MDDM Subjunctive Spaces

[Dave Monroe]

First off, pardon, ev'ryone, my particularly egregious
typos )corrected below) in those excerpts from the
Morson and Bernstein books.  Was posting from a bagel
shop where I'd already frozen up one machine whilst on
my way to a movie (Jacques Rivette's Va Savoir, by the
way, an alleged romantic comedy the funniest line of
which was a Heidegger gag ...), and I already had to
retype virtually that entire post.

Of course, it's always the "e" and "s" keys ...

Gary Saul Morson is, of course, one of yr major
contemporary Bakhtinians, and I skipped his recap of
MB's "chronotope" et al. figuring, well, those who
know, know, and anyone else interested can look
Bakhtin up easily enough.  And I did have to type
everything twice, so ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> on 26/11/01 3:46 AM, Dave Monroe at
> davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

From, again, Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom:
The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 1994),
"Introduction," pp. 1-14 ...
 
> > "To concentrate on the sideshadowed ideas and
> > events, on what did not happen, does not cast
> > doubt 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.  Only the brightness of an
> > actual event can cast sufficient shadow for
> > sideshadowing to matter ...." (p. 7)
> 
> 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.

Well, from what I can tell, this is all covered in
Morson's "Introduction," even in what little I posted
of it, so ... 

But keep in mind that the novel was written and
published, the story is narrated, and and "we"--and
this is where meaning is constituted here--are (and
always already will be) reading it all in "presents" 
(ca. 1972-97, 1786, 1997-?) in which much depicted
within, as Morson puts it, "exists ... with all the
weight afforded by the singularity of what we might
call event-ness."  Pynchon indeed has the freedom to
put M 'n' D through all sorts of wackiness not to be
found in "the" historical record(s), but "we" know, at
least in outline, "What Really Happened" (and I've
been making an effort to fill some details in those
outlines as well here) ...  

And since we've already had the Seahorse and St.
Helena, for example, and despite the Learned English
Dog and the Octuple Gloucester (presented as a
fabulation anyway) and the Jenkins' Ear Museum (where
DID that ear end up?  The Shepard squared novel has
its own answer, but ...)--by the way, these aren't so
much "alternate histories" here as embellishments on
actual(ized) history, they don't really affect the
outcome of the narrative vis a vis the real-historical
events at stake here, with which their is, of course,
much, even overarching, congruence--at the end of Ch.
17, no matter what ((Pynchon says) Cherrycoke says)
Mason says he thinks ("the two of huz, in America." "I
don't think so" [p. 182]), we can be pretty sure
they'll end up surveying that Line.  And, of course,
they do ...

Of course, one (set of) event(s) that undoubtedly
(though not, I'll grant, in the latter case here,
absolutely necessarily) looms o'er both Pynchon's
writing and "our" reading of the novel is not
necessarily "presented" in the novel, that is, the
American Civil War (1861-1865) ...

Pynchon's subjunctivities seem almost exclusively
(hesitant to say categorically "always" here) to be,
indeed, sideshadows cast in the "brightness" of actual
events.  The famous example is, of course, that road
(always already) not taken in Gravity's Rainbow, the
Slothropite heresy of "On Preterition," though this,
of course, is a fabulation as well.  But the suggested
is, things COULD have been different, but ...

But, again, from Morson, such sideshadowing ...

"calls attention to the ways in which narratives,
which often turn earlier presents into mere pasts,
tend to create a single line of development out of a
multiplicity.  Alternatives once visible disappear
from view and an anachronistic sense of the past
surreptitiously infects our understanding....
sideshadowing restores some of the presentness that
has been lost.  It alters the way we think about
earlier events and the narrative models used to
describe them." (pp. 6-7)

In Mason & Dixon, as I recall--and I believe this is
where the thread began here ...--the notable moment in
this regard is that passage, "Does Brittania, when she
sleeps, dream?  Is America her dream? [...] serving as
a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that
may yet be true," and so on (p. 345).   And Terrnace
has already mentioned, excerpted from ...

McHale, Brian.  "Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or,
   a Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space."  Pynchon and
   Mason & Dixon.  Ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving
   Malin.  Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000.  43-62.

But maybe I'll make a pss through it here shortly ...

But, again, what lends such pasages in Pynchon their
particular poignancy ("A pesky Penguin ploy!") is
precisely (...) "our" vantage point, from/at/by which
those possibilities, those subjunctivities, have
already been foreclosed, and, perhaps (and perhaps
this is Pynchon's point [...]) not for the better ...

But point well taken that, unlike in, say, Gravity's
Rainbow, such subjunctivities are being narrated as if
they were not yet, within the events being narrated,
even, to some extent, with the time of narration
(i.e., 1786), (always) already resolved ...

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