M&D: Cowart article/ch.35

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Michael Crowley wrote:

> A few weeks ago someone mentioned David Cowart's recent article in
> American Literature, "The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon."  I just got
> around to reading it and found it pretty interesting overall.  However,
> his reading of the outer frame discussion of history and novels at the
> beginning of chapter 35 has me a bit confused.

I've not read Cowart's article. I can only access AL to 1993 at the moment.

>
>
> Cowart writes (in part):
>
>         ...the historian pursues an unltimately chimerical objectivity, a
> spurious grail.
>         Hence, in chapter 35, the debate regarding distinctions between
> history and romance.  Wicks speaks here for the metahistorical
> perspective, as his listeners articulate the commonsense objections.  Mr.
> LeSpark, for example, quotes the Great Lexicographer: "Dr. Johnson says
> that all History unsupported by contemporary Evidence is Romance" (351).
> When his brother, the bibulous Ives, delivers himself of a tirade against
> novels, the new form that outromances the romance, one recognizes an
> inchoate syllogism that seks to disparage the historical novel--Mason &
> Dixon for example--as little more than an oxymoron.  Wicks however,
> dismisses the earnest pursuit of unitary truth and mischievously suggests
> that the greater the element of romance, the better the history.  He
> rejects the sober fact mongering of a Gibbon in favor the richer,
> paradoxically less deluded homages to Clio that Herodotus wrote--and in
> later ages Sir John Mandeville, Captain John Smith, and Baron Munchausen.
> Wicks, like Aristotle, values history only insofar as it allies itself to
> the insights of poetry or, more broadly, literature.  "Who claims Truth,
> Truth abandons" (350), he declares, articulating a kind of parallax view
> of history.  By implication, Truth creeps in where the imagination
> reigns--especially imagination of multiple perspectives.  At its best,
> historical fiction allies itself to that search for the miraculous so
> inimical to the logocentric pretensions of the Enlightenment.  If this is
> history as carnival, history constantly threatening to "converge to Opera
> in the Italian Style" (706), it is also the history that Wicks can
> characterize as a record of humanity's "Hunt for Christ" (75).-- [American
> Literature, June 1999, p. 358]
>
> I agree in general, though not in all details, with the point Cowart
> focuses on: this idea of the impossibility of discovering the
> objective Truth or of constructing a "true" history. That's pretty
> obvious and nothing new.  But am I missing something, or does he
> mistakenly assign all of Ethelmer's lines to Wicks?

Well, from the passage you quote above it appears that Cowart has assigned
lines to Wicks.

> Only Ives's lines are
> tagged in the text, so perhaps anyone could be speaking them, but when we
> get to Ives's response to "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons," we get,
> "'Hogwash, Sir,' Uncle Ives about to become peevish with his Son[...]" he
> then calls the other speaker "young Pup" and "Ethelmer":
> "'Ethelmer.' Ives raises a monitory Eye-brow. 'Time on Earth is too
> precious.  No one has time, for more than one Version of the Truth." (350)

Right, that's how I read it: "his Son" and "young Pup" can not be Wicks.

>
>
> If memory serves, these lines were read as Ethelmer's during MDMD.  The
> sentiment expressed is certainly in synch with Wicks's attitude towards
> history (as seen in the ch 35 epigraph, "Facts are but the Play-things of
> lawyers--[...]).  But even though this is how he feels, Wicks wouldn't
> express himself so directly at this point, having early been reminded of
> his role as Scheherezade and also having recently encountered Wade's
> sarcasm on the topic of killing Indians.  Also, the argument sounds much
> more like that of a father and son, the younger and older generations each
> thinking they know it all... And Ethelmer has already demonstrated his
> lack of restraint with his heretical comments on Our Saviour (ch 7).

Right again.

>
>         What makes these comments on history even more interesting is that
> even as Ethelmer seems to express an attitude towards history very
> similar to Wicks's, Wicks is so concerned about and fearful of
> where Ethelmer's thoughts are headed (away from Christ).
>
> I've reread the first few pages of ch 35 a few times, and they only make
> sense if it's Ethelmer arguing with his father.  Any ideas on how this
> scene should be read?

The lack of tags and the fact that these ideas are in general agreement with
Wicks may have confused Cowart.


Cowart states:
"Wicks, like Aristotle, values history only insofar as it allies itself to
the insights of poetry or, more broadly, literature."


Just like Aristotle. In fact, Wick's "Facts are but..." from ch 35, is
Aristotle with a capital A. Pynchon nailed it.

What if anything does Cowart say about M&D Chapter 26--Plato, Music, and
Change?

"I believe his Quarrel was with the Dithyrambists,: the REVd smoothly puts in,
"--who were not changing (italics) the Forms of Song, he felt, so much as
mixing up one with another, or abandoning them altogether, as their madness
might dictate." M&D.262

In both cases Pynchon is concerned with the phenomena of change--history,
music, Poetry.

Terrance