pynchon-l-digest V2 #12770

[Monte Davis]

> 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.

And if anyone had said that, he or she would be a fool. But neither Morris
nor anyone else said that.  what he did say: that Pynchon doesn't mention
"burning Jews in ovens" in GR, which is literally, factually, indisputably
true.

Not even the naked corpses stacked for the crematorium at Dora-Mittelbau
belie that, however much it reminds you of WWII newsreels seen in high
school: "Dora laborers included political prisoners such as members of the
French resistance, Soviet and other Eastern POWs, prisoners classed as
'asocial,' and some Hungarian Jews who arrived in summer 1944" [
http://dora.uah.edu/slavelabor.html] The latter made up 5-10% of the
prisoner population at that time,

IOW, Dora-Mittelbau was a labor camp established to crank out A4s as fast
as possible, with a small and incidental Jewish population. Its crematorium
was an equal-opportunity end point. It was built and managed by a different
branch of the Nazi/military hierarchy than that which built and managed the
extermination camps (Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor,
Majdanek, Chelmno), which were established to kill and burn Jews as fast as
possible. Those are what most people -- those, at least, without an axe to
grind -- think of when they read "burning Jews in ovens."

It was *you* who turned Morris' remark into your own straw man, calling it
"bold," progressively inflating it toward the quote above, and
characterizing the discussion as "dangerous territory." More than one FB
responder twigged to that as Holocaust denial at once -- but of course you
could have had no such dog-whistle intent, could you?.

BTW, congratulations on spotting as the first of many, many Holocaust
presences in GR the nightmare Evacuation train leading to "a judgment from
which there os no appeal" on p. 4. "I proposed that on the P-list in a
group read of GR long ago," you note modestly on FB, "and I think I saw it
pop up somewhere else in the Pynchon literature since that time." It's a
shame that Joseph Slade had to go it alone when I heard him make the same
point to a LIU class in 1976, like twenty other Pynchon scholars who made
the same point in print before the P-list ever existed.

Doug: You have comprehensively vanquished the straw man you created. David:
you have cooperated with evident relish in re-staging a flame war which --
along with many others -- made the P-list a smaller and less interesting
place than it once was.

Now give it a fucking rest, both of you, OK?

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 9:36 AM, Doug Millison <dougmillison at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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