V-2nd Dopplegangers

[David Payne]

The Pynchon wiki has a snippet of that Pynchon letter about V. that I so badly mangled in my previous post. Quoting the wiki:
 
"In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in David Seed's book The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3), Pynchon wrote, '…When I wrote V. I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. […] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration.'"
 
Anyhow, it's a good letter and you should read the whole enchilada if you can get a copy of Seed's book. I know that a lot of the libraries near me have it.