Pynchon as propaganda

[jbor]

    There were men called "army chaplains." They preached
    inside some of these buildings. There were actually
    soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened.
    Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and
    some died before they got back inside a
    garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the
    army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to
    die about God, death, nothingness, redemption,
    salvation. It really happened. It was quite common.
                                        (GR 693)
 
>> I interpret this passage as a poignant representation of the futility of war
>> (and, more overtly, of the futility of religious faith), and of the enormous
>> loss of lives during WWII specifically, rather than a criticism of either
>> the doomed soldiers for holding to their faith before going into battle or
>> even of the actions of the "army chaplains" doing the preaching.

on 3/4/03 1:40 PM, Mutualcode at aol.com at Mutualcode at aol.com wrote:
 
> Probably not. When GR came out in '73, Saigon had yet to fall, and while
> GR was ostensibly about WWII, it couldn't help but be read through the lens
> of Viet Nam. 

Seems highly improbable. The past tense, particularly in the last two
sentences where the narrator directly and self-consciously addresses the
reader to endorse the historical veracity of the information, is pretty
emphatic.

That rather basic grammatical fact aside, it's not 1973 now, and it almost
certainly wasn't 1973 as Pynchon was writing the passage either, so your
argument against my interpretation is both irrelevant and illogical to begin
with. There's no doubting that some people back in 1973 and shortly
thereafter attempted to wield GR as an anti-Vietnam War screed (some still
are using it for such mean propagandistic purposes, more's the pity!), but
to do so actually distorts the text and belittles its true achievement.

The section in which the cited passage occurs culminates with Slothrop
finding the scrap of newspaper in the gutter and the text leaving it to the
reader to decode the headline announcing that the U.S. had dropped the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Back on August 6, 1945. Enola Gay. "Little Boy".
Identifying this act as part of "the great moral crusade of the 20th
century" is quite contemptible in my opinion, while trying to claim that GR
depicts WW II as such is utter bunkum.

best


> My Lai had been publicized by Seymour Hersh, Fitzgerald had
> published "Fire in the Lake..." and Nixon's fall lay in the future. I think
> the
> tone of the passage very much reflects on what, by that time, had come to
> seem as an immoral war, and that the narrative voice is sounding an authentic
> sense of amazement at how far America had fallen into depravity by the
> time of the Vietnamese fiasco and the publication of GR:
> 
> Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked
> to the men who were going to die about God, death,
> nothingness, redemption, salvation. It really happened.
> It was quite common...(GR, 693)
> 
> The moral argument for the war in Vietnam had been totally discredited
> by the time of GR's publication, while WW II was, and always will remain,
> the great moral crusade of the 20th century, inspite of our recognition-
> with Pynchon's help- of it's darker economic underside.