Pynchon's "muse" (was ...

[Otto Sell]

Nice topic indeed - goes to the core of the pomo debate (and therefor to the
heart of GR too): The End of History as exemplified by the deadly binary
opposition between the US and the USSR, developed out of the German
Rocket-programme harvested by both sides.

Nice things to tell a Pavlovian, but to a Christian, Marxist or Historian as
well.
This is what they all fear. The end of the idea of history as a linear
process, going on along lines of causes and effects as told in the history
books:

"How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and
fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware--perhaps--that in his play he
wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect
itself. What if Mexico's whole *generation* have turned out like this? Will
Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next? No
links? Is it the end of history?" (GR 56)

"All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a
diversionary tactic." (GR 167)

"All das Gerede von Ursache und Wirkung ist weltliche Geschichte,
und weltliche Geschichte ist ein Ablenkungsmanöver."
(Der Geist von Walther Rathenau in "Die Enden der Parabel," p. 269)

"We have now reached an interregnum. Stagnant; (...) Now memory is a
traitor: gilding, altering. The word is, in sad fact, meaningless, based on
the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous." (V., p. 307)

"Facts are but the play-things of lawyers (...) History is not chronology,
for that is left to the Historians, nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance
belongs to the people. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the
one, as claim the Power of the other,- her Practitioners, to survive, must
soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom wit,- that there may
ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day,
losing our forebears in forever, not a Chain of single Links, for one Link
could lose us All,- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and
short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their
Destination in common." (Mason & Dixon, p. 349)


I can only agree to Robert when he considers "Pynchon's texts (...) as
"versions of history" which are offered to the reader," through Fausto IV in
"V.," Rathenau in "Gravity's Rainbow" and Cherrycoke in "Mason & Dixon." His
aim in writing such novels cannot be purely esthetical, embedded in the
postwar world and after Auschwitz.

And if Robert looks for the origin of the word "esthetic" (and thus forcing
us to do a little additional reading on esthetic and the anaesthetic) he's
exactly doing what Terrance urges, tossing "the jargon and semantics and
language games out in the interest of communication so that achievements
made possible by one framework or formulation may be incorporated in
another."

So I did my Wolfgang Welsch after coming home from the shift:
- Ästhetisches Denken - Philip Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1993.

a lot of stuff in English:

http://www.uni-magdeburg.de/iphi/ww/home.html or
http://www.uni-jena.de/welsch/

http://www.uni-jena.de/welsch/papers/Beyond.html

Otto
>
> jbor wrote:
> >
> > No Terrance. Something happening and writing about something which
happened
> > are very different, protest as you might.
> >
> > best
>
> I'm not protesting, I'm simply answering your question.
>
> Your question was,
>
>
>
> > If two historians disagree about what happened, or about why it
happened,
> > then *at least* one of them is writing something which might also be
called
> > "fiction", isn't she?
> >
> > best
>
>
> I asked, why?
>
> I asked where your proposition is supported.  Do you hold
> that the past is one?
> That the past is one and therefore only one history of the
> past  can be history while all others must be fictions?
>
> You said,
>
> "If two historians disagree about what happened, or about
> why it happened,
>  then *at least* one of them is writing something which
> might also be called
>  "fiction", isn't she?
>
> I suspected that the questions was rhetorical.
>
> So I wrote:
>
>
> My guess is that implicit in your semantics is the notion
> that all "history as text" is fiction. I hardly think that
> you would be arguing that the past is one and therefore all
> accounts of the past should be the same.
>
>
> I said, I have only given this a little thought but that by
> common sense I think that the past is one. The past is one,
> but we have many histories of the past.
>
> Common sense also says that all attempts to reconcile those
> different histories by stating that one history is the true
> history and refuting all others is not destined to succeed.
> So saying that one history is the one  true history that
> renders all histories that differ, false histories or saying
> that one is history while all others are fiction is a futile
> exercise.
>
>
> I said, it makes good sense to admit that history belongs to
> the past and the past is the time before the present.
>
> That being said, we can also say that the past admits of
> more
> than one valid formulation.
>
> That being said, that the reason for this fact is to be
> discovered not in language but  in the nature of thought
> itself.
>
> Again, taking your question, I asked,
>
> If two people disagree about the past, what happened and
> why, must one be fiction and one history?
> And, must all differences about the past be considered
> substantive and resoluble by an appeal to an "either or"
> formulation or logic and the facts?
>
>
> I did not simply reply to your question but to another one
> of your posts when I said,
>
> You seem to be admitting that history, like fiction is a
> product arbitrary and
> conventional, but refusing to appreciate the fact that this
> is not simply a matter of who gets to say what about the
> past and what they say, and what causes they attribute to
> the events they choose to include, but a noetic quality:
> arbitrary and conventional, like thought itself.
>
> This, idea, that texts, historical or fictional, religious
> and mythical, are arbitrary and conventional products of the
> nature of the human mind is a big theme in GR.
>
> The problem as I see it, is not about fiction being history
> or the other way round, but communication across and between
> different theoretical formulations.  Rather than collapsing
> all the so called rigid boundaries by renaming everything
> with quotation marks, i.e., "history as fiction," and
> setting up agons, like the one you started with--if two
> historian don't agree at least one might be said to be
> writing fiction--why not recognize the urgent need to toss
> the jargon and semantics and  language games out in the
> interest of communication so that achievements made possible
> by one framework or formulation may be incorporated in
> another.