Rewriting History's "Ghoststories"

[Dave Monroe]

>From Marcel Cornis-Pope, Narrative Innovation and
Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War and After (New
York: Palgrave, 2001), Ch. 1.3, "Rewriting History's
'Ghoststories': The Bifurcated Focus of Innovative
Fiction," pp. 22-35 ...

"As a fabric of events 'lodged in the room of the
infinite possibilities they have ousted,' history is
for Stephen Dedalus not too different from a
'ghoststory' (Joyce, Ulysses, 9.148).  Derrida also
speculates that any narrative negotiation of the
unsettled space between life and death, past and
memory, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can
only talk with or about some ghost' (Spectres of Marx
xviii).  A 'logic of haunting' (10-11) weighs upon
historical narrative, forcing it repeatedly to coem to
terms with the 'ghost' of the past that 'never dies'
(75).  The spectral presence of 'numerous phenomenoa
that still remain unexplained' makes '[p]eriodic
revisions--literally new visions and
perceptions--[...] necessary' (Southgate 65-66, 67). 
Rewriting is thus very much part of the process of
historical construction, but its role remains
ambivalent, both liberating and limiting.  Imaginative
re-visioning can disrupt the lineraity of a given
system of 'truths,' regarded as the 'soul' of
traditional History, opening it up to the promise of a
new 'event-ness.'  But as pynchon's Vineland suggests,
rewriting also functions as a tool of cultural
appropriation, subordinating contingencies to
retrospective plots.  No act of historical
interpretation can escape this contradictory
dialiectic that generates both exciting new contours
and distressing flatness...." (p. 22)

http://www.palgrave.com/products/Catalogue.aspx?is=0312238371

Citing ...

Derrida, Jacques.  Spectres of Marx.
   Trans. Peggy Kamuf.  NY: Routledge 1994.

http://www.routledge-ny.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn=9780415389570&parent_id=&pc=/shopping_cart/search/search.asp?search%3Dderrida%26sortBy%3D1%26pn%3D5

http://newleftreview.org/A1759

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm

Joyce, James.  Ulysses.
   Paris: Shakespeare & Company, 1922.

http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679722762

http://www.edunet.ie/books/ulysses/nestor.html

Southgate, Beverley.  History: What and Why?
   Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Perspectives.
   New York: Routledge, 1996.

http://www.routledge-ny.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn=9780415256582&parent_id=&pc=/shopping_cart/search/search.asp?search%3Dsouthgate

Much on Pynchon through M&D throughout, so ...


 
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