Ethical Diversions

[jbor at bigpond.com]

On 18/06/2006 Dave Monroe wrote:

> It's because you took it upon yrself to pre-emptively
> striek at a book

Again, Dave, I didn't. Below is what I wrote. And then you went berserk 
-- false allegations, insane paranoia, dozens of belligerent posts. As 
you invariably do, and for years now. It's as if in you there's this 
sudden onset of hysterical panic at any hint of actual discussion of 
Pynchon's work here, particularly on the topic of the near-total 
absence of the Holocaust from GR's narrative and why that might be the 
case.

By all means address the content of what I've written below and feel 
free to disagree or not and make your points. Or, if you're not up for 
it, just let it slide. But please, enough already with this petty 
vendetta.

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)