Politics vs Art

rich richard.romeo at gmail.com
Wed May 4 08:42:39 CDT 2016


one of the major misconceptions about the Holocaust and mass murder is that
most people think only of Auschwitz which technically was not a death camp
say like Treblinka was. Dora was not a death camp either--they were work
camps in essence, horrible in any case. still broadly speaking we can
include such camps as part of the Holocaust if our definitions expand on a
broader definition of extermination in its myriad forms (gas, labor, rape,
etc). So, yes Pynchon does address that in Dora.

The missing bit from GR which I think Pynchon cant adequately utilize
directly w/r/t to the Holocaust is that there was no logical reason for
such mass murder from an economic point of view beyond appropriating space.
If you build up your message as Pynchon does about Them and systems and
repressions and markets and link them all up, it cant really digest the
insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology which underpinned much of its
actions in the East.

i guess what I'm saying is hybrid camps like Auschwitz or outright labor
camps like Dora where there was an economic benefit for Germany or
perceived to be (many projects were failures) are easier to explain than
outright death mills like Treblinka, Sobibor, etc. maybe that's one reason
for Pynchon's 'aloofness' on the subject

just my two cents

rich

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:32 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> But WHERE does GR "depict the Holocaust?"
>
> David Morris
>
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160504/2af0182d/attachment.html>


More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list