History's rathouses & Re: blicero's sexuality

[Dave Monroe]

See? Discussion. Yes, indeedy do, we ALL rathouse,
stencilize, whatever, we ALL make our valorizations,
devlorizations, supplementations, you, me, The Whole
List Crew, right on up to Mr. thomas ruggles Pynchon,
Jr. himself.  Again, keep in mind, you can't have yr
(or, for that matter, allegedly, Pynchon's) absolute
relativism and yr very own value judgments, too. 
Better yet, keep it onscreen ...


--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. 
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/