the relative 'centrality' of the Holocaust in GR

[jbor]

on 7/15/01 3:36 AM, Jeffrey Williams at jwilliams9 at nyc.rr.com wrote:

> 
> Regarding the Holocaust and it's relative 'centrality' to GR, the discussion
> seems to be overlooking the entire Herero narrative. I'm in the midst of a
> re-read of GR, and strangely enough, I just meandered through the passage
> about the Herero's engaging in self-extinction beyond the zero. If I recall
> some of my critical readings correctly, TP is drawing a parallel to the
> Jewish holocaust and attempting to represent the ineffable sense of
> surrender that permeated the persecuted groups. Six million jews (give or
> take a few) were shipped off and killed with the tacit acceptance of the
> indigenous population and no notable resistance from the persecuted group.
> The plight of the Herero's is similar, only in the wonderful world of
> narrative, the unconscious death wish gets a voice of its own.

Just a couple of points. The Herero narrative in _GR_, and the depiction of
the 1922 resistance and subsequent massacre in _V._, have been discussed in
quite a bit of detail here. I think that -- historically-speaking -- there
are very significant differences: the Jewish people in Europe did not have a
"death wish", unconscious or otherwise, whereas one of the sources Pynchon
read while researching _GR_ did suggest just that regarding the Herero; the
situation in Sudwest was a colonial one, where the Europeans had come from
outside and imposed a regime and then tried to impose a culture on the
indigenous population, unlike Nazi Germany; the campaign of genocide against
the Herero was a response to revolts by the tribes; and so forth.

The 1969 letter from Pynchon to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in the back of
David Seed's book, illustrates that, in the late 1960s at least, Pynchon was
interested in the historical experience of the Herero in its own right,
rather than as a parallel to or metaphor of the Holocaust, and I think that
that was what he was doing with the Herero narrative in _GR_:

    When I wrote _V._ I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of
    dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and
    40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into
    it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially,
    and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing
    goes much deeper.

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=534&sort=date

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=556&sort=date

> Furthermore, isn't it possible that TP is using the Herero holocaust as a
> parallel to the Jewish Holocaust to raise awareness of the Herero plight?

Perhaps this happens in _V._ a little. The detailed depiction of the Herero
point of view in _GR_ -- Enzian's perspective on historical and personal
events -- is exactly what we don't get vis a vis the Holocaust in that novel
(imo).

best