"the limits of our knowledge"

[Doug Millison]

" ''In this book I do not memorialize the Holocaust,'' he says. ''I 
ask questions about what happened and why.'' Bauer's empirical cast 
of mind cannot tell us all we want to know. It resists speculative 
flights and avoids the dark corners that only intuition or art can 
fathom. He loves quoting Hilberg to the effect that ''we historians 
are in the truth business.'' Impatient with the scruples of 
postmodern skepticism, which reminds us of the limits of our 
knowledge, Bauer in ''Rethinking the Holocaust'' makes a strong case 
for the tact and insight of the historical imagination as it 
confronts the unimaginable. "

--Morris Dickstein, distinguished professor of English at the City 
University of New York, in his review of _Rethinking the Holocaust_ 
by Yehuda Bauer, in today's NY Times Book Review at 
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/28/reviews/010128.28dickstt.html

The "limits of our knowledge" -- certainly something that TRP 
addresses in GR, V., and his other work, with regard to a spectrum of 
concerns broad enough to have earned his work the descriptor 
"encyclopedic" yet at the same time (what makes him more than a mere 
chronicler or encyclopedist) aware of limits to what can be known. 
Pynchon might also be seen to give us some of those "speculative 
flights" D here leaves to the realm of art, as P might be seen 
choosing not to avoid "the dark corners that only intuition or art 
can fathom." Whether he illuminates those dark places at the margins 
or center or everywhere or nowhere in his work would seem to depend 
on a particular reader's perspective.

Seems a very long time ago that Eric Weinstein suggested that we talk 
about the way Pynchon negotiates the Line between fiction and 
history, how time flies when you're having fun...

On another topic, I'm not ready yet to throw 19th century literature 
out the window, and I'd hazard a guess -- but who knows for sure, 
right --  that TRP hasn't either; others have had interesting things 
to say here about the Dickens in Pynchon, to name a relatively recent 
example.

That's enough for now -- "subtext elbow" prevents me from typing more, sorry.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>