VV(11): Rathouse ...

[Dave Monroe]

"The spring thus wore on, large currents and small eddies alike resulting in 
headlines.  People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built 
his own rathouse of history's rags and straws." (v., Ch. 8, Sec. iv, p. 225)

Just as we each build our "own rathouse" of Pynchon's "rags and straws," no? 
  Though I'm not so sure "a normal distribution of types" prevails here ...

http://www.stat.wvu.edu/SRS/Modules/Normal/normal.html

http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/normal_distribution.html

http://psych.colorado.edu/~mcclella/java/normal/accurateNormal.html

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~naras/jsm/NormalDensity/NormalDensity.html

But leaving aside for the moment the similarity the thermo- and/or fluid 
dynamic--"large currents and small eddies alike"--"rathouse" of history 
proposed here to the nonlinear (chaos, catastrophe theoretical) dynamics of 
more recent "rathouses," from Robert Holton, "In the Rathouse of History 
with Thomas Pynchon: Rereading V.,"  Textual Practice 2, No. 3 (Winter 
1988): 324-344 ...

Hayden White's argument "that the conviction that one can meake sense of 
history stands on the same level of epistemic plausibility as the conviction 
that it makes no sense whatsoever" seems to echo a recurring concern in 
Thomas Pynchon's work....  An inevitable problem then arsises ... throughout 
the novels--is this pattern, order, meaning (if located) a property of the 
world and of history?  Or is it a projection of the ordering perception of 
the one who is searching for meaning?  If the order or meaning perceived is 
primarily a property of the interpreter's perception, how, then, is that 
sublime object of interpretation--historical reality--to be approached?  
What are the political implications of this problem? (324)

[See here Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and 
Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), p. 73.  
Holton abbreviates this as CF from here on out ...]

V. explores the aporias of epistemology at a series of specific and critical 
junctures in modern Western history, documenting the beakdown of white 
imperialist hegemony. (324)

There is an almost Pynchonesque irony in the way in which many critics have 
maintained a blind spot in their raedings of Pynchon's texts, a blind spot 
that occludes the explicitly social dimensions of the work.  (324)

... Pynchon as a profoundly political and historical novelist whose 
conecption of teh political and historical field has much in common with 
contemporary cultural and historiographical theory.  (325)

According to White, prior to the formation of teh dsicipline of history in 
the nineteenth century, teh subject was considered a branch of the more 
general field of rhetoric ... (325)

As history came to constitute a distinct discipline, rules of evidence and a 
more rigorous sense of factuality came into play, not only regulating the 
kinds of narrative a historian could produce but also altering the 
underlying conception of the nature of the historical field itself ... (325)

White goes on to relatie tehse dichotomous conceptions of history to the 
consurrent debate on the nature of the sublime and the beautiful.  The 
irreducible confusion and the ultimately unrepresentable nature of the 
historical field are associated with the idea of the sublime, while the 
conception of history as possessing order, logic, or sense falls into the 
aesthetic category of the beautiful.  As aesthetics superseded rhetoric and 
the beautiful gradually displaced the sublime as a category of judgement, 
teh narratives both of history and of fiction were expected to display a 
more thorough sense of coherence and a fidelity to "the facts," such that it 
could be seen as one chapter in a narrative that, if extended long enough, 
could tehoretically recount and account for all of history.  This view of 
history is supportible only by exclusion of teh historical sublime: history 
as an awesome, perhaps incomprehensible, terrifying, multifarious, 
unrepresentable spectacle. (325)

... the problem is not that history cannot be intrerpreted as much as the 
fact that it can be, endlessly, it seems, and in contradictory ways. (326)

Ricouer (326)

Similarly, Lyotard argues that the sublimity of the pure event subverts any 
attempt at final or full representation, and furthermore that the sublime is 
thus precisely what must be repressed in order for representation to occur. 
(326)

[and here see Jean-Francois Lyotard, "the Sublime and the Avant-Garde," 
Paragraph 6 (1985), rept. in Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections 
on Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991)]

Selection of the events deemed worthy of narration, of narrative point of 
view, and of the narrative techniques employed thus fall partly under the 
compulsion or need for narrative coherence, a compulsion that prompts White 
to ask "what kind of notion of reality authorizes construction of a 
narrative account of reality in which continuity rather than discontinuity 
governs the articulation of the discourse" (CF, p. 10).  (326)

It may not be stretching the point too much to infer taht problems of 
narrative continuity have to do with problems of authority in a more general 
sense as well.  History is generally, as the saying goes, written from the 
vantage-point of the victors; to this might be added Fanon's observation 
that objectivity has always been on the side of the colonizer.  (326)

[see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963); cf. 
Walter Benjamin: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the 
same time a document of barbarism."  "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 
Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968)]

The postmodern version of the historical sublime differs, however, from its 
predecessors.  Jameson remarks that the sublime

is no longer subjective in the older sense that a personality is standing in 
front of the Alps and knowing the limits of the human ego.  On the contrary, 
it is a kind of non-humanist experience of limits beyond which you get 
dissolved.

This sense of dissloution that marks the sublime can be taken to refer as 
well to the dissolution of the continuity and coherence of narrative an its 
claim to represent realistically. (327)

[see Anders Stephenson, "Regarding Postmodernism: A Conversation with 
Fredric Jameson," Social Text 17 (Fall 1987), pp. 30-1, rept. in Andrew 
Ross, ed., Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism (Mpls: U of Minn 
P, 1988.)]

If narrative coherence is threatened ... then the cohesion and legitimacy of 
the social system are also being threatened.... the weakening of the 
authority of the narratives through which society understands and authorizes 
itself ....  It is surely no coincidence that much postmodern fiction was 
produced in a period of social upheaval, a period during which many of the 
basic beliefs of European and North American society were subjected to 
radical critique. (327)

This heterogeneous discourse would by definition include teh alterity which 
has been repressed by an imperialist culture and its totalizing narratives.  
In this sense postmodern historical relativism can be seen as the 
dissolution or deligitimization of any one cultural group's claim to sole 
authority in the construction of historical narrative, an authority that is 
ultimately political in nature. (327)

To be cont'd ...
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