Recent Chapter

[Dave Monroe]

I did want to mention that all of the hosts I've been
a guest of here since signing on have never been
anything less than hospitable (reminds me, trans. of
Derrida and  Dufourmantelle's Of Hospitality out,
really should have cited at my intro.), and I do hope
that Th' Dude wasn't implying otherwise, though he
certainly can be read as such.  Gotta run for the day,
but White and LaCapra are favorites of mine, off the
top of my head, I'd throw in Michel de Certeau's The
Writing of History as well, but i'm sure I'll do so
soon enough.  but "Stencilization" will indeed be the
topc of the day, or week, or twoo weeks, at least, no?
 And have you thought about atking up The Mighty
Quali's mantle yourself?  I'm becoming tempte, but ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> ----------
> >From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
> >
> 
> > As I recall, discussion typically,
> 
> snip


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