pynchon-l-digest V2 #12774

[Keith Davis]

Excellent

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> On May 6, 2016, at 12:19 AM, Doug Millison <dougmillison at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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