Fiction vs History?

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 10:35 PM
Subject: Re: Fiction vs History?

> Amy J. Elias, _Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction_, Baltimore:
> Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
>
> Another positive review, with more expansive commentary on the M&D
chapter,
> here:
>

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?command=view_essay&essayid=douglasce

>
> Publisher info here:
>
> http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/2412.html
>
> best
>

Thanks, it really seems to be a very interesting book:

"The final chapter, called by Elias a "Coda," offers a sustained reflection
on John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Thomas Pynchon's Mason &
Dixon (1997). These paradigmatic novels allow her to trace the overarching
development of the metahistorical romance over the last 40 years.
Metahistorical romance moves, Elias says,

in pendulum motion from the "realism" of Scott's historical novel form,
through the abstraction of modernist spatial form and postmodern fabulation,
back toward the "realism" of postcolonial politics. Because they inherit the
dialectic between realism and romance structuring Scott's novels, writers of
metahistorical novels seem to hang suspended between these poles and captive
to pendulum motion, acutely self-reflexive about their inability to break
free to a real access to History and confined within two literary genres
they tend no longer to associate with the Real. Through metahistorical
romance, these novelists often problematically attempt to voice the Other
that their own national histories have demonized and rendered historically
silent. (222)

Elias argues that history functions as mere setting in Barth's novel, thus
producing no ethical questions for the West; though it plays out on the
stage of history, its drama is of existential pathology and individualist
assertion. "This is the romance element on its way to being redefined within
what will emerge later in the century as metahistorical romance, the
preoccupation with and incessant return to history by writers who, because
they operate within a cultural imaginary traumatized by its own
self-awareness, return to romance - with difference, as différance" (228).
Through a couple of really neat intertextual allusions to Barth's novel that
Elias reads in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Elias establishes the distance
between them. Pynchon's history is not just setting, for his novel opens up
questions of "the social construction of history," with one of the main
characters realizing that "disciplinary science constructs explanations of
the world in order to provide comfort to the citizenry and to exercise
social control," a process in which his labor too will be embedded (231).
Calling Mason & Dixon a "definitive metahistorical romance" (242), Elias
notes that it centers slavery as a thematic concern, and not, as does
Barth's novel, use it as a mere historical setting. "Barth's vision is very
much aligned with that of the existential modernists, while Pynchon's is
closer to that of the postmodern metahistorians: for the latter, what is
needed is a social response to sublimity, not an individualistic one"
(232)."
(Christopher Douglas)