Fiction vs History?

[kent mueller]

Damned right! The map is not the territory, that's the relationship between
history and truth. Fiction is both map and territory. That's all I ever
meant by a "higher order". Now, I'm stepping away from the bong, with no
sudden moves, and gluing myself to the news for the next seven days.


Kent 


> From: o j m <p-list at sardonic201.net>
> Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:23:47 -0400
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Fiction vs History?
> 
> A few brief thoughts before I get back to grading this stack of (theory)
> papers in front of me.
> 
> Otto, your points are well taken, but I think you're missing a few aspects
> of Ghetta's argument.  First, I do worry that he's right in suggesting that
> perhaps the deconstructive technique can become dogmatic.  You've got to be
> careful not to universalize deconstruction as a "technique."  If you do,
> this is as ideologically blind as what deconstruction aims to
> critique.  Perhaps deconstruction is the first philosophy to fail precisely
> when it begins to succeed--and fails because of the success.  *Ought*
> (there's a word kids in my generation seldom use!) one to always employ
> deconstruction?  Are there better techniques for certain kinds of problems
> and questions?
> 
> Second, Ghetta's point about "T"ruth being in the realm of God, wasn't
> playing the God Card.  What he was getting at, I think, is a point I raised
> a while ago: poststructuralists set up a strawman argument against
> knowledge.  By positing that any error or ambiguity preclude knowledge or
> objectivity, poststructuralists set up an account of truth, knowledge, and
> objectivity that is 1) very easy to shoot down, and 2) an account of
> knowledge that very few people, if anybody, within the philosophical
> community would adhere to.  To reiterate a point made all ready: the world
> cannot be reduced to a text.  There are indeed extralingual things, aspects
> of this world that operate with or without our fancy words and
> theories.  The real challenge is to articulate a theory of meaning that
> accounts for error, subjectivity, and imperfect knowledge and yet does not
> abandon ideas such as truth or objectivity, a theory of meaning that can
> indeed draw a conceptual line between fiction and history.
> 
> Perhaps a good way to approach this is through the work of Edward
> Said.  While it is indeed the case, as Said argues, nobody is able to
> extract their perspective from a social power construct, this does not mean
> that there can be no such thing as history.  Indeed, what is the point of a
> body of work like Said's--or, in a sense, Foucault's--except to point out a
> wrong line of historical thinking?  Behind such a project is the implicit
> assertion that they have a better notion of history--a version more true,
> somehow.  While it may not be the case that we will ever have a final,
> perfect history book (that is, a history book that moves from the gray area
> into the clearly defined black or white area), I for one adamantly believe
> there can be more and less accurate histories.  Who here would claim that a
> history text that denies the Holocaust is more*right* than Shirer's The
> Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or that official Soviet records denying
> the gulags is more accurate than The Gulag Archipelago?  Of course a
> historian is selective in choosing what to tell--the question is the
> rightness of those selections, though, is it not?
> 
> O.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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