MDDM 35 Christ and History

[jbor]

Sam wrote:
> 
> Chapter 35 opens with an excerpt from the Rev'd Cherrycoke, Christ and
> History.  
> 
> I'm curious, and maybe this has been discussed already, but how do these
> excerpts get into the story?  Surely the Rev'd isn't reading them in... but
> they have been added later...by who? Cherrycoke?

Possible, but I tend to think that it's more likely to be a chapter motto
inserted by Pynchon's implied narrator, just like the quotations which open
Ch. 10 (94) and Ch. 26 (257). Ives' opening remark is answering a question
which someone else in the room has posed; he's not commenting on the
quotation from Wicks.
 
I think the (unstated) question Ives is responding to might go back to the
previous conversation about M's (& D's?) visit to Lancaster Town, something
along the lines of "How does one find out for certain whether or not Dixon
accompanied Mason to Lancaster?" Ives had tried to contest the version being
presented by Wicks from the "evidence" of Mason's "Field-Record", the use of
the first person pronouns in that primary source. (341.6) The excerpt from
Wicks's manuscript at 349 is a self-conscious defence of his use of hearsay
("Dixon told me .... ") in composing the historical recount in the previous
chapter, in answer to Ives' challenge. I think the fact that Wicks's next
story is an autobiographical reminiscence - with Mason and Dixon absent from
it - is also a response to Ives' rebuff.
 
> Here Cherrycoke asserts that history is not truth or one official account of
> events past, but rather a collection, a story, a perception of events, gossip,
> and such, combining multiple views to arrive at a disorderly tangle of stories
> creating a common past.

Yes, but this is in itself only one perception of quite a number of
different perceptions - let's say meta-perceptions, perceptions about what
"History" and "Truth" in fact are, let alone the relationship between them -
which are presented in the discussion which opens the chapter. The
conversation which opens Ch. 35 is another example of Pynchon's dialectical
approach. Who is "correct"? Which voice speaks for Pynchon? We simply can't
say.
 
> Historical Method for Cherrycoke is then that of collecting gossip, spying,
> and then entertaining?

Yes, and as Thomas notes, it is a wryly reflexive critique or parody of
Pynchon's own process of "historical" composition in the novel.

> Lawyers on the other hand create the truth - official account and chronology
> of events - out of facts, evidence, with the most convincing argument being
> the true state.

I think that Wicks (and Pynchon) take yet another opportunity to have a
swipe at lawyers, casting them here as 'spin merchants' who substitute their
"Facts", like "Play-things", for some more reputable definition of "Truth"
(or "Absolute History", as David put it).
 
> The name of this piece is "Christ and History."  The historical Christ (that
> of the bible? - but then wasn't Paul a lawyer?) is what? a collection of
> recollections... gospels and letters... not so much a true, or factual,
> account of Christ.

I think it's just Wicks's way of pulling rank. For him, Christ is the
ultimate "Truth", beside which all else is trivial and illusory.
 
snip
> 
> What does "Christ and History" say about the story of Mason and Dixon that
> Cherrycoke tells?
> 
> Does Cherrycoke consider himself a historian?  a Remembrancer? a Quidnunc?

I think Wicks certainly considers himself to be an "Historian", and he
defends the "arts" he has used in composing his tales.
 
> Oh, "a great disorderly tangle of lines..." Can history (or truth) even be
> understood? Le Spark argues for a single version of history later...
> Cherrycoke suggests this is impossible.

Yes, but he contrasts it against the present as a finite "Destination". The
inconsistency in Wicks's logic is that, if the past is such a complex
"Tangle of Lines" then the present is certainly not a single, unified
"Destination" either, because once it has passed into the domain of either
"Facts" or "Chronology" or "Remembrance" or "History" it is again a
"disorderly Tangle" or mere "idle Rotating". As Sam notes re. the earlier
chapter pronouncement (75), Wicks's vision of historical convergence on a
single "Destination" is just a variation on and attempt to justify the
linear or causal conception of historical process - a "single Version ...
proceeding from a single Authority". Whether "God" or "State" or "Law" (or
"Author") is constructed as that "Authority" is somewhat irrelevant (which
ties in with Otto's observations and Thomas's citation from Eagleton). I
think Wicks's sentiments in the quote are actually in greater alignment with
Ives' pov than with Ethelmer's. (Interestingly, I don't think Wicks joins in
during the actual discussion until 351.23. I had the exactly same thought as
Sam, that he has been out to the "little boy's room", and had missed most of
the preceding "intermission".)

> http://www.theonion.com/onion3631/christian_right_lobbies.html

best