Herero

[jbor]

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>From: Eric Rosenbloom <ericr at sadlier.com>
>

> The Herero it seems are for Pynchon a model of what we all must come to
> terms with, the hateful legacy upon which our present-day lives are built.

Surely there is a distinction being made between "the west and non-west",
between Christianity "valuing analysis and differentiation" and the tribal
cosmology with its "unified concept of creation" where human, animal and
nature's "soul" are one. I think Pynchon's letter to Hirsch conclusively
illustrates that Pynchon wasn't simply endorsing such a glib platitude in
his research into and representation of the disintegration of Herero society
and culture in _GR_:

                    ... 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.

And so on. So that while in _V._ (and that notorious passage at 245.9 giving
the statistics of Herero deaths during 1904-7, and noting how it "is only 1
percent of six million, but still pretty good"), Pynchon had "superficially"
represented the Herero genocide as "a sort of dress rehearsal for what later
happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s", in _GR_, and after considerably
more research into the topic, he was interested in how the Herero might have
been "deliberately trying to exterminate themselves". All that stuff about
tribal suicide, the cult of the Empty Ones, and what Enzian himself is up to
with the 00001, indicates to me that the focus in _GR_ is more on the
"comparative religion" side of things, and that this indeed marks a
*development* in Pynchon's historical perspective between the two novels.
Don't forget the passage about Karl Marx, "that sly old racist", where the
colonists look on in dismay as their subject population of "dusky natives"
dwindles unaccountably *prior to* the 1904 rebellion. (_GR_ 317)

Cf also Frantz Fanon's comment below:

      A national culture under colonial domination is a contested
    culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It
    very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This idea
    of a clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of
    the occupying power which interprets attachment to traditions as
    faithlessness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to
    submit. This persistence in following forms of cultures which are
    already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of
    nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throwback to the
    laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no re-
    defining of the relationships. There is simply a concentration on a
    hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up,
    inert and empty. ('Reciprocal Bases of National Culture and the Fight
    for Freedom' in _The Wretched of the Earth_, which is prefaced by
    Sartre, Grove, NY, tr. 1966, first publ. 1961, p. 191)

best