peated point of contention here ...

[jbor]

on 7/14/01 8:41 PM, lorentzen-nicklaus at lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de
wrote:

> yes yes, that's how it always goes ... the moment we get a little deeper into
> the issue, some people immediately scream "hairsplitting!" ... raul hilberg,
> perhaps the guy who knows most about the holocaust, he does  n o t  mention
> dora mittelbau or peenemünde in his book "perpetrators, victims, bystanders.
> the jewish catastrophy 1933-1945", nyc 1992: harpercollins (the german edition
> was published the same year at the s. fischer verlag in ffm). dora was a labor
> camp, not - like auschwitz or treblinka - a death camp. to say so does not at
> all imply any kind of holocaust denial. & extinction through work is, in human
> history, the rule, not the exception. these days, just read about it in the
> paper yesterday, there are about 40 000 000 slaves in the world.
> sweatshop-slaves, sex-slaves, household-slaves ... your argument that the
> mentioning of jewish dora prisoners makes the distinction between labor camps
> and death camps irrelavant, i do not understand at all.

Quite right in my opinion, Kai. When someone dares to make such a
distinction, and it's a distinction which is made on page 666 of the novel
itself, there's always this interminable hue and cry about it (only from one
or two people, of course, but both are loud and rude).

I think that the conspicuous absence of the Holocaust from _GR_ serves at
least a couple of purposes. (The phrase reminds me a little of the "Excluded
Middle" which Oedipa faces up to in _Lot 49_, and which we will hopefully be
able to discuss next month.) For one, by situating his narrative in the
moment and in the minds of the various characters, the novel very clearly
represents the fact that the war itself was not being fought over the
Holocaust at all, which is something which Ken McVay strongly confirmed to
me in his posts:

> I certainly agree with that. Even when Allied leaders _knew_ what was
> going on, they shied away from public statements/actions because they
> were afraid of being accused of fighting only for the Jews.
> 
> This is not a mystery, it is mainstream historical reality.

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=143&sort=date

And, I think the fact that the Holocaust is conspicuously absent from the
text is something which immediately strikes the reader. It brings the
Holocaust (and questions about why Pynchon chose *not* to depict it) to the
fore, where depicting it might actually have served to engender the reader's
complacency about it. Also, I think that there are other, equally valid,
reasons why Pynchon would not want to appropriate the horror and suffering
of so many for the purpose of a (fictional, literary) text, as many other
people here have suggested. After all, how could Pynchon have known what it
was like? How could he claim to "own" that experience? (Perhaps through
Pirate's "Talent" ... ?)

And I think it's possible that the JFK assassination might have been
intended to -- *might have been* -- just the same sort of "Excluded Middle"
or conspicuous absence in _Lot 49_ that the Holocaust is in _GR_. But like
cjhurtt the novel itself hasn't been particularly successful in conveying
that to me as a reader. (In fact, although I think that Pynchon is by far
the superior writer, DeLillo's _Libra_ is imo the ultimate literary
representation of the JFK assassination, and will perhaps be remembered as
DeLillo's most important work.) If _Lot49_ were intended by Pynchon to be an
"encrypted meditation" on JFK's assassination, then two possibilities
emerge: first, that myself and many others are simply not very good readers
(bereft of that so-called "magic eye") and so we need someone like Charles
Hollander to come along and tell us what the novel is "really" about; or
secondly, that the novel itself has not been successful in its aim. Neither
of these two alternatives seems attractive to me, but I'm wondering whether
the "Excluded Middle" position is the possibility that _Lot 49_ *isn't* an
"encrypted meditation" on the assassination of JFK?

Whether or not the absent/present Charles Hollander is willing to discuss
his admirable body of work here remains to be seen.

best