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>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
>
> As I noted when I posted my own Pynchon Digest
> Condensed Version, my own stencilization, my own
> rathouse of that letter to Thomas F. Hirsch here some
> time back, there are (at least) a few problematic
> notions there.
Problematic in the sense that you don't agree with what Pynchon writes, or
argues, that is. Which is fine and all, but somewhat beside the point.
Your particular bowdlerised or selective edition of the Hirsch letter, if I
remember correctly, was specially crafted to imply Pynchon as condemning
*Germany* as the sole cause of all that was heinous about the 20th Century,
and thus to support a particular point of view about Blicero et. al. in
_GR_. What's interesting is that you actually had to leave out some very
important connecting sentences between Pynchon's statements in that letter.
I won't bother going back and finding what you wrote, but I'd be pretty sure
you "elided" the following crucial points Pynchon makes for Hirsch's
benefit:
I feel now the thing
goes much deeper.
Their god embodied male and female,
creation and destruction, life and death. The missionaries came in
and set up dichotomies, busted up that unity
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.
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
What's very revealing is the way you've had to snip that third sentence in
mid-stream yet again. I think that, both in this letter and in his fiction,
this consciousness of "Christianity being a glaring exception" to the
unified cosmologies of "religions all around the world" shows up over and
over. It's where someone like Eddins's attempted construction of a
supposedly evil "gnosticism" within Pynchon's texts in order to salvage them
and show them as upholding Christian values falls down totally.
Pynchon is quite emphatic in this letter that it was the *Christian*
missionaries who came in and dismantled the Herero culture (cf " ... the
Rhenish Missionary society who corrupted this boy ... " in _GR_ at 100.7).
I'm not sure that the literate/preliterate false binary you and Terrance
have been using as a distraction has anything to do with the purport of
Pynchon's comment. I think his point is that the Herero themselves had not
written anything down in terms of their own history, culture, motivations,
and thus all he had to go on was the *biased* reportage of literate Western
observers. In his fiction, both in _V._ but more so in _GR_ I think, his
concern was to get inside "the mind" of the Herero (cf. that "mind of Watts"
in the other contemporary polemic of his): "getting the African side of it",
representing their pov, giving them a voice. What was also interesting and
serendipitous is that it's apparently a commonplace for him to speak of
particular *biases* which colour and might distort a person's
interpretation. Quelle surprise.
> Pynchon also, as I've noted before, makes some
> noteworthy generalizations about the Germans as well
Although you conveniently overlook his reference to the Kleinstaaterei
(system of little states) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648). You're
confusing or conflating -- perhaps deliberately! -- the notion of a
coherent German political state (didn't begin to happen till the second half
of the c. 19th) with Pynchon's references to German *language* and German
*Christianity*. The latter is simply a shorthand for Lutheranism ...
Calvinism ... Protestantism ... and, at a pinch, those pesky Puritans. Isn't
it?
best
PS. No, David Morris is real, and so am I. We all know who "big one" is now
(God what a hypocrite!), and Terrance has managed to show his hand with
three more of his silly personas in the last 24 hours. Do try and keep up.