Politics vs Art

[Mark Kohut]

"By indirection we find direction out"......

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 10:28 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160504/bcea4642/attachment.html>