Pynchon & rap

[Terrance]

Monte Davis wrote:
> 
> >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.

True. 

> 
> 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.

Yes, however, there is no doubt that the demise of the Jews,
not only the Holocaust,  is very, very, conspicuous in
Thomas Pynchon's fiction. It is clearly very important to
V., CL49, and GR. That being said, it seems to me, that,as
you said, so wonderfully, "inhuman suffering" is exactly
what P is writing about. What is its cause? Six Million Jews
or the Herero or the Native Americans, so on? 

"The wedge turns out to be a rocket." And there is something
religious about its transmutation, its transmogrification in
secular history. 

 


> 
> 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>