GRGR Holocaust

[Will Layman]

Like so much of GR, the work camp sequences assume that you know a certain
amount about history already, then they warp what you know to reveal new
wrinkles.  Particularly, by highlighting the concentration camps as WORK
camps, GR shows that their was corporate (as well as political) profit in
the holocaust.  GR makes the holocaust part of its larger outrage about WW2
-- that the war was a method of profit and expansion not for nations but for
moneyed interests, interests that were larger than nations and even larger
than the war itself.

Not to underplay the horror of the holocaust, but GR's critique is more
"meta" than condemning the Nazis or condemning any one actor -- it is to
show the complicity of both sides of the war in maintaining a
force/counterforce, them/us societal structure that keeps the wealthy and
powerful in money and power, regardless of their nationality.

That said, by giving a work camp prisoner one of the books' most emotional
and heartfelt sequences -- touching on a relationship between father and
daughter -- Pynchon personalizes the holocaust in a way that he does little
else in the book.

-- Will

On 10/26/05 2:51 PM, "Oscar" <chimpo at gmail.com> wrote:

> The second time I read GR, I learned a lot about the German internment
> camps.  Jews weren't the only people held/slaughtered/worked to death.
> Gays, politicals, and others were sent to the death camps as well as
> the Jewish (as an aside, I found the way they marked the prisoners
> with different color triangles pretty fascinating e.g. pink triangle
> for gays).  I did not learn these facts in school.  I learned this
> from GR.
> 
> I don't think Pynchon takes The Holocaust head on, but he does address
> the issue.  At the risk of sounding anti-semetic, I might even suggest
> that Pynchon might even take a more realistic view of the situation
> than most school oriented history books.
> 
> Oscar
> 
> On 10/26/05, Keith McMullen <keithsz at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> If someone who knew nothing of The Holocaust read GR, they would still
>> know NOTHING of what was done to the Jews.
>> 
>> This does not mean that the novel does not address the issue.
>> 
>> This does not mean one is a Holocaust denier by pointing out this fact.
>> 
>> It does raise very interesting and important questions about why
>> Pynchon decided to deal with the Holocaust the way he does.
>> 
>> If you have any doubts about the fact that Pynchon is NOT dealing
>> directly with the historical information, that he is presenting it
>> solely by indirect literary methods. Try and cite anything in the
>> entire novel which would educate someone who found the novel on a
>> desert island about anything specific about the treatment of the Jews.
>> 
>> 
>