pynchon-l-digest V2 #12770

[Doug Millison]

Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom by Luc Herman, Steven C.
Weisenburger covers the Holocaust in GR with a subtle approach that feels
right to me. My take-away is that it's in there and it isn't - both/and -
and I encourage anybody who's interested to dive in.  I own the book, but
portions of it are on Google Books, including much of the discussion on how
the novel treats this subject. Herman and Weisenburger have written a fine
book about the novel, highly recommended.
https://books.google.com/books?id=M7JpAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq=homosexual%20prisoners%20concentration%20camps%20gravity%27s%20rainbow&source=bl&ots=ySTuLYMRVN&sig=o6h1py8Josog-EBgebpvQOksT9I&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZx8rJ0sDMAhUS72MKHZIcAwAQ6AEIKjAC#v=onepage&q=homosexual%20prisoners%20concentration%20camps%20gravity's%20rainbow&f=false

Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History by David Cowart is another
recent book that I haven't read yet - it's on the list - but a quick search
of the Preview text at Google Books indicates that this book also discusses
the Holocaust in Pynchon's novels;
https://books.google.com/books?id=VYnorYLekEYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=holocaust&f=false

No doubt, Pynchon's approach in GR and the other novels is subtle, he's not
writing flames on the P-list, after all.  But to say that the Nazi
extermination of the Jews, homosexuals, "gypsies", political prisoners,
slave laborers, and others, is absent, that the Holocaust is absent from
the novel, seems to fly in the face of what the reader encounters on the
page.  Pokler puts his wedding ring on the finger of a dying inmate at Dora
in a setting that could have come of out of the documentary films of the
camps that were played in the US after the war (I saw some of them at high
school in the 60s), GR on pp. 432-433.
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