re re re re Re: "The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1 Section 1

[Peter E. Zelz]

I, a lurker, present myself for a flaming.  I read GR once, about 15 years
ago and was overwhelmed, amazed, captivated, confused, dazzled, fascinated.
Really looking forward to going through it again with the group and
benefiting from insights provided by an obviously eclectic bunch of people.
However, not having majored in English, not having any particular interest
in Literary Criticism (capital L, capital C), I'm having a hard time
understanding all the round'n'round about the holocaust and GR.  I, for
one, frankly don't care whether or not the "Holocaust was 'central' to GR",
and further am not sure why I should.  Is there some perverse PC tenet
which states that every novel set in Europe in the first half of the 1940s
has to address the holocaust?  Are there other unwritten laws that state
that novels set in other locales and times must concern themselves with
particular historical events?

Cheers,
z



> [Original Message]
> From: <MalignD at aol.com>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: 10/27/2005 18:45:43
> Subject: Re: re re re re Re: "The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1
Section 1
>
> << he includes enough direct references to the Holocaust to nail it for
the 
> reader, who can safely assume that the novel's settings include the
>  death camps,  >>
>
> This seems a good bit of backpedaling from your previous claims that the 
> Holocaust was "central" to Gravity's Rainbow, against what any reasonable
reader 
> would respond, which is that the Holocaust is all but absent from GR.
>
> Joseph Heller was asked why he, a Jew, didn't include mention of the 
> Holocaust in Catch 22 and he said that he couldn't include it without
making Catch 22 
> a very different book from the one he was writing.  That has always
seemed to 
> me the case with GR as well, along with, perhaps, Pynchon's modesty about 
> addressing something which he was without stature (by dint of youth,
background, 
> experience) to address.