pynchon-l-digest V2 #12774

[Doug Millison]

Answering one of Monte's points -- below - to be clear I have never claimed
to be the first or only person to suggest that in the opening pages of GR
the evacuation by train and the people nobody bothered to save might be
read as an allusion to the removal by train to concentration camps and
death of Holocaust victims, and I certainly make no such claim now.  It is
an idea that came to me from my own reading, from the beginning when I
first encountered GR and read it in '73 (see below)., I did not have any
contact with academic readers of Pynchon or their books/articles until the
mid-90s when I got to the P-list in time to read and discuss M&D with the
group, and a lively group it was.  Many of them were also around for group
readings of Vineland and GR that I participated in, too.

Nope, the only news I ever broke on Pynchon-L was news that Playboy Japan
had published an interview with Pynchon, when my friend in Japan sent me a
copy of the magazine, which I shared with a top Pynchon scholar and
mentioned in this forum. For my pains, a notorious flamemeister here
accused me of fabricating the story, but I believe consensus reality does
include that Playboy Japan published that interview, although there may be
some doubt about its provenance.  But, back in that day, I was merely the
messenger, passing along news, and copies of the interview from Playboy
Japan, to the experts who knew what to do with it.  (That same flamemeister
for some years accused Dave Monroe and me of being the same person, but I
believe enough oldschool p-listers knew - met in person, talked on phone -
 us both to feel confident that the fact we are/were (RIP Dave Monroe)
different individuals remains out there in the multiverse.

In '76 when Monte was fortunate to be listening to Slade lecture about
Pynchon, I was in a different classroom, reading and writing about French
literature at UC Berkeley, taking classes with visiting prof Tzvetan
Todorov and some very sharp people in the UCB French department (including
one prof who went on to write a book concerning Pynchon, or it had a
chapter about Pynchon, the book is in a box with a thousand others in the
basement downstairs and the author's name escapes me now, Dave Monroe
purchased and sent me a copy of his book after we had met and talked about
what we had read and studied, quite a few years ago now).

The draft had interrupted my studies and sent me overseas to play Radar
O'Reilly in a mechanized infantry battalion not far from the site of the
 M*A*S*H unit of TV fame, where I discovered and read GR in the summer of
1973, after its publication that spring; the person who ordered new books
for the libraries in the various bases and camps for the 2nd Infantry
Division scattered along the DMZ in Korea, had good taste, our library at
Camp Howze had an excellent selection of contemporary fiction. Roth,
Malamud, Pynchon, many others that I read that year, I had the longest
library card on record at our outpost there 6 km down the road from Peace
Treaty Village at Panmunjom, but of course that wasn't much of an
accomplishment in an Army where the spare time reading wasn't generally
bound in hardback, although of course you were always running into somebody
who had read something cool or recherché, and the occasional closeted
intellectual . I came back to the USA and finished my 2-year non-volunteer
stint, slowly made my way across country to Berkeley to start school as a
transfer student (sophomore) in January of 1976.

I was surprised at the vehement push back to that suggested reading of GR's
opening, in those thrilling days of yore in this forum; I assumed that the
Holocaust in GR was a legitimate topic of discussion, also assumed that
scholarly readers of Pynchon had explored all the pieces of the GR puzzle.
And it turns out that there was, and continues to be a nuanced discussion
of the Holocaust in the novel in the critical literature, far more
sophisticated than anything I could offer. It's amazing to me  that,  going
on 20 years later, this topic still causes such grief to some readers of
this gritty and fantastical World War II (and more) novel in this forum in
particular.

My unoriginal take is that the rocket is the star of the GR show and it's
built by slaves who were worked to death in a camp where Jews and others
also died (recalling to my mind America built by slaves starting in
colonial days, depicted in M&D) in a  larger context of  genocide of the
Jews and the systematic mass murder of homosexuals, "gypsies", political
enemies, and other undesirables, which some people call inclusively the
Holocaust - just as M&D is set  in the context of the ongoing genocide of
the indigenous peoples of the New World and elsewhere in the world where
corporations managed to insinuate themselves, as colonists take the good
land from the Indians and push them off, kill them, give them smallpox and
other infectious diseases either by accident or on purpose & etc.,
beginning almost as soon as they got here from Europe.

Monte:
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.
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