NYRB article re what texts can say about the author

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20001221082R
New York Review of Books - December 21, 2000
  Extraordinary Commonplaces
  by ROBERT DARNTON

In light of the recent discussion jody and I recently enjoyed (I 
certainly did) touching on the possible value (or lack thereof) of 
learning more about Pynchon (through his essays, letters, journals if 
they ever appear, etc.) with regard to a richer appreciation of his 
novels and stories, Darnton's article offers some tangential insight.

Among other things, he discusses a monograph by Kenneth Lockridge 
about M&D bit player, Thomas Jefferson' commonplace book (a book in 
which Jefferson copied quotes from books he read, and which he later 
edited and bound) and what it might tell us about Jefferson. 
Regarding passages of poetry about women that Jefferson copied, 
Darnton says:

"Lockridge's evidence seems largely
  circumstantial; and we have been there
  before, in a long line of
  psycho-biographies that pretend to
  penetrate the souls of the dead by
  reading domestic details as if they were
  tea leaves. Most scholars probably will
  prefer harder facts, like the evidence from
  DNA that linked Jefferson to Sally
  Hemings-who does not figure in
  Lockridge's argument, although she could
  fit into it. But Lockridge's reading of
  Jefferson's commonplace book challenges
  conventional wisdom in an interesting way.
  He treats it like a Rorschach test, and
  invokes Foucault rather than Freud. The
  bits and pieces of literature that Jefferson
  assembled are therefore deemed to
  function like an epistemological field: the
  relations among them and spaces
  between them suggest an unconscious
  process of ordering. The horror of female
  sexuality conjugates into fear of male
  inadequacy, anxiety over patriarchy,
  repulsion at disorder, and obsession with
  death."


Darnton then turns to a book that he is reviewing, _Reading 
Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England_ by 
Kevin Sharpe, which discusses the commonplace books of "William 
Drake, a voracious reader and bit player in the
  conflicts that convulsed England from 1640 to 1660."

Darnton says,

"He [Sharpe] is right, I think, to treat commonplace
  books as sites to be mined for
  information about how people thought in
  a culture based on different assumptions
  from our own. By selecting and arranging
  snippets from a limitless stock of
  literature, early modern Englishmen gave
  free play to a semi-conscious process of
  ordering experience. The elective
  affinities that bound their selections into
  patterns reveal an epistemology-a
  process of knowing-at work below the
  surface. That kind of phenomenon does
  not show up in conventional research and
  cannot be understood without some
  recourse to theory. Foucault probably
  offers the most helpful theoretical
  approach. His "archaeology of
  knowledge" suggests a way to study
  texts as sites that bear the marks of
  epistemological activity, and it has the
  advantage of doing justice to the social
  dimension of thought. "


...I also like what Darnton has to say about the way readers can 
become authors when they keep a commonplace book, which I've done for 
many years now; and in general I recommend this article.

I realize this represents no real parallel or close analogue to the 
situation regarding Pynchon. I do expect that more than a few Pynchon 
scholars will be happy if they ever have a chance to examine 
Pynchon's letters, notebooks, etc., and I imagine they won't have too 
much trouble finding ways to incorporate this material into their 
studies in ways that will interest their readers. Having said that, I 
in no way, shape, or form mean to imply that such is necessary for a 
full and complete and absolutely mind-boggling if not -blowing 
experience of reading Pynchon, which is of course possible without 
the aid of any critical or biographical apparatus, although I suspect 
that coming to it without some knowledge of 20th century (and 
earlier) culture might tend to limit a reader's appreciation 
somewhat, and I'll confess I'm not even sure about that, or much of 
anything, when you come right down to it.
-- 
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