VV(11): Rathouse conc'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)

Much of the remainder of Holton's essay discusses our forthcoming Chapter 9, 
"Mondaugen's Story," so I'm going to hold some of that in reserve until 
VV(12), but I think you all will get the idea here, and I'll include the 
necessary V. references, so ... so, to conclude from Robert Holton, "In the 
Rathouse of History with Thomas Pynchon: Rereading V.,"  Textual Practice 2, 
No. 3  (Winter 1988): 324-344 ...

It is worth pointing out that, whatever the epistemological traps that lie 
tangled within Stencil's obsession with V., the subtext of every historical 
narrative he produces has to do with imperialist conquest or violence, with 
a steady current of racism. (333)

It is in these themes of race and colonial history that the continuity of V. 
lies, and it is a continuity that remains undisturbed by the epistemological 
aporias presented in the novel.  However much the possibility of final 
knowledge is undermined and narrative shown to be unstable, Pynchon seems at 
times to address the reader directly and without a trace of epistemological 
distress ... (p. 333; e.g., here, for Holton, V., p. 244-5)

Pynchon combines historical facts, even statistics, with what seems at times 
an almost allegorical symbolism in order to sharpen his critique. (334)

Mondaugen, at one point during the siege party, sets off in search of the 
power generator ....  The generator he actually finds is of a more symbolic 
nature than he had intended ...

[and here follows a discussion of the "planetarium" @ V., p. 239-40.   
Technically, this is more an orrery, I think, but ... but cf. the 
planetarium trope in The Crying of Lot 49 (e.g., p. 16)]

Again, it is possible to read this as a demonstration that love (or, at 
least, desire) makes the world go round.  And Pynchon, with his fine sense 
of cliché, no doubt intends this.  But the final allusion is to slavery, 
oppression....  For the reader at least there should be less ambiguity 
surrounding the power generator and the generations of slave who have 
powered this society ... (334-5)

[then the scarred Bondel, V., p. 240 ...]

... the wounds represented here as smiles and winks can be read as the 
inscription of the desire and power of the oppressor on the literal body of 
the slave--from the point of view of the torturer, a point of view that 
Mondaugen has passively accepted. (335)

[the ravine, V., p. 279 ...]

The scarred back of the Bondel can be considered a kind of text that can be 
read in different ways in different cultural and historical situations (even 
as "smiles" and "winks"), but the existence of the scars themselves in not 
in doubt.  Although "history is not a text," writes jameson, "it is 
inaccessible to us except in textual form."  Here the text of history is 
inscribed in the scars of the backs of its victims. (335)

[and here see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a 
Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981), p. 35; Michel de 
Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Mpls: U of Minn P, 1986), p. 
227.  Cf. Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony"?]

There is a clear moral and historical imperative governing Pynchon's 
representation of "real" historical events and their apparent pattern.  It 
can be detected perhaps in the way the Bondel's post-revolutionary song (a 
failed revolution) echoes in V. through decades and across cultures: in 
Porcepic's appropriation of African polyrhythms for white  European 
modernist music (V., p. 402) and in Sphere's black American jazz with its 
"rising rhythms of African nationalism" (V., p. 60). (336)

The recurrence of mirror imagery in discussions of V. is symptomatic of a 
prevalent problem in postmodernism: the possibility that an acceptance of 
relativity entails a trivializing of interpretation.  (336)

A dangerous tendency of cultural relativism, Fabian adds, is the fact "that 
such mirrors, of placed at propitious angles, also have the miraculous power 
to make real objects disappear." (336, citing Fabian, Time and the Other, 
pp. 44-5]

Yet this need not be the case.  There is a corollary to mirror imagery: if 
placed at certain other propitious angles, mirrors have the equally 
miraculous power to present objects and perspectives previously unavailable 
to perception.  Pynchon's postmodern mirrors may indeed conceal many things 
and present many illusions and deceptions, but they also re-present 
historical situations and events that had hitherto remained obscured from 
sight.  Under the cover of historical relativism, rather than making events 
disappear, he is making present what seems to be a remarkable history of 
western racism from the atrocities of colonialism to the somewhat more 
covert racism of America at the time of writing. (336-7)

