MDDM Subjunctive Spaces

[jbor]

on 26/11/01 3:46 AM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

> "To concentrate on the sideshadowed ideas and events,
> on what did not happen, does not cast oubt on the
> historicity of what occured but views it as one among
> a range of possibilities, a number of which might,
> with equal plausibilty, have taken place instead.  The
> one that actually was realized, though, exists from
> then on with all the weight afforded by the
> singularity of what we might call event-ness.  Onlythe
> brightness of an actual event can cast sufficient
> shadow for sideshadowing to matter ...." (p. 7)
> 
> Morson and Bernstein's books, by the way, are
> expressly presented as companion pices, an were
> initially conceived as parts of one large work.  But
> alternate history, the counterfactual, the
> allohistorical, is a fascination of mine, e.g., ...

Thanks for the quotations. I agree that Bakhtin is especially relevant. His
notion of the "chronotope" fits perfectly with the stuff you've cited here.
But I also think there are two separate issues which are being conflated.
Certainly Pynchon represents "alternate histories", such as the fabulation
of Mason's visit to the Jenkin's Ear Museum in Ch. 17. But he is also
concerned to present his historical fictions from within a present moment
(in the past), rather than retrospectively (from a vantage where hindsight
is permitted a role), and the contemporaneity of his narrators, such as
Wicks, or Mason, is invariably marked. In other words, there is always (the
pretence of, at least) a certain fidelity to a particular historical moment
in the ideas and attitudes which colour the representation of character and
event in the narratives. Now, the subjunctive is/was a grammatical mood
which opens up possibilities of alternate futurities from the vantage of a
present point in time. So, in the very broadest of terms, from the vantage
of 1762, Mason and Dixon could have gone on to America together, or they
could have gone on to do any number of other things. That indeterminacy can
be and could've been expressed by the use of modal auxiliaries (might,
could, should), but invariably these formulations are effected to verge on
notions of permission or authority, or finite cause and effect, rather than
on freedom of opportunity and true indetermination. This latter is the realm
of the subjunctive, and it's these subjunctive spaces which Pynchon is
concerned to investigate and reinvigorate in and through his texts.

best