Recent Chapter

[jbor]

As I think I mentioned, thanks are due to you for your hosting, and 
certainly no offense to you was intended in my reply to "Max's" post. I did
find his post offensive, I will admit, though as a general rather than
personal insult from someone who has contributed very little other than
insult and upset here. But that issue is of no real consequence.

To return to the chapter, in all that citation from secondary sources we did
seem to lose sight of those comments re. history and Stencil's atypicality
vis à vis his civil servant status, within the text itself:

    People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built
    his [sic] own rathouse of history's rags and straws. In the city of
    New York alone there were at a rough estimate five million different
    rathouses. God knew what was going on in the minds of cabinet ministers,
    heads of state and civil servants in the capitals of the world.
    Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in action.
    If a normal distribution of types prevailed they did.

    Stencil fell outside the pattern. [ ... ]

I'm not sure that the novel is in any way suggesting that a conspiracy-maker
such as Stencil is somehow more accurate or insightful than any of those
five million others. That his "rathouse" of history is not superior to
anybody else's is what seems to me to be one point, and that his lethargy
and "vegetation" are unusual for someone in his self-conferred role/s seems
to be another.

I like what Holton has to say about Pynchon's texts being set at certain
moments which are "aporias of epistemology", and I think Hayden White's
writings (and, perhaps, those of Dominick LaCapra also), in their
questioning of the authority or privileging of "the archives" as some sort
of "unprocessed historical record," are relevant here as well.

For example, White writes, with some derision:

    That language ... is the *instrument of mediation* between consciousness
    and the world that consciousness inhabits ... will not be news to
    literary theorists, but it has not yet reached the historians buried in
    the archives hoping, by what they call a "sifting of the facts" or "the
    manipulation of the data", to find the form of the reality that will
    serve as the object of representation in the account that they will
    write "when all the facts are known" and they have finally "got the
    story straight." (White, _Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
    Criticism_, (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1987: pp. 125-6)

See also:

Hayden White, _Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century
Europe_ (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1973)

Dominick LaCapra, _Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts,
Language_, (Cornell U., Ithaca, 1983)

LaCapra, _History and Criticism_, (Cornell U., Ithaca, 1983)

best



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>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
>

> As I recall, discussion typically,

snip