Sanders, "The Politics of Literary Reinscription ..."

[Dave Monroe]

>From Mark Sanders, "The Politics of Literary Reinscription in Thomas 
Pynchon's V.," Critique, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Fall 1997), pp. 81-96 ...

A letter written in January 1969 was the occasion for Thomas Pynchon to 
define his fictional project in V. and Gravity's Rainbow in 
historiographical terms and to state some ground rules for the metropolitan 
historian of European colonialism in Africa.  In seeking to explain 
colonialism, that historian has to make sure of "getting the African side of 
it" (Seed 241).  The historian also is dogged not only by the biases of 
official colonial historiography and by European writers who interpret 
Africa belief systems in Western Christian terms but by the nature and 
processes of writing itself.  Pynchon the novelist assume s that what unites 
him with the historian of colonialism is his desire for historical 
explanation; but he differentiates himself from the latter by claiming a 
certain archival ineptitude. (81)

The letter to Hirsch not only sheds light on the processes of V.,s 
composition but on what Pynchon regarded as the limits of what he could do 
with his sources.  The ethnographic material, although more respectable than 
the propaganda, has its own difficulties.... The Namibian Hereros become, 
for Pynchon, representative Africans, and in turn, stand for others who have 
been brought into contact with Western colonialism and imperialism, a 
process he often characterizes as psychocultural subjection. (82)

"Mondaugen's story" is an allegory, much in the tradition of Heart of 
Darkness, in which Africa is called upon to provide a space in which the 
European Zeitgeist can be visited by its disavowed spectral double.  The 
Europeans, who enact their sexual fantasies within the walls of Foppl's 
castle, are, by Pynchon's account, typical of European colonizers in 
general. (83)

Writing and art are repressive.  Marx's analyses betray none of the 
pleasures that go with colonialism.  They remain devoted ... to an order 
theological in its edicts restricting sexual behavior.  The excesses of the 
colonialists are enacted as an aesthetic as well as a moral reaction to the 
experience of being European.  With no apparent lines of communication 
linking it to Europe, Africa is a place for Europeans to perform acts that 
they wish nobody back home to hear about, a place where the cries of shame 
are muted and life can, in accordance with the pleasure principle, 
proceed.... "No word ever gets back" [GR p. 317]. (83)

However, as liberal critics of colonialism since Bentham have pointed out, 
that absence of reflection is illusory.  The correct machinery .... has, in 
effect, to translate and interpret.... The Bondelzwarts uprising engendered 
two reports ....  The availability of those texts is not as encouraging as 
it seems.  They are defective, because they have been produced by a machine 
tuned up with European bias.  The preliterate accounts of Africans, in 
Thomas Pynchon's view, have been excluded. (83)

[on Bentham Sanders cites Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of 
Australia's Founding (NY: Vintage, 1986), pp. 43-83]

Mondaugen ... gets a ride with a mutilated Bondelzwarts, who sings a song 
that is lost, not only because Mondaugen cannot understand it, but because 
the sound waves are too weak to travel: that is the end of Mondaugen's story 
in V., "Stencilized" in 1956.  (84)

Stencil's version is given to us by a narrator, although some of the key 
events Mondaugen relates come to him in delirious "passage[s]" ([V., p.] 
255) extracted from either Foppl's or Godolphin's recollections of the 
Herero War.  Not history, exactly, but undeniably, Stencil's version of 
Mondaugen's story is narrated with an overlay of historiographical 
conscience by a professes truth-teller: male violence toward women as 
sadomasochism; Africa as playground for European fantasies; Herero genocide 
as holocaust dress-rehearsal; colonialism as sex tourism; imperialism as 
psychosexual conquest (see Holton 336).  A prelude, "Mondaugen's story" with 
it many layers is thus not only Conradian allegory; but once the 
fictionalizing processes have been reconstructed as best they can for 
examination, it is also a dramatization of the ambiguous, risky place of the 
novelist who would profess loyalty to historical fact. (86-7)

[and here Sanders points us to Robert Holton, "In the Rathouse of History 
with Thomas Pynchon: Rereading V.," Textual Practice 2.3 (1988): 324-44]

