re MDDM 35 Christ and History

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Terrance wrote:
 
> RC has been read as both the
> deconstructing postmodern anti-historian and a mouthpiece for the
> Christian Values espousing mystic, TRP. Both readings make little sense
> to me. What about the book? M&D? Sam asks a very good question. What are
> these little bits doing here in this book? 

Terry Eagleton in his "Illusions of Postmodernism" polemically describes
the postmodernist concept of History:

"History, as opposed to history with a small h, is for postmodernism a
teleological affair. It depends, that is, on the belief that the world
is moving purposefully towards some predetermined goal which is immanent
within it even now, and which provides the dynamics of this inexorable
unfurling. History has a logic of its own, and co-opts our own
apparently free projects for its own inscrutable ends. There may be
set-backs here and there, but generally speaking history is unilinear,
progressive and deterministic."

(He goes on to say that it would be useless to try and find "people who
hold this belief, because there aren't any", arguing that the 20th
century has made it clear to everybody that "none of the great utopian
or Enlightenment ideals seemed any nearer to being realized".)

RC does not use the word "history" in this sense, even though he spells
it with a capital H. For him history is "not a Chain of single Links"
i.e. not "unilinear, progressive and deterministic". By this, of course,
he nevertheless implies that there are people or institutions who
perceive history as a chain of single links and not as a "great
disorderly Tangle of Lines". He does not explicitly mention the
political aspect of this notion, but rebellious young Ethelmer does:
"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in
Interests that must ever prove base." And that a "(...) a single
Version, in proceeding from a single Authority,-" is highly dangerous,
we may add. I believe we have to read Ethelmer's dispute with his
father, a lawyer, as a supplement to the excerpt from Cherrycoke. This
is not about the pros or cons of history in general, but about two
different concepts of history.

What are these bits doing in the book? They help to support one main
theme of M&D, namely the relationship between facts and fiction, or
reason and imagination. Most importantly, they can be read as
poetological statements. M&D, after all, is a novel in which history is
"tended lovingly and honorably" by a major fabulist, counterfeiter,
ballad-monger and crank. P himself is an historian in the sense that
Cherrycoke describes. But M&D is not only a work of imagination but a
book based on solid research. An essential part of the work of the
storyteller Pynchon consists of the gathering of facts. The historian is
also a lawyer. Thus, it would be wrong to read the poetological
statement implied in the excerpt from Christ and History as an
expression of Romantic poetics a la Shelley's "Defence of Poetry". To
write history in this sense means to be poised between the lawyer's
chronological and factual chain of cause and effect on the one side and
the people's ahistoric myth and remembrance on the other side. (It is no
accident, by the way, that Cherrycoke uses the word "Remembrance".
Compare Luke 22,19: "And he took the bread and gave thanks, and brake
it, and gave unto them, saying: This is my body which is given for you:
this do in remembrance of me." Cherrycoke is alluding to the eucharist,
i.e. Christ is present in the paragraph about history.)

Got to stop here, though I could go on for a while. A few questions and
remarks: 

Christ, Terrance has said, according to Catholic dogma is ahistorical.
This may well be the case, and it is certainly the view of mystics like
Meister Eckhart. Yet St. Augustine created the concept of linear time
and laid the groundwork for the idea of a teleological process, i.e. for
the postmodernist view of History which Eagleton satirizes.

Ethelmer says that history is innocent. This is an outrageous statement,
is it not?

What's the relation between Christ and truth in the excerpt from Christ
and History? Between Christ and factual veracity?

Thomas