The Disgusting English Candy Drill

[Monte Davis]

> All of these oblique references to the Holocaust point to the 
> deliberate vacancy of the Holocaust itself, just as the figures in 
> Hunter Penhallow's  paintings in AtD point to the "deliberate 
> vacancies" of his compositions  (AtD, 897). (And WW1 in AtD 
> is conspicuously absent in much the same way as the Holocaust in GR).
> The atomic bomb over Hiroshima is (non-)represented in much 
> the same way...

And in M&D, slavery and the Seven Years' War and War of Independence are
*seen* in ways that are mostly glancing, oblique, and parodic compared to
their weights in theme and plot.

For me, those meticulously carved vacancies are eloquent in two ways. One is
a species of tact or humility in the face of huge and terrible experience:
TRP isn't Primo Levi or Frederick Douglass or Wilfred Owen, and isn't going
to try.

The other is a reminder, an unseen guest always at our side: you think
history is over and done with, foax, safely then and there? No, it's here
and now, informing what you are and think and say all the more thoroughly
for your attempts to move on...