pynchon-l-digest V2 #12774

Sat May 7 05:36:28 CDT 2016

Too explicit and an artist like Pynchon is just writing history --or
journalism about history.

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, a great post from Mr. Millison.
> Thank you.
>
> Also heartily agree with .... "Morris’s point is that P’s work loses
> something as it gets more explicit".
>
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>
> > On May 6, 2016, at 9:10 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >
> > I think the question is not whether that holocaust implication is legit,
> because I don’t think that is in question by anyone. The question is
> whether the holocaust is treated explicitly, in this case death camps
> clearly described in detail.  Morris’s point is that P’s work loses
> something as it gets more explicit, not that the holocaust is absent from
> GR. Whether one agrees or not with David’s argument, it is important to
> hear what is being said.
> >  Interesting writing here. I have wanted to hear a bit more of your own
> story in relation to the list.
> >
> >> On May 6, 2016, atI 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.
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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