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.
>
> 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]
>

"family story perfected in the hellish Forge of Domestick Recension,
generation 'pon generation, till what survives is the pure truth, anneal'd to
Mercilessness, about each Figure, no matter how stretched, nor how influenced
over the years by all the sentiments from unreflective love to inflexible
Dislike." Where a little "Irresponsible Embellishment" on the part of the
current tale teller is recognized as 'part of the common Duty of Remembering"
and "sentiments-how we dream'd of, and were mistaken in, each other" "count
for
at least as much as our poor cold Chronologies." M&D.695

"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."
David Cowart's recent article in American Literature, "The Luddite Vision:
Mason & Dixon."

History, for Aristotle, is sharply differentiated from myth (contrasted with
Plato's view of history as a myth-though not less true for being a myth), on
the one hand and philosophy, on the other. For unlike myth, history attempts a
literal account of actual processes and, unlike philosophy, it is concerned
with particulars, and not with universals. Therefore, history, for Aristotle,
is not true.
Viewed as history, the sequence of men's inquires and speculations partakes,
according to Aristotle, in part of the cyclic return that governs the seasons
and lives of all sublunary things and in part of the progressive character of
an enterprise that has a beginning whose record survives only in the form of
myths, stages of improvement to which all men have contributed in their
respective ways, but no man can account for.

"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons"

    THE investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An
indication of
    this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth
adequately, while, on the
    other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true
about the
    nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing
to the truth, by
    the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. Therefore, since the
truth seems to
    be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, in this respect
it must be easy,
    but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we
aim at shows
    the difficulty of it.

    "Perhaps, too, as difficulties are of two kinds, the cause of the present
difficulty is not
    in the facts but in us. For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day,
so is the reason in
    our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

    "It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views
we may agree,
    but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these
also
    contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought. It
is true that if
    there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric
poetry;
    but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus. The
same holds
    good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some
thinkers we
    have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible
for the
    appearance of the former.
                    --Metaphysica ii.1.993a30.

Now, does Pynchon agree with Wicks who agrees with Aristotle?

Terrance