history & fiction & Pynchon & V.

[jbor]

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>From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>


> I'm still not sure what it is about DeLong's article that is so
> upsetting to my P-list colleagues.

Actually, it was Doug's bowdlerisation of DeLong's review which several
people have commented on. There's nothing much wrong with DeLong's review
except that he mischaracterises Taylor's book on the WWII, expecting it to
be some sort of psychological study of Hitler and evil instead of the fine
and extremely thoroughly-documented analysis of European foreign policy that
it is. He also seems to be an advocate of the Gradgrind school of
historiographical understanding:

    ... When Ranke in the 1830s, in legitimate protest against moralizing
    history, remarked that the task of the historian was "simply to show
    how it really was (wie es eigentlich gewesen)" this not very profound
    aphorism had astonishing success. Three generations of German, British,
    and even French historians marched into battle intoning the magic words,
    "Wie es eiglentich gewesen" like an incantation -- designed, like most
    incantations, to save them from the tiresome obligation to think for
    themselves. (E.H. Carr, _What is History?_, Random House, 1961, p.5)

The review of the two books about the Irving trial which Jeremy originally
posted is actually a more even-handed one, and I find it particularly
interesting that the defence chose not to debase Holocaust survivors'
testimonies by dragging them into Irving's spurious libel case and the
courtroom/media circus (p. 5):

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/23/irving/index.html

> DeLong asks a serious question
> about historians that would seem to echo Pynchon's concerns about
> history and fiction, especially as we see this directly addressed
> in M&D.  Pynchon obviously puts a lot of history into his fictions,
> and he plays some interesting games with his historical tid-bits in
> his fictional settings.  Why?  What can we learn from the way Pynchon
> uses his fictional character Esther -- who shares a name with a
> Holocaust-preventer in the eponymously-named Old Testament book -- to
> comment on the Holocaust in V., for example?

As mentioned previously, the conversation between Slab and Esther in the
current section of _V._ foregrounds Esther's hypocrisy in using the
Holocaust as metaphor and rhetorical weapon in order to foreclose an
entirely unrelated and comparatively trivial argument. The tactic is
described by the detached narrator as "phony" (pace Holden Caulfield):

       So they talked metaphysics while the afternoon waned. Neither
    felt he was defending or trying to prove anything important. It
    was like playing one-up at a party, or Botticelli. [...]
       "How can you say there's a soul there? How can you tell when the
    soul enters the flesh? Or whether you even have a soul?"
       "It's murdering your own child is what it is."
       "Child, schmild. A complex protein molecule, is all."
       "I guess on the rare occasions you bathe you wouldn't mind using
    Nazi soap made from one of those six million Jews."
       "All right--" he was mad-- "show me the difference."
       After that it ceased being logical and phony and became emotional
    and phony. (354.1-14)

best