MDDM Ch. 76 The Great Wind of Oblivion

[Dave Monroe]

   "'I had my Boswell once,' Mason tells Boswell,
'Dixon and I.  We had a joint Boswell.  Preacher nam'd
Cherrycoke.  Scribbling ev'rything down, just like
you, Sir.  Have you,' twirling his Hand in Ellipses,--
'you know, ever... had one yourself?  If I'm not
prying.'
   "'Had one what?'
   "'Hum...a Boswell, Sir,-- I mean, one of your own. 
Well you couldn't very well call him that, being one
yourself,-- say, a sort of Shadow ever in the Room who
has haunted you, preserving your ev'ry spoken
remark,-- '
   "'Which else would have been lost forever to the
Great Wind of Oblivion,-- think,' armsweep south, 
'as all civiliz'd Britain gathers at this hour, how
much shapely Expression, from the titl'd Gambler, the
Barmaid's Suitor, the offended Fopling, the gratified
Toss-Pot, is simply fading away upon the Air, out
under the Door, into the Evening and the Silence
beyond.  All those voices.  Why not pluck a few words
from the mulitudes rushing toward the Void of
foirgetfulness?'" (M&D, Ch. 76, p. 747)

Cf. ...

"The spring thus wore on, large currents and small
eddies alike resulting in headlines.  People read what
news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own
rathouse of history's rags and straws." (V., Ch. 8,
Sec. iv, p. 225)

And not only ...

"There is no document of civilization that is not at
the same time a document of barbarism."

http://www.v2.nl/Icons/Quotes/BenjaminQ.html

But also ...

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His
face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a
chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his
feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his
wings with such a violence that the angel can no
longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skyward."

http://osf1.gmu.edu/~cforchem/oldsite/benjamin.html

>From Robert Holton, "In the Rathouse of History with
Thomas Pynchon: Rereading V.,"  Textual Practice 2,
No. 3  (Winter 1988): 324-344 ...

"It is worth pointing out that, whatever the
epistemological traps that lie tangled within
Stencil's obsession with V., the subtext of every
historical narrative he produces has to do with
imperialist conquest or violence, with a steady
current of racism." (p. 333)   

   "The recurrence of mirror imagery in discussions of
V. is symptomatic of a prevalent problem in
postmodernism: the possibility that an acceptance of 
relativity entails a trivializing of
interpretation....  A dangerous tendency of cultural
relativism ... is the fact 'that such mirrors, of
placed at propitious angles, also have the miraculous
power to make real objects disappear.'  (p. 336,
citing Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 44-5)

   "Yet this need not be the case.  There is a
corollary to mirror imagery: if placed at certain
other propitious angles, mirrors have the equally
miraculous power to present objects and perspectives
previously unavailable to perception.  Pynchon's
postmodern mirrors may indeed conceal many things and
present many illusions and deceptions, but they also
re-present historical situations and events that had
hitherto remained obscured from sight.  Under the
cover of historical relativism, rather than making
events disappear, he is making present what seems to
be a remarkable history of western racism from the
atrocities of colonialism to the somewhat more 
covert racism of America at the time of writing." (pp.
336-7)

   "Pynchon's history is an attempt to remind us about
certain aspects of our heritage that, a de Certeau has
observed, we might prefer to overlook as we select
materials from which to construct our narrative of the
past.  And, no matter how much it is argued that the
past is our own creation, we create it out of a
limited supply of building materials: 'People read
what news they wanted to and each accordingly built
his own rathouse of history's rags and straws....
Doubtless their private versions of history showed up
in action' (V., p. 225).  Doubtless everyone's version
of history shows up in action--which is why it is so
important to examine the construction of history ..."
(pp. 337-8)

"... the rooms in Pynchon's rathouse exhibit a radical
an consistent rereading of European imperialism.  Yet
Pynchon is no dogmatist: any final interpretation--of
history or of his story--remains thwarted.... 
Pynchon's project is not primarily a reconstruction of
history from the point of view of its victims ....  
Instead he works to decentre the possibility of an
established authoritative account of historical
events." (p. 340)

"While V. does not, by itself, articulate the
discourse of the other to any great extent, by
fragmenting the monolithic Western narrative of
objective historical realism it works towards opening
the discursive space in which that narrative of
alterity, non-synchronous and discrepant experience,
may be articulated and even understood." (p. 340)

Also included as Chapter 7 of Robert Holton, Jarring
Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of
History (Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1994) ...

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com