History's rathouses & Re: blicero's sexuality

[jbor]

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

> But we all build our own
> rathouses, we all perform our own stencilizations ...

The use of "rathouse" as metaphor is both pertinent and Pynchon's own
invention I believe. It takes us back to Fra Fairing's Parish, of course,
the epitome or embodiment of a "rathouse", and the added implication in this
subsequent expository passage is that what we are each building from
"history's rags and straws" in our constructions of identity/consciousness
and courses of "action" are in fact prisons -- just like Fra Fairing.

The sewer sections in _V._, analogised in the text as a place of seclusion
where human consciousnesses might achieve individuation or indeed make
rational sense of the world (history), recall sequences in other postmodern
fictions: Stanley's "Bathysiderodromophobia" -- apparently, a fear of
subways -- in Gaddis's _The Recognitions_; Sontag's _Death Kit_, where
America itself is encrypted as an underground necropolis; scenes and
settings in many of DeLillo's novels (_Ratner's Star_, _Great Jones Street_,
_Mao II_ all feature this motif, and the opening of _Libra_ where L.H.
Oswald stands at the front of a subway train as it "smashed through the
dark", and after the assassination his happy contemplation of living in a
tiny gaol cell and that image of Nicholas Branch writing the official CIA
history in his claustrophobic "room of theories", are perhaps the most
telling recurrences of it there); all culminating, perhaps, in Gass's _The
Tunnel_.

Conversely, references to Plato's allegory of the cave in _The Republic_,
that unenlightened or "irrational" state of human consciousness wherein mere
moving shadows are perceived as reality, figure in John Updike's texts.

Gass's very good 1982 essay 'Representation and the War for Reality', is
evocative of this tension and of how it self-refers to the role of the
artist as well:

    We must never forget how important prison has been to the art of
    fiction, for it is always within walls, literal like Malory's and
    Dostoevsky's arrest, or, like Lowry's, dreamed; whether of cork and
    self-imposed like Proust's, like Lawrence's, of flesh, or because, as in
    the case of Borges and Joyce, the writer is going blind; whether the
    world outside is defined, like Balzac's, from the middle of a
    shade-drawn, coffee-stimulated night as still and solid as a cloud;
    whether in sexual retirement or alcoholic haze, Céline's embittered
    hate; it is always from the point of view of the confined, the shut-in,
    that the work is performed; and the scenes of public life we see when we
    look through the pen appear only at the ink end where there seems to be
    a light, because the cell of the self stares back at us from the
    other. (Gass, 'Representation and the War for Reality' in _Habitations
    of the Word: Essays_, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985, p. 87)

So, indeed, Pynchon's point indeed seems to be that we all do build our own
rathouses, trace out our stencillizations: Eddins, you, me, other readers
here, Stencil, Pointsman, Blicero, Pynchon himself. I can only agree with
Kai and Jeremy that the imposition of value judgements on the basis of such
rathouses and stencils is entirely arbitrary and merely reveals the
prejudices of the beholder rather than any universal order or ultimate
truth.

best

p.s. My preferred model for the running of a group read hosting is that
perfected by Chris Karatnysky and others, whereby a short summary of the
chapter or section is followed by brief notes on the text and some focus
questions to encourage discussion amongst the participants. Nonetheless, I
do not begrudge you the amount of additional work you chose to do in lieu of
these for your spot.