as
far as I can recollect there are only one or two glancing
references/allusions to these or other extermination camps in the novel. The
novel does not depict or focus on the mass executions or the program of
ethnic cleansing enacted by the Nazis, nor does it detail the experiences of
Holocaust victims. It's an incredibly long, vast, ostensibly "historical"
novel, which is set, for by far the greater part of the narrative, in
Germany in 1945, and the text introduces an enormous cast of characters and
entertains a vast array of their perspectives. Thus, I think it is a fair
statement, as many people are saying and have said -- including, apparently,
Chuck Hollander -- that these things are largely or significantly absent
from the text.

Such observations are neither "Holocaust-denier rhetoric" nor "Holocaust
denial". They should be open for discussion without such slanders being
voiced.

best