Ethical Diversion

[Clement Levy]

Hi,
I tried to follow your various arguments on Shoah in GR, and didn't 
want to take part, until I found this, which you don't seem to have 
quoted yet (a comment by Stefan Mattessich on a famous page in GR – 
Viking page numbering).
I'd be glad to hear what you think about it. I find the idea of "muted 
presence" very good (and true), but can't get everything as soon as it 
turns to be about Derrida and Heidegger. Anyway, it might be worth 
quoting, regarding that thread.

"The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing 
of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being 
carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of 
the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging, their toes clustering 
white and round as pearls . . . each face so perfect, so individual, 
the lips streched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught 
at the punch line of the joke . . . and the living, stacked ten to a 
straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers . . . . All his 
vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other sidee of this. While he 
lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in 
the darkness outside . . . all this time". [432-433]
This outside, this negative space where ther preterite (“loser”) body 
lives its peripherality to the evacuated, machinic center of textual 
being, and where a certain kind of “individuality” is murdered for an 
abstract bureaucratic ideal, exists not only for Franz but for 
Gravity‘s Rainbow to the extent that the Holocaust is never directly 
submitted to its parodic mutations of form—indeed, its exteriority or 
muted presence in the background of the novel is quite conspicuous. 
Dora would seem to be a radical limit to Pynchon’s strategies, the 
arrest or suspension of the joke, the moment before its consummation 
become the travesty of its own travesty, the text ceasing to be a joke 
and returning to a seriousness it repeatedly denies itself. Pökler’s 
“writing” is presented as one possible destiny for writing in general, 
one version of what Derrida, paraphrasing Heidegger‘s notion of 
“metalanguage” in his essay “The <i>Retrait</i> of Metaphor,” calls the 
temptation “to occupy the place of form, of formal language,” an 
“impossible and monstruous project of the father . . . this mastery of 
form for form’s sake” (“Retrait,” 18 ).

Stefan Mattessich. Lines of Flight, Discursive Time and Countercultural 
Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Durham–London: Duke University 
Press. 2002, p. 159-160.

Best regards.
Clement