GRGR Holocaust

[Humberto Torofuerte]

Well isn't the Herero thing a kind of an oblique Holocaust reference?

So is the group read on now? I just hate anarchy...but I do like all the
free stuff you can get.

On 10/26/05, Will Layman <WillLayman at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
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