Herero

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >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


WOW! We  are making progress here.