Pynchon & rap

[Monte Davis]

>To claim that it is obvious that the Holocaust is a central theme in GR is
ridiculous and
> insulting to the novel ("Have you read Thomas Pynchon's novel GR?" "Yes,
it deals
> with the Holocaust." "What does it say?" "The Holocaust was bad."). No,
the
> difficulty is how to account for this relative absence.

One possibility -- which, alas, would not support much flame-baiting -- is
simply that in the ~30 years since GR's composition, the Holocaust has come
to assume a much larger place in our collective memory of WWII.

One could ponder whether it "should have" had that prominence from 1945 on,
and was "suppressed" in the first postwar generations -- or whether its
increasing prominence is part of a broader return of the repressed that has
given us women's studies, Afrocentric studies, and other post-imperial
post-colonial post-m*d*rn non-dead-white-male perspectives. Either way, it's
been an undeniable development in bibliographic volume, survivors' memoirs,
claims for reparations against German/Swiss/Austrian corporations, Holocaust
studies programs, museums and monuments, etc. etc. etc.

My null hypothesis is that the "relative absence" may be nothing more than
the result of applying 2001's perspective to a 1973 novel. GR has taught me
a great deal about inhumane Systems, of which the Holocaust was one
consequence. But so were Stalin's purges of the 1930s, which are only
glancingly present in the Tchitcherine/Kirghiz story line. So were the
civilian deaths by bombing in Japan, which are only glancingly present via
Ensign Morituri and a scrap of newspaper.

The Holocaust is also "relatively absent" from _Catch-22_, "Saving Private
Ryan," _The Thin Red Line_, and "Enemy at the Gates". Is it significant that
Pynchon gives such short shrift to American air bases in Italy, to the
Normandy campaign, to the Pacific war, or to Stalingrad? (And while we're at
it, why is he so provocatively silent about the internment of
Japanese-Americans?)

Back when Hank James sat around the bong with Tom and Dick Farina and Jules
Siegel, he used to mutter "Hey, man, we must grant the artist his subject,
his idea, his donnee: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it."

-Monte Davis <a P-list reader since 1995 -- and a lurker since 1998 largely
because of interminable, unprofitable flamefests like l'affaire
Millison-jbor>