Meat man Pynchon

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Yes, the pigs, the dodoes, the Herero. They're all likely to trigger 
associations with the Holocaust in the reader's mind. But, again, 
they're never explicitly connected to the Holocaust in the narrative, 
or by the characters.

It's good to be able to have these discussions finally. Despite that 
initial stream of all-too-familiar outbursts, it seems as if the 
near-total absence of descriptions of the Holocaust from the narrative 
of GR, and the possible reasons for that, along with the various ways 
in which Pynchon does constantly play on the reader's prior knowledge 
of the Holocaust, have become legitimate topics for consideration here.

best

On 24/06/2006:

> It may seem a little crass, but the slaughter of pigs IS yet another 
> sly reference to the Holocaust in GR, the pigs being likened to the 
> preterite (and by extension the Jews slaughtered by Hitler).  Pynchon 
> is rumoured to have a deep affection for pigs, keeping stuffed toy 
> pigs in his room during the writing of GR
>
> Ghetta
>>
>>>
>>> I remember a public television history of Chicago that showed some 
>>> diagrams of the mass-production slaughterhouses for pigs that were 
>>> jaw-dropping in their carnage-per-minute.  Highly engineered 
>>> machinery for mass butchery.
>>> Now just imagine that those were people instead of pigs...
>>>
>>
>> So now we're converting Pynchon family allusions into Holocaust 
>> allusions?  (-;