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

[Dave Monroe]

To clarify, to say that "the thing goes much deeper"
is not to exclude "what later happened to the Jews in
the 30's and 40's."  Again, that concatenation there. 
Dodos, American Indians, Herero, Jews, Vietnamese
Buddhists (though there's an interesting take on the
Vietnam War, Christians vs. Buddhists).  There are
distinctions to be made, but Pynchon's allusive chain
here is of one piece, without any weak links ...

To say that Christianity is the dividing line, esp. in
the novel to come, is to ignore the fact of various
Christianities (e.g., "German Christianity," i.e., old
skool Protestantism) as well as the economic and
technological interests which constantly seep and
erupt through the cracks in Gravity's Rainbow's WWII,
not to mention the anti-Christianity of Nazism ...  

--- 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
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 


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