Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity's Rainbow

[Dave Monroe]

... and hopefully to finish up from Katalin Orban,
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 ...

   "What is noteworthy is that the Holocaust, when it
rarely appears in the text elsewhere, does so in a way
radically different from the Pokler scene.  I those
cases, the Holcaust is rather something that happens
in teh text or even happens to teh text.  Like 'Them,'
the Holocaust intimates 'possibilitie far far beyond
Nazi Germany' (GR 25) ....  But--and this is what
makes teh Holocauts a structural touchstone of an
ethics of response and de-centered vision--thse
analogies and replication leave the Holocaust at a
blurry margin of vision in the text except for the
single case [GR 432-3] discussed above.  Extermination
camps only make their sudden appearance to immediately
fade into points of reference for virtual camps [GR
453, 666] .... 
   "For a text so cosmologically inclusive in its
plural ontologies and at the same time so intent on
seeing through everything in its worlds, it is indeed
intriguing and suspicious that it nearly unfailingly
reatins the euphemism of 'work' for the camps and
fails to find the narrative time and space for 'What
really went on here' (GR 296).  The narrative refuses
to see through rocket scientist Dornberger's
euphemistic refeence to foreign workers; Jewsih
families are cryptically 'sent east' ... and foreign
prsioners are 'brought in' from occupied countries to
camps where what is enforced is work and re-educaton
(GR 105,423).
   "Even more significanty, the narrative estblishes
no explicit connection between these workplaces and
its panorama of modern extermination.  What mediates
between the latter two is barely more than a few
resonant textulaized 'Holocausts' spread evenly over
the novel with the exception of its concluding part
from which they are absent.  The Holocaust, or rather
'Holocaust,' appears as a mispaced signifier, an error
pointlesssly intruding on the normal course of
narration...." (p. 164)

Okay, again, interruptions, so ...
 
                                              





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