GR, V2, slave labor

[jporter]

On Nov 1, 2005, at 12:59 AM, pynchonoid wrote:

>
> The simple suggestion I made back in '99, which
> apparently still gives some readers the willies, is
> that if you take the rocket to be central to the novel
> (as many readers do), the rocket brings with it (in
> history and in GR) the Holocaust-victim slave laborers
> who built the rocket: no Holocaust, no slave laborers;
> no slave laborers, no rocket; no rocket, no GR.

I am not of the "Rocket is central to the novel" school,
anymore than I think the Compass in Donne's
"A Valediction: forbidding mourning" is central-

	And though it in the centre sit,
   	 Yet when the other far doth roam,
	It leans, and hearkens after it,
  	 And grows erect, as that comes home.

to the meaning of the poem It's a metaphor, "a truth and a lie,"...
"though it in the centre sit." But the center of GR is
"a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
The rocket, like everyone and everything else in
the novel's thrall, is in orbit around that central
enigma. Is the Holocaust at the center? I don't think
so, but what might be, is the motivation for committing
the crime of the Holocaust, as well as, the motivation
for resisting, and all motivation for that matter.

  "They" are chasing Slothrop who's chasing The Rocket,
but the rocket is merely following the contours of a
gravitational field. GR simply lays out in detail the
characteristics of that field. What's at the center of
the field remains a mystery, but might have something
to do with the "it's all theatre" line, especially if you
consider it to be a reference to the "theatre of the mind".

I don't think Pynchon is interested so much in alluding
to the horrors of the Holocaust as he is in laying out
the psychic field permeating that time, including the
Holocaust. The effect is not to diminish the guilt of
those who committed genocide, but to enlarge it. The
approach tends to undermine the psychological fences
people erect around the camps and make them more
porous. What little difference there is between the
psyches of those inside and the rest of us becomes
more arbitrary.


> Not only does Pynchon give GR a scene of dead and dying
> slave laborers - one of the most touching, many
> readers testify, of Pynchon's writing -  it comes at
> the climax of a major character's story arc; Pokler's
> predicament is that of anybody who profits in an
> economy where human beings are used as a disposable
> resource.

That's to say, all of us, since our system is predicated
on just that, which makes the phenomenon a general
one. The Holocaust has its unique characteristics, but
the effort to make it a completely unique event in time
and space, given that system, is probably doomed to
failure-  especially given the tendency to blame others
for our own shortcomings, as well as, the steady advance
of technology.

jody


> [...] A disturbing and little-known aspect of the Nazi
> slave labor system was the involvement of big
> business. Many of the most respected German
> corporations had no scruples about using concentration
> camp labor. A company’s decision to use slave labor
> was voluntary. By the end of 1944, one half a million
> ghetto and concentration camp inmates were chained to
> hundreds of corporations. The greatest offenders were
> either state-owned enterprises – such as BRABAG, the
> Herman Goring Works, and Volkswagen – or munitions and
> arms makers, such as Junkers, Messerschmitt, Heinkel,
> Krupp, Dynamit Nobel, and Rheinmetall-Borsig. By 1943,
> almost every major private corporation was complicit,
> including BMW, AEG-Telefunken, Siemens, Daimler-Benz,
> Schering, and the component firms of IG Farben, namely
> Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, and Agfa. German divisions of
> American firms were equally guilty, such as Ford and
> General Motors’ Opel. [...]
> -Forced Labor During World War II
> Prepared By
> The B'nai B'rith
> Center for Human Rights and Public Policy
> http://bnaibrith.org/ppolicy/holocaust_issues/forcedlabor100599.cfm
>
> "By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any
> piece of machinery, was the real and major result of
> the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended to
> include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range
> rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz.
> It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how
> these three curves of development might plausibly
> converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we
> have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control,
> and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes,
> unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance
> of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body
> counts has become -- among those who, particularly
> since 1980, have been guiding our military policies --
> conventional wisdom."
> - Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?
> The New York Times Book Review
> 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
>
>
>
>
> http://pynchonoid.org
> "everything connects"
>
>
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