Politics vs Art

[David Morris]

Million continues on FB:

"naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be
stacked in front of the crematoriums" is a hallmark image of the Holocaust,
and that word - and such images - were in wide circulation at the time that
Pynchon wrote and published GR in which he describes a concentration camp
with corpses stacked up to be cremated, and tells the story of a German
engineer who made himself blind to the horror that supported his work on
the rocket.
Readers of GR (published in 1973 by an author who knows WWII history as
well as any novelist, I expect) have never been confined within the
boundaries of what might have been known to people in the novel, nor is the
author, and some of the people in the novel certainly know about the Nazi
extermination of Jews, so-called "gypsies", homosexuals, and political
enemies in the camps, and other undesirables, whether or not the
perpetrators referred to what they were doing as a Holocaust; the facts of
their war crimes remain whatever the term used to refer to them
collectively.  Pokler knew it was going on but refused to admit it to
himself at the time, as he plainly explains in GR.

My reply:
This a graphic description of the V-2 slave-worker's fate. Within GR's
revealed world it doesn't suggest genocide in WW2, now called Holocaust. We
bring that knowledge into GR from outside the text.  In GR's revealed world
this isn't a depiction of genocide, though it is extremely disturbing.  P
had already described genocide in V.  I think it is telling that he chose
that genocide to depict.  It is the neglected story.

Your argument is a nit pick. The Holocaust isn't depicted in GR, but we all
know it lurks LARGE offstage.  Old nits (& wits) die hard, don't they? Why
pick this witlessness?  You are forging an argument that doesn't exist.
But isn't that what trolls do?  Same as it ever was...

David Morris
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