V.V. (12) Pynchon's letter to Thomas F. Hirsch

[jbor]

Seeing as we're upon the chapter where Pynchon uses the Herero research 
material he describes in this private letter, republished with Pynchon's
permission in David Seed's _The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon_
(London, MacMillan, 1988, pp 240-243), I thought I'd quote some of the more
salient passages:

    I'm afraid I went at the whole thing in a kind of haphazard fashion --
    was actually looking for a report on Malta and happened to find the
    Bondelzwarts one right next to it in the same, what NY library calls
    "pamphlet volume". But since then I've been hooked on it.

    [ ... ]

    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.

    [ ... ]

    The problem, as I guess you appreciate, with getting the African side of
    it, is that the Hereros were preliterate and everything available from
    them is a) anecdotal and b) filtered through the literate (McLuhan),
    Western, Christian biases of European reporters, usually missionaries.
    But I feel the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same
    number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is
    now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority
    in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing
    analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and
    integration. It is impossible, I think, to consider the pre-colonial
    Herero apart from his [sic] religion, which in turn governed his social
    organization. Their villages were circular, set up like the ancient
    yang/yin diagram, women living on the north half, men on the south, the
    whole thing oriented like a mandala on the points of the compass, each
    direction having a special meaning. Their god embodied male and female,
    creation and destruction, life and death. The missionaries cam in and
    set up dichotomies, busted up that unity, created categories, and
    historically nobody has been better at this than the Germans. Both in
    mathematics and in politics, as witness the whole Kleinstaaterei hangup
    dating from before the peace of Westphalia. Contrast the shape of a
    Herero village with the Cartesian grid system layout in Windhök or
    Swakopmund, read Lewis Mumford or talk to someone in the city planning
    department here. The physical shape of a city is an infallible [cl]ue
    to where the people who built it are at.

    [ ... ]



More later when I have time to spare. Seed's notes provide primary sources
which Pynchon used, other sources on the Herero Rebellions which were
available at the time, and conjecture about what else Pynchon might have
read. His study contains a nifty diagram of a Herero village as well, on p.
188.

Q. When Pynchon refers to "the literate (McLuhan), Western, Christian biases
of European reporters, usually missionaries", is he is making a pejorative
comment?

best