Ethical Diversions

[jbor at bigpond.com]

The passage hadn't been quoted, but it was certainly cited. Pokler 
acknowledges to himself the true horrors of Dora -- and his complicity 
therewith -- only after the end of the war, even though he'd been 
working at the Mittelwerke for a time and he "knew about" and had seen 
"the starved bodies" and appalling treatment of the prisoners in the 
work camp there (428).

What Mattessich refers to as Pokler's "writing" is simply the planning 
and drafting for the 00000 rocket he was contracted by Weissmann for at 
Nordhausen while all this inhumanity was being carried on in "the 
invisible kingdom" just next door. Isn't it?

best

On 26/06/2006:

> 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
>
>