V.V. (17) current chapter

[jbor]

>> Postmodern fiction embraces eclecticism. With a passion. The fact that the
>> nesting of narratives has always been a standard literary tactic really
>> doesn't have any bearing on the issue of its typicality for the postmodern
>> "genre".

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>From: "Otto" <o.sell at telda.net>
>
> Additionally it expresses the opinion that to some degree eclecticism and
> intertextuality are inevitable in literature.

Yes, quite right. I'd say in *all* texts.

It's interesting that trying to "define" postmodernism in traditional terms,
attempting to "tether" it as a genre to some sort of linear chronology,
premature (and wishful) announcements of its "death" and the like, are all
part and parcel of that whole "Analysis and Control" schtick which Pynchon
ridicules and condemns throughout his novels and published non-fiction.

Isaiah Berlin makes a useful distinction between "cultural or moral
relativism", which is effectively as closed-minded as monoculturalism is,
and "cultural pluralism". Discussing Vico and Herder in particular, he
writes that pluralism "merely denies that there is one, and only one, true
morality or aesthetics or theology, and allows equally objective alternative
values or systems of value." ('Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century
European Thought' 1980)

I think that Pynchon is a cultural pluralist whose sympathies lie with those
who have turned and are still turning away from those Enlightenment values
of "Analysis and Control" -- the Luddites, the Gothic writers, the badasses
-- and that he follows in, or has strong affinities with, the tradition of
German Romanticism, from Kant through Nietzsche and right up to Rilke, and
of Herder in particular, even despite the excesses and horrors which have
been wrought (unhappily) in its name. Isaiah Berlin again:

      Yet there is a central insight given us by romantic humanism -- this
    same untamed German spirit -- which we shall not easily forget. Firstly,
    that the maker of values is man himself, and may therefore not be
    slaughtered in the name of anything higher than himself, for there is
    nothing higher; this is what Kant meant when he spoke of man as an end
    in himself, and not a means to an end. Secondly, that institutions are
    made not only by, but also for, men, and when they no longer serve him
    they must go. Thirdly that men may not be slaughtered, either in the
    name of abstract ideas, however lofty, such as progress or freedom or
    humanity, or of institutions, for none of these have any absolute value
    in themselves, inasmuch as all that they have has been conferred upon
    them by men, who alone can make things valuable or sacred; hence
    attempts to resist or change them are never a rebellion against divine
    commands to be punished by destruction. Fourthly -- and this follows
    from the rest -- that the worst of all sins is to degrade or humiliate
    human beings for the sake of some Procrustean pattern into which they
    are to be forced against their wills, a pattern that has some objective
    authority irrespective of human aspirations. ('European Unity and Its
                                                    Vicissitudes' 1959)

In Isaiah Berlin. _The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History
of Ideas_. Edited by Henry Hardy. London: John Murray, 1990, p. 199.

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