There are, as Pynchon realizes, the makings of a story other than the one 
told by the colonialists. (86)

Pynchon's challenge as a historian is to attempt to speak for Africans, 
while rejecting the idea of colonial guardianship. (87)

[much of what follows involves a detailed reading of the various documents 
Pynchon used in researching the Herero for V., as mentioned in that "Letter 
to Thomas F. Hirsch," printed as an "Appendix" to David Seed, The Fictional 
Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988).  I'll perhaps 
yet have occasion to cite from Sanders here in detail, but I'm trying to 
sketch some immediately salient points for the time being, and I don't have 
much time, so ...]

The 1923 Report supplies not only the historical facts but is the verbatim 
source of Van Wijk's words in V ... (88)

[and there's an interesting explanation of that "die lood van die 
Goevernement sal nou op julle smelt"--"The Government's lead will now melt 
upon you" (V., p. 232)--here ...]

In figuring the white response in terms of the Von Trotha genocide, Pynchon 
is both engaged in historical reconstruction and submitting, in a highly 
mediated way, other frames for giving an account of the events.  Along with 
Pynchon, we tend to want to find resistance and agency.  But is the 
excessive reaction to that resistance on the part of the Europeans not, in 
this case, the more remarkable event?  Reinterpreting the documents and 
writing his own, more or less parodic, version of the events, he fabulates a 
story with fictional characters.  Although this is as close as he gets to 
the "African side of it," he succeeds more than he intimates with Hirsch. 
(90)

... we need to pay attention to the difference he makes between literature 
and other forms of information.  There is a basic difference between "data," 
and their reinscription in a short story or novel.  To some extent, Pynchon 
say, a writer has to remain faithful to the accepted scientific knowledge 
and the historical record ....  Yet, for Pynchon, there are things that 
history will not say .... his "borrow[ings]" necessarily function, and are 
advertised in his texts, as grafted, nonoriginary "written syntagm[at]a" 
(Derrida 317).  Despite the many levels of mediation in V., a certain 
regulation of the play of these syntagmata is attempted; if history allows 
little or no play, literature may be said to get life from a regulated play. 
(91)

[and here see not only Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (trans. Alan 
Bass.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), but also the "Introduction" to Slow 
Learner ...]

... the object of his own writing is not simply what he calls "nonverbal 
reality" (Slow Learner 24)--although it is certainly not about it--but the 
very verbal database and psychical processes that supply the constructions 
that guide our relation to it.  Certainly, the dichotomy of "printed 
sources" and "nonverbal reality" does not do justice to his practice in V., 
which Holton calls "a postmodern historiographical novel--a novel about 
historical representation as well as about historical events" ([Holton] 343) 
... (91)

People may objectify others by giving them speech, interpreting what they do 
or say in a way that denies them autonomy ... (91)

Ethically, Pynchon experiences a dilemma: he wants to restore historical 
agency--ultimately their ability to represent themselves as victims of 
european colonialism--but if he does so he risks travestying his agents.  So 
Pynchon begins the authoritative position of the historian ... and instead 
dramatizes the idea that all reconstructions of events depend on conceptual 
structures and motivations the origins of which we cannot ever trace.  
Mondaugen, who realizes that he is mixing up Foppl and Godolphin, finds it 
hard to distinguish between the sources of his impressions as to separate 
fact and interpretation .... (92)

The aesthetic choice of programmatic indeterminacy, apposite in this 
context, transgresses, in one other notable passage, the historiographical 
guidelines that Pynchon avows in the Hirsch letter .... Foppl (or Godolphin) 
imagines suicidal sexual collaboration on the part of Herero women ... (92)

The analysis that Foppl's fantasies invite is consistent with Pynchon's 
critical notion of colonialism as s set of failed encounters, a succession 
of gendered misunderstandings between "west" and "non-west" ... (92)

[and here follows an interesting elaboration on "the Konig episode" from the 
1918 Report on the Natives vis a vis the Herero woman digging for onions who 
ostensibly thanks her murderer ...]






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