Ethical Diversions

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Not sure what Dave Monroe's problem is this week, but I wasn't actually 
"arguing" with anyone.

Can't really see how (or why) anyone would take the below comments 
personally, but I apologise if my reading of GR causes him offence.

best

> --- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
>
>> I think it's safe to assume that every reader of GR will know about 
>> the Holocaust. What is striking, though, is its absence from 
>> Pynchon's narrative. But once you recognise that, at the time the 
>> novel is set, virtually noone knew what was happening in those camps, 
>> Pynchon's rationale for this becomes clear.
>>
>> For those at the time who did know something about the death camps, 
>> or those who might have known, like Pirate (the telepath), like Katje 
>> (the double or triple agent), and like Blicero (the SS officer), it 
>> was a prospect so terrible that they tried to suppress it in their 
>> minds, to the point where it only leaks through in dreams or 
>> neurosis.
>>
>> The few direct references we get (105, 666, 681), oblique though they 
>> are, are likewise fully consistent with how events played out at the 
>> time. And Pokler's obliviousness, until that moment when he walks 
>> through the gates of the Dora work camp at war's end (432-3), is the 
>> clincher.
>>
>> best
>>
>>> Orban, Katalin.  Ethical Diversions:
>>>    The Post-Holocaust  Narratives of Pynchon, Abish,
>>>    DeLillo, and Spigelman.  New York: Routledge, 2005.
>>>
>>> Ch. 3, "Pinpricks on the Ars(e) Narrandi: Liminality
>>> and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow," pp. 115-67
>>>
>>>    "These traces play hide-and-seek with the reader
>>> ....  What I have been arguing all along is that this
>>> play of hide-and-seek is one of the most serious
>>> 'games' this work is playing, one in which seriousness
>>> and anxiety are hopelessly (hopefully?) mixed up with
>>> a play of openness.  There is nothing to secure that
>>> such textual traces will be read in terms of traumatic
>>> loss, for their liminality is not underwritten by
>>> anything in the narrativethat is also not overwritten
>>> in this scattering encyclopedia....  How can a text
>>> work in its unguaranteed posibilities?  This is what
>>> is at stake in Gravity's Rainbow in general and it and
>>> in its performative, erratic and minimal ethics in
>>> particular.  And it is in this sense the book takes
>>> perhaps its greatest risk with the trace of the
>>> holocaut, which it brings to the threshold of
>>> perception, neither remembered, nor forgotten." (pp.
>>> 166-7)
>>>