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

[jbor]

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>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
>
> The point
> is, and to, apparenbtly, Pynchon, the events are
> comparble, and the Herero genocide not only does evoke
> the Holocaust, but is, apparently, "intended" to do so
> ...

Really? That paragraph from the letter doesn't strike me as admitting of
such certainty or interpretive closure at all:

    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.

Let's see: "When I wrote _V._ ..." (as opposed, perhaps, to now?); "a sort
of dress rehearsal"; "hardly profound"; "superficially"; "I feel now the
thing goes much deeper." I don't know that "a sort of dress rehearsal" does
quite equate with "events" being "comparable" (or in what ways such a
comparison might be said to be operating ...); and I'm not sure where (or
why) you're suddenly invoking what Pynchon "intended" from what he writes in
this letter to support your interpretations of his novels. ... In fact, the
paragraph would seem to me to suggest precisely the opposite of what you
were contending, i.e. that, by 1969, and certainly in respect to _GR_,
Pynchon had come to "feel the thing goes much deeper" than any snug
comparability between the Herero genocide and the Shoah.

> Actuially, all the dialogue there is being trnaslated,
> and, trust me, having done my time in teh history of
> technology, "orrery" is generally the preferred term
> for such machinery, esp. in light of the modern
> planetarium.

Of course, the term appears in the narration rather than the dialogue. And I
certainly wasn't making up that definition of a planetarium as "a model of
the solar system, sometimes mechanized to show the relative motions of the
planets" [Collins]. I think, therefore, that it is by far a more apt term
than "orrery" in the cultural/temporal context.

As well as this, I think the symbolic significance of the mechanical cosmos
introduced here by Pynchon should be factored into any discussion of the
inanimate, religion, science et. al. as represented in this novel.

best