peated point of contention here ...

[Dave Monroe]

First off, keep in mind, Doug and I (and others) may
very well be arguing somewhat-to-rather different
things here, but we are in agreement that the
Holocaust is, indeed, a significant context for the
novel.  I'll leave it up to him to clarify those
differences, however, in the meantime ....

Among the several points I've argued here have been
the following.   Gravity's Rainbow is set largely ca.
WWII Europe, largely in Nazi Germany, even, and in no
small way touches on the V-2 project,  with episodes
in the V-2 complex at Peenemunde and its attendant
concentration camp, Dora (which, again, did indeed
make use of Jewish labor dsetined ultimately for
extermination even before the setting of GR, along
with technically proficient Polish and Russian
slaves).  Even given "Hogan's Heroes," it seems
reasonable to assume that the Holocaust will be
invoked somehow for  just about anybody involved ...

Events like the Holocaust and Hiroshima are indeed, if
not mentioned outright, undeniably alluded to (a
concentration camp, concentration camp prisoners, a
partial newspaper headline + photograph).  It is
undoubtedly reasonable to assume--as it ISN'T with
much else of no small significance in the novel
(Tarot, Kaballah, Rilke, chemistry, thermodynamics,
ballistics, calculus, et al.)--that most anyone
reading the novel would certainly recognize them as
such.  Which, by the way, is why it's not necessary to
elaborate all too much on them, while other allusions
are more fleshed out to some extent.  But it is also
the enormity of these events which makes it
unnecessary for Pynchon to beat readers over the head
with them ...

There also is a certain responsibility involved in
perhaps not depicting outright, not appropriating, the
horrors of the camps in what is so often an outright
farcical novel.  Which is not to say that much that is
horrific does not occur within, but ... but this is a
line perhaps walked as well recently by Roberto
Benigni in Life is Beautiful, or, even more recently,
in the Czech film, Divided we Fall (and I've seen at
least one other ostensible Holocaust "comedy," if one
can call them that, of late).  To not in some way deal
with teh subject, given the setting of the novel,
would entail certain problematics as well.  Again, see
"Hogan's Heroes" here (which starred a Jewish refugee
from Hitler's Germany as well as a Jeiwsh member of
teh Resistance ... Catch-22 I haven't read in some
time, but I simply don't reacll being trouble by it
vis a vis the Holocaust).  The absolute absence of any
sort of consideration of, for the Holocaust here, esp.
by an author as knowledgeable and astute as Pynchon,
would raise questions ...  

We're familiar with them, we know they're horrific,
and GR seems to no samll extent concerned with their
genealogy, their archaeology, their trajectory.  From
the extermination of the dodo to the Rocket at its
"fianl delta-t" over the Orpheus theater--to global
thermonuclear holocaust, a genocide, "the world's
suicide," at least an order more horrific than any
such slaughter preceeding it--the novel repeatedly
evokes similar events.  This both reinforces and
multiplies what may or may not be the relatively
"weak" signals of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, et al., as
transmitted above.  

What I--again, without wanting to speak for Doug
here--take exception to is not only the extraordinary
overrecation here to, the relentless persecution,
even, of any mention of what is indeed a significant
context for the novel (as the Holocaust is for V. as
well, and it does not go univoked in The Crying of Lot
49, either ... Vineland, I don't recall, but one might
even make a case for Mason & Dixon, given that
genealogy, that trajectory, Pynchon rather more than
hints at in GR).  I no doubt could go on here, and no
doubt much that I perhaps should have said will come
to me soon enough, but I tire of this as well.  I
persist in addressing the issue as it arises (why,
again?), however, as I don't think a war of ideas
whould be one of attrition, much less of exhaustion. 
Then again, I don't think there should be hostility at
all involved in the first place, but ...



--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> The point remains. The novel barely refers to and
> does not depict what was going on in the
> extermination camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It
> does not depict the Nazi program of genocide which
> was specifically directed at the Jews and which was
> responsible for the slaughter of over 6,000,000
> Jewish  people. When I stated that the novel does
not
> describe "the Holocaust", and that the Holocaust is
> "absent" from the novel, this was the -- pretty
> obvious -- meaning of that observation. This fact is
> regardless of whether one decides to expand the
> definition of the phrase "the Holocaust" to include
> the murders and deaths of non-Jewish prisoners and
> POWs in the labour camps and elsewhere or not. (Most
> dictionaries don't, by the way. 

By the way, pretty much any dictionary, encyclopedia,
history, account, whatever in my experinece (which
isn't any more limited than anybody else's here, I
imagine) does actualy take into account the deaths of
non-Jewish prisoners in the camps (concentration,
labor, whatever, though perhaps not the POWs not
enslaved for whatever reason.  Keep in mind, the
Slavic peoples were not long after the Jews on the
Nazi death list ...), but ...

> BUT THAT WAS NOT THE ISSUE.)

Okay, but you seem to keep insisting on a distinction
qhich, questionable at best before the intriduction of
Jewsih prisoners at Dora, pretty much breaks down
thereafter.  But my contention is that we need not
even get so far in our hairsplitting here ... 

> The brief sequence with Pokler watching the "foreign
> prisoners" in Dora does not depict what was going on
> in the extermination camps at Buchenwald and
> Auschwitz. It does not depict the Nazi program of
> genocide which was specifically directed at the Jews


And the Slavs, and the Roma (the Gypsies), and ...

> and which was responsible for the slaughter of over
> 6,000,000 Jewish people.

Among, again, many, many others ...
 
> The mention of S-shaped spokes in the opening
> sequence of the novel does not depict what was going
> on in the extermination camps at Buchenwald and
> Auschwitz. It  does not depict the Nazi program of
> genocide which was specifically directed at the Jews
> and which was responsible for the slaughter of over
> 6,000,000 Jewish people.

But its' eminently readable as an allusion thereto ...

> The reference to a Polish undertaker in a rowboat
> does not depict what was going on in the
> extermination camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It
> does not depict the Nazi program of genocide which
as
> specifically directed at the Jews and which was
> responsible for the slaughter of over 6,000,000
> Jewish people.

And, again ...
 
> The *absence* of any such depictions in the novel is
> significant.

Okay, now, I think, we're in tentative agreement.  At
least until you answer the question, "how so"?  An
answer I don't recall having ever recieved ...

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