It is also not entirely accurate to claim, as Hite does, that "in V. ... 
nobody seems to learn anything."  Sphere, Rachel and Maijstral all seem to 
progress in their understanding of the world.  And, while it is true that 
"Benny Profane's last words in the book are 'Offhand I'd say I haven't 
learned a goddam thing'" (V., p. 454), Profane is not set up as an ideal or 
universal specimen.  Nor is Stencil, whose policy towards knowledge is 
either obsessive or "Approach and avoid" (V., p. 55), to be considered a 
universal epistemological model ... (337)

Surely there is a middle ground between Profane, who claims to understand 
nothing and learn nothing, and Stencil, who seeks to comprehend the totality 
of experience.... As readers we need not choose only between the two; 
instead, it ought to be possible to learn something ourselves. (337)

The point here is neither to hypostatize facts more to relativize them out 
of existence.  As Said contends, "Facts do not speak fo themselves but 
require a socially acceptable narrativeto absorb, sustain and circulate 
them." (337)

[Edward Said, "Permission to Narrate," London Review of Books 6, 3 (16 
February 1984)]

Pynchon's history is an attempt to remind us about certain aspects of our 
heritage that, a de Certeau has observed, we might prefer to overlook as we 
select materials from which to construct our narrative  of the past. (337)

And, no matter how much it is argued that the past is our own creation, we 
create it out of a limited supply of building materials: "People read what 
news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's 
rags and straws.... Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in 
action" (V., p. 225).  Doubtless everyone's version of history shows up in 
action--which is why it is so important to examine the construction of 
history ... (337-8)

The building of a historical rathouse is not simply a matter of jouissance, 
of the free play of imagination ... (338; by the way, it is with this bit 
that J. Kerry Grant glosses "rathouse" in A Companion  to V.)

In Pynchon's work, however,history is in no danger of collapse. (338)

... the strange history of Egypt's Lake Mareotis ... (338)

[here follows a comparison of V.'s "Stencilized" "impersonation" of this 
event vs. E.M. Forster's narration of it in Alexandria: A History and A 
Guide, which actually casts the Stecilization in a favorable light, as a 
sort of revisionist history--q.v. ...]

... the rooms in Pynchon's rathouse exhibit a radical an consistent 
rereading of European imperialism. (340)

Yet Pynchon is no dogmatist: any final interpretation--of history or of his 
story--remains thwarted....  Pynchon's project is not primarily a 
reconstruction of history from the point of view of its victims ....  
Instead h works to decentre the possibility of an established authoritative 
account of historical events. (340)

While V. does not, by itself, articulate the discourse of the other to any 
great extent, by fragmenting the monolithic Western narrative of objective 
historical realism it works towards opening the discursive space in which 
that narrative of alterity, non-synchronous and discrepant experience, may 
be articulated and even understood. (340)

... in V., written while the American civil rights movement gathered 
momentum, it is racial difference that is explored most fully. (341)

The end of the narrative of history on a global scale is apocalypse, the 
sublime spectacle of unrepresentable terror.... throughout V., the 
possibility echoes that the end of the story, the end of history, may be 
imminent, as "the balloon" appears set to "go up" on a number of occasions 
and Western society seems about to tear itself apart.  The novel ends as the 
troops prepare for yet another neo-colonial showdown--Suez.  "The Middle 
East," says Stencil Jr, "cradle of civilization, may yet be its grave" (V., 
p. 387).  This ending signals an attempt to connect the historical record 
and the novel itself to present conditions in the world, to historicize 
contemporary politics in a radical context.  Pynchon observes that, although 
the First World War takes on the power of an "apocalyptic showdown" in V., 
"Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too.  It was bad enough in '59 
and is much worse now ..." (SL, p. xxix) (342)

Also included as Chapter 7 of Robert Holton, Jarring Witnesses: Modern 
Fiction and the Representation of History (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 
1994), which also features chapters on Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, E.M. 
Forster's Parade's End, William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, and works by 
various African-American female novelists.  Q.v.  I'd esp. like to thank 
both the person who pointed that out to me and the person who sent along a 
copy of the original publication ...
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