Pynchon and fascism

Paul Nightingale isread at btopenworld.com
Thu May 29 10:21:02 CDT 2003


Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 09:11, Terrance wrote:
> > Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?"
> 
> Yes, Foucault is the writer Paul N. theory reminded me of.
> 
> The idea that what one says or believes isn't as interesting as why
one
> says and believes it I think is loaded with truth. (from a historical
> viewpoint)
> 
> Still I couldn't put it together with the with the various fascism
> pronouncements of the essay.
> 
> But one never knows what may develop.
> 
> P

I suppose very generally I'm using ideas that might be associated with
discourse theory, new historicism, cultural materialism,
poststructuralism. I can't claim to be an expert in any of those areas,
and any experts will probably burst out laughing at my eclectic
approach: it happens that I read something, find ideas interesting and
useful, and don't always bother asking myself what the resulting mix
will look like to others. I'm quite happy to use Foucault's ideas on
subjectivity and power alongside ideology and hegemony from Marxism.
What I've earlier called narrative is the way all the elements in the
text add up. Foucault referred to the relations between statements,
which also takes into account the way the text-on-the-page relates to
other texts. When we started discussing the Foreword I connected 1984 to
Leavis' Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture; since then I've been
thinking of the possible connections with another post-war dystopia,
Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy. That of course is to focus
on 1984; I've been more interested here in discussing P's writing circa
2002-03. Hence the meaning I attached to "homeland" as a signifier in
the P-text.

Part of this approach is that one questions the distinctions usually
drawn between different kinds or genres of writing. Most obviously
fact/fiction: I treat the Foreword as fiction. Which doesn't mean P has
written it as one of his short stories, he is clearly constrained when
he refers to 'Orwell' and 'fascism' and 'Churchill' and 'circa 2003'
etc. The biographical details he offers for O aren't invented; the
British PM at that time was Ch etc. I didn't 'make up' the 'story' about
Bevan and Cripps, although novelists do use 'real-life characters' in
that way. Think of DeLillo's Libra, also Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand,
several of Doctorow's novels ... and M&D. P has been dealing with the
fictions of history writing -- "stencilised history", pastiche, the
unreliable narrator -- since his first stories, and this is how I
approach the Foreword. One looks at how rather than what, bearing in
mind that how produces what.

So when I say 'how we know what we know' etc I mean how the text
produces what it tells us about Orwell or fascism or whatever: two
biographies of O might be completely different, and give the reader
radically contrasting views of the man. One identifies the points of
disagreement, perhaps, and then, perhaps, one tries to analyse the
reasons why the disagreement has come about, how it has been produced.

Another key point is that the only way in which we can know fascism is
through what's written about it, the way it's represented ... and that
would include the personal testimony of those who lived through the
Third Reich. It's sometimes said that this approach denies the real
world, as when Baudrillard was criticised (inaccurately, but he might
have stated his case more clearly) for saying the Gulf War never took
place (he was talking about media coverage). Not so. The real world is
out there somewhere; we can only know it through the way it's
represented, the text as mediator. You asked if I had in mind the
differences between Italian, German and Spanish fascism. Well yes and
no; I wasn't thinking of anything specific (a long time since I studied
the topic) although anti-Semitism didn't feature in Italy (as I recall).

Coincidentally I've just been reading essays by Hayden White who
describes what he calls "figural realism", in short, the way in which
history writing turns 'the past' into narrative (or fiction). At one
point he refers to the Holocaust as the "paradigmatic modernist event in
Western European history" because the scale of it all means it cannot be
adequately described or represented ... which I suppose might be
interesting, given what has been said, on the p-list, about the
Holocaust in 1984 and GR.





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