Tabbi: Pynchon's Psychology of Engineers

[Dave Monroe]

Sniff sniff sniff ... you know, I don't instigate
these little border skirmishes, esp. as I'm not even
quite sure what we're skirmishing about, not quite
what I've come to term here as a "violent agreement,"
but ...

But did I somehow imply Irving had fallen out of
repute from the start?  On teh other hand, but of
course it's all revisionism.  In a braod sense, all
history, all historiography, is.  Though perhaps
revisionism isn't quite the right word in Irving's
case.  Redemption?  Not uncommon in Hitlerology (cf.,
say, John Toland).  At any rate, on Irving,  not to
mention most everyone else, see, e.g., ...

Lukacs, John.  The Hitler of History.
   New York: Knopf, 1997.

http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375701139

Lukacs has his own idiosyncracies, of course, but he
doesn't disguise his Catholic religiosity, at any
rate.   

Also ...

Lipstadt, Deborah E.  History on Trial:
   My Day in Court with David Irving.
   
http://www.harpercollins.com/global_scripts/product_catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0060593768

Have to pick that one up.  But, again, Irving was by
and large what was available at the time.  Between
Irving and Von Braun and Dornberger, there's that more
technical work, timetables and so forth ...

Tabbi should have mentioned Irving's subsequent
history, no matter how familiar one might assume his
readers'll be with Irving's case.  Maybe Pynchon's
fallen under the same spell as many Hitlerologists. 
But he is writing about how we perpetuate fascisms
despite ourselves, no?  "This is America, you live in
it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl" (Lot 49, Ch. 6,
p. 150) ...

Okay, I gotta go hunt me some Volkswagens, so ...

--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
> 
> The point about the Irving book which Tabbi notes as
> a definitive Pynchon source is that *all* of
> Irving's work, even before the absolute uproar
> created by his Hitler book in the late '70s, leans
> towards revisionism. There's no need for
> "denazification" or whatever the attempted
> obfuscation is about, because Irving was regarded
> by pretty much everybody as a reputable historian in
> the '60s and early-to-mid '70s. But still the point
> remains that in this book, _The Mare's Nest_, 
> Irving was working to debunk or ameliorate Nazi
> "crimes". And, as an aside, you'd think that Tabbi,
> writing in 1992, might have been a little more
> upfront about what, by that date, David Irving
> clearly was and is.

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