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

[Otto]

"Appendix: Pynchon's Reading for Gravity's Rainbow," a
Letter from Thomas Pynchon to on Thomas F. Hirsch, 8
January 1969, "reproduced with Pynchon's permission,"
in David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas
Pynchon (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988), pp. 240-3 ...

"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 30's and 40's.  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." (240)

Given the fact that there's a historical continuity from those of 1904 to
the ones of 1933 I still think his original idea is quite appealing to me.

(...)
"But I feel personally that the number done on the
Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on
the American Indian head by our own colonists and
what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam
by the Christian minority in Saigon and their
advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis
and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and
integration." (241)

snip

Dave wrote:
> he's already set up
> the allusive chain, Herero genocide to Holocaust,
> he need not repeat it, and therefore need not write,
> "the same number done on the Jewish, Slavic, Gypsy,
> homosexual, Jehovah's Witness and so forth head by
> the Nazis" (or, perhaps, even, "the same number done
> on any number of ethnic minority heads by Stalin").

The "thing" really "goes much deeper", I would like to expand this "allusive
chain" to the dodoes (pre-1904) and all mankind (the end of GR).
For if we can extinguish some kind of animal, and a "small" (Herero) or
bigger (Jews, Poles, Russians) human population the next logical step is the
development of techniques to annililate all mankind. That this development
has been executed by techniques that were taken over from the same who had
built Auschwitz makes it even more fitting.

Otto