VV(11): Rathouse cont'd ...

[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 I'm building my own "rathouse" of Holton's "rags and straws" as 
well.  Continuing on then in Robert Holton, "In the Rathouse of History with 
Thomas Pynchon: Rereading V.,"  Textual Practice 2, No. 3 (Winter 1988): 
324-344 ...

The problem of separate, perhaps incommensurable, worlds of experience, and 
of a concurrent separation in the representation of that experience, has 
long been a central one for Pynchon, and he has often been quite specific 
about the social and political implications.  (328)

His own early short fiction often turns on themes of class or racial 
separation, anticipating the social turbulence of the sixties.  About that 
era, Pynchon writes:

The success of the "new left" ... was ... limited by the failure of college 
kids and blue collar workers to get together politically.  One reason was 
the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of 
communication between the two groups. (SL, pp. xv-xvi [ellipses in Holton's 
text])

As its title suggests, one of Pynchon's few published essays, "A Journey 
into the Mind of Watts," is an attempt to map one such force field ... (328)

Images such as "the edge of the world" and "invisible force fields" posit a 
universe made up of non-synchronous systems of "discrepant experiences," and 
Pynchon's frequent invocation of this difference, whatever its 
epistemological consequences, is firmly based in social and historical 
observation.  It is by means of this firm grounding in concrete social 
experience that he avoids the trivialization that can be a consequence of 
moral or cultural relativism. (328-9)

[see Ernst Bloch, "Nonsynchronism and the Obligations to Its Dialectics," 
New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977); cf. Johannes Fabian, Time and the 
Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 1983) on 
"allochronism"]

The "invisible force fields" separating cultural groups find metaphorical 
expression in V. as well as in the profusion of siege imagery ....  The 
military siege with its focus on a wall separating opposing groups finds its 
epistemological correlative in the idea of fundamentally irreconcilable 
discrepant experience ... (329-30)

The most extensive exploration of this problem in V., however, revolves 
around certain aspects of racial difference, examining a series of critical 
moments in the history of European imperialism when the West quite 
deliberately and strategically denied the validity and the reality of 
non-synchronous Third World experience as part of a brutal enforcement of 
its own priorities. (330)

V. is, in a sense, a parody of those books--by Kipling, Buchan, Haggard, et 
al.--that contributed to the construction of the "manichean" racial 
difference that JanMohammed locates at the very heart of that colonialist 
literary genre. (330)

[here see A.R. JanMohammed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function 
of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature," Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 
1985)]

Clear though Pynchon's political position is here, perhaps the most 
critically neglected aspect of V. is its political use of epistemological 
and historiographical problems as a means to break down the wall of 
objective realism, a wall that has protected the hegemonic culture of 
Western Society. (330)

The general epistemological dilemma in V. is given one central formulation 
by British agent Sidney Stencil, who "remembered times when whole 
embassiesful of personnel had simply run amok and gibbering in the streets 
when confronted with a Situation which refused to make sense no matter who 
looked at it, or from what angle."  As a result he problematizes the very 
existence of an objective reality.  "He had decided long ago that no 
Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those 
who happened to be in on it at any specific moment" (V., p. 189).  (330)

... Stencil Sr has developed an alternative to objective appraisal: a form 
of epistemological teamwork.  But this approach too is not without 
difficulties ... (330)

If, as Lyotard argues, the terror and the sublimity of the event lie in part 
in its unrepresentability, then for Sidney Stencil there is at least safety 
in numbers.  Truth, or knowledge, thus ultimately becomes a problem not of 
verification (or at least not of verification alone) but of consensus, 
privileging the homogeneous over the heterogeneous.  In fact, one of the 
lessons of V. concerns the final impossibility of representing the world 
coherently and full from any single perspective ... (331)

... Stencil Sr stresses the need for a "degree of rapport" among those 
attempting to form the composite picture of its, suggesting that otherwise 
they would "form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous" (V., 
p. 189).  The word "mongrel" carries here, as usual, a pejorativee sense, 
and in V., with its acute awareness of race and colonialism, it carries a 
less abstract meaning as well--a racial mixture.  Sidney Stencil's 
insistence on a "degree of rapport" suggests an ethnocentrism which serves 
to protect his version of The Situation from epistemological and political 
dissolution and guarantees the exclusion of ... discrepant or 
non-synchronous experience ....

[reminds me here of the critique of pragmatism in Cornel West, The American 
Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 
1989)]

In the world of Stencil Jr, however, that difference--while still 
central--is far less divisive.  Racial purity, a fetishized ideal in the 
historical sections of V., is at times almost parodied.  The members of the 
Whole Sick Crew and those with whom they associate are, by and large, as 
Rachel puts it, ""Deracinated" (V., p. 382) in both senses of the word: 
rootless and without sharp racial distinctions ... (331)

While they are no means oblivious to their particular racial backgrounds, 
with the exception of Mafia Winsome this awareness is generally not used as 
a principle of exclusion.  (331)

Malta ... a motley of races" (V., p. 310) (331-2)

Ironically, when stencil Jr tries to represent The Situation of 1898, his 
narrators constitute precisely the sort of "mongrel" assortment his father 
would have rejected .... (332)

... a non-homogeneous interpretation of reality.  nevertheless, Stencil Jr 
is finally something like White's traditional historian attempting to find 
both meaning and narrative coherence on history.  His facts, of course, are 
incomplete, so in an effort to represent certain historical moments of 
importance to his overall narrative he must go beyond hard facts, blurring 
further the line separating fiction and history.  History according to 
Herbert stencil, as his name might suggests, is made to fit a pattern.  Yet 
within the novel it is largely through Stencil's narratives that we have 
access to history ... (332)

... focalization or point of view determines a great deal ... (332)

Pynchon's use of multiple focalizers undermines any single sense of norms as 
interpretive guides ... (332)

We are reminded, however, of the difficulty of doing so, of escaping our 
towers, by the fact that both the focalizers who provide a centre of 
consciousness and to some degree the events related have been "Stencilized." 
  Yet balancing this narrative instability is the historical detail ... 
(333)

To be cont'd ...

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