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

[Dave Monroe]

No problem with any of this on this end.  Still a bit
uneasy about the problmatics of going from the
extinction of the dodos to attempts at that of the
Herero, the Jews, the possibility of that of
humankind, but ... but that is indeed the
concatenation Pynchon sets up.  And one left
open-ended, so taht one might continue to think, the
Cambodians, the Kurds, the Kosovars, the Tutsi ...
read one, think 'em all ...

--- Otto <o.sell at telda.net> wrote:
> 
> "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
> 
> 
> 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


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