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

[jbor]

Excerpts from the second half that 1969 letter where Pynchon explicitly 
refers to the "literate, Western, Christian biases" of European commentators
on the Herero people and culture:

        [ ... ]        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. It has to do with our deepest
    responses to change,death, being human.I doubt it was only firepower and
    aggressiveness that beat the Hereros during that "complex and terrible"
    time. I think the Hereros had as much to do with it as von Trotha did.
    ... This is why I find Steenkamp's pamphlet so fascinating, though I
    don't know how valid his arguments are. He attempts ro explain the
    declining birth-rate among the Hereros with numbers like over-
    population and Vitamin E deficiency, and to discount the notion,
    apparently widely-held at the time, that the Hereros were deliberately
    trying to exterminate themselves. But I find that perfectly plausible,
    maybe not as a conscious conspiracy, but in terms of how a perhaps
    not completely Westernised people might respond. They had no concept of
    property in the European sense before the missionaries came, they felt
    themselves integrated into everything, like mystics in deep trances or
    people on acid; their cattle had souls, the same souls as their own and
    a possible part of a universal soul, but you better check that out. But
    they had no hangups sacrificing cattle, it was part of a universal
    scheme, and so it's doubtful if they'd have hangups sacrificing
    themselves either, given a unified concept of creation, which shows up
    in religions all around the world, Christianity being a glaring
    exception. And German Christianity being perhaps the most perfect
    expression of the whole Western/analytic/"linear"/alienated schtick.
    ... I don't like to use the word but I think what went on back in
    Südwest is archetypical of every clash between the west and non-west,
    clashes that are still going on ....

      Far from being a minor sideshow in African history, I think it could
    be vitally important to what's going on in the world these days.
                                        Yours truly
                                        Thomas Pynchon


Q. Do the negative references to "missionaries" and Christianity in this
personal, expository letter signify that it might be fruitful to seek a
critique of same in his fiction? Is there any evidence here to suggest that
Pynchon sympathises more with the tribal cosmogony of the Herero than with
the "whole Western/analytic/'linear'/alienated schtick" embraced by
Christianity, the Western philosophical tradition, and Enlightenment
scientists such as Liebniz and Gauss?

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