"The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1 Section 1

Paul Mackin paul.mackin at verizon.net
Fri Oct 28 08:58:16 CDT 2005


On Oct 28, 2005, at 8:49 AM, Meg Larson wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Meg Larson"  
> <megley1 at chartermi.net>
> To: "John Doe" <tristero69 at yahoo.com>
> Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 8:35 AM
> Subject: Re: "The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1 Section 1
>
>
> he sed:
>
>
>> faintly ironic tones ):
>> There may be many reasons for it's exclusion....one,
>> perhaps, is that Pynchon has established the peculiar
>> intrigue of the plight of the Hereros...another "race"
>> that has also had more than its share of abuse and
>> terror at the hand of Master Races....in order to
>> maintain the Gravity  :  ) of the situation of the
>> Hereos, Pynchon wisely avoids attracting the reader's
>> attention to the imcomparable massacre of the
>> Holocaust...it would detract...also, I think he
>> understood that the comical capers, the whimsy burts
>> of song, the many other devices of levity and high
>> non-seriousness would lose effect if the reader was
>> maintaining images of the Ovens in his/her mind...
>>
>>
> I say:
>
> The fact that GR is not a Holocaust novel per se has always meant,  
> to me,
> that the War meant/represented many different things to many  
> people; for
> some, it wasn't just (or even) about the Holocaust.

Not to be too picky but has anyone ever said that the War itself was  
ABOUT the Holocaust? To my way of thinking (and definition of what   
WW II was), this would carry a completely wrong implication.  That  
the Holocaust was the great, or one of the  great, calamities  of the  
War PERIOD (1939-45) is a better way to state things.

There were a number of great calamities of course. Don't remember at  
the moment what the preferred estimate of the number killed was.  
Several tens of millions . . .


> The War was a
> displacement of all sorts of foax in all sorts of places, and if  
> one was not
> aware of what was happening in the camps, I think it may be because  
> not
> every one was concerned about that aspect of the War--they were  
> concerned
> about how it affected their own lives in their own place in the world.
>
> What the hell--it's early.
> M.
>